Adobe released Photoshop for iPads back in November 2019 after plans to bring the photo editing app were revealed in 2018. However, though the app is built on the same codebase as the desktop counterpart, it launched with a limited set of capabilities since the company intended to expand the product depending on how “people use Photoshop on a mobile device”.
Today, the company is adding two major improvements for the iPad app – the Refine Edge Brush and the ability to rotate the canvas using a two-finger gesture while editing. The firm aims to bring feature parity with the desktop counterpart, and the Refine Edge Brush brings more useful functionality to the offering for those that use the iPad version.
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The Refine Edge brush – as the name suggests – lets users refine the edges of images when selecting tricky objects, such as hair or fur. The company says that it is “required to achieve realistic, professional quality selections of objects”, and helps smoothen out or remove subjects from “complex backgrounds”. The firm adds that it tweaked the UI to adapt it for touch-based devices. However, the results mimic the app on the desktop.
Additionally, Adobe claims that it put a lot of work into making the feature “fast”. The team has already made improvements to the performance of the feature, with the next release expected to bring in more improvements.
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In addition to the Refine Edge Brush, the other major improvement is the “much requested” ability to rotate the canvas with a two-finger gesture. The functionality makes using the app on an iPad more “natural and fluid”. The feature also lets users zoom the canvas in and out while rotating. When being rotated, the canvas can be snapped at 90-degree intervals. Users can also turn off rotation and snapping form the settings.
The improvements bring the iPad version of Photoshop closer in terms of functionality to the desktop counterpart. Adobe has also announced more features that it will be bringing to the app soon.