Adobe Photoshop Express has been available as an iPad app for quite some time, but — despite being quite powerful and feature-filled — it hasn't been as appealing to most image-editing beginners as some other apps.
Based on Adobe's keynote presentation during Photoshop World 2011 though, that might be changing soon.
Photography Bay reports that Adobe demonstrated its plans for the Photoshop for iPad app on Thursday and that there is a lot to be excited about. Based on the presentation, the future app will be a great deal more powerful (probably thanks to the fact that the iPad 2 is a graphics powerhouse), have nearly every menu option under the sun, take advantage of more multitouch gestures, and include a clever layer animation feature.
As you can see in the slightly blurry video of the demonstration above, the layer animation feature is one of those things that initially seems to have little reason for existence other than to show off how nifty an iPad's user interface and touch screen are, but there's more to it than that.
This showy feature will probably help make the app — and Photoshop itself — far more accessible to amateur image editors.
Sam Spratt, a professional digital artist for whom Photoshop is a key tool, explains that image editing beginners often struggle to comprehend features such as layers in particular. For those individuals, "the ability to see the layers of an image deconstructed to their individual shapes and transparencies almost instantly makes a difficult concept simple to grasp and utilize."
There are no details as to when amateurs and professionals will be able to take advantage of the features shown off in Adobe's keynote, but for the sake of better image memes, we hope it's soon.
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter, loves to be liked on Facebook, and needs to brush up on Photoshop basics.
