Adobe Reveals the Major Updates Coming Soon to Photoshop on iPad

When Adobe released the first version of “full” Photoshop for iPad, the company reassured us that updates to this limited first version “will be impactful, and frequent.” Today, Adobe followed up on that promise by revealing some of the major updates that will be coming to the app in the coming months.

The release of Photoshop on the iPad hasn’t gone quite as smoothly as Adobe probably hoped, with early reviews slamming the app for being “severely limited.” But if you’re worried that Adobe was lying about that “frequent” update schedule, the brand wants you to know it means business.

In a blog post published minutes ago, Photoshop Product Manager Pam Clark is giving users “a glimpse into what’s to come and how your input is reflected in our planning process.”

The first major feature to be added in 2019 will be the AI-powered Select Subject tool that was first previewed for the desktop back in 2017.

Then, before the year is out, Cloud Documents will also “become faster than ever before,” allowing you to sync files between the iPad and Desktop versions of Photoshop seamlessly without bogging down your connection by only saving changes you’ve made. “If you change just one pixel,” writes Clark, “only that pixel syncs to the cloud.”

That’s it for 2019 (which is almost over, after all), but Adobe promises to add much more in the “first half of 2020.”

The Refine Edge brush and the Curves adjustment layer will both be making their debut on the iPad version—both major enhancements for photo editors—while other adjustment layers like Levels will see improvements in functionality. The team also promised to “begin to deliver integration of Lightroom and Photoshop workflows on the iPad,” making it easier to go from editing a RAW image in Lightroom to making major adjustments in Photoshop without leaving your iPad.

Oh, and they’ll also be adding Brush Sensitivity and Canvas Rotation, but those are such absurd omissions from Version 1.0 that we can’t really call them “new features.”

To read about all of these updates in slightly more detail, head over to the Adobe blog, and don’t be afraid to share your thoughts with Adobe while you’re there. All of these planned improvements, writes Clark, are being prioritized in response to feedback from the community, so if you have further feature requests, she encourages you to join in and offer feedback through this link.

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