Bloomberg has a piece out today that suggests the iPad version of Adobe Photoshop is coming soon, and profoundly disappointing in its featureset:
Adobe has been testing Photoshop for iPad under the codename Rocket with a small group of beta testers since earlier this year. Participants have told Bloomberg News that some beta versions don’t include well-established features they expected to be part of the release. They complained about less advanced or missing features around core functionality like filters, the pen tool and custom paintbrush libraries, vector drawing, color spaces, RAW editing, smart objects, layer styles and certain options for mask creation. Their disappointment about these limitations stems from Photoshop’s established reputation as a leading professional photo-editing program on the desktop.
To be fair to Adobe, Photoshop is an ancient program that is the bedrock of a huge chunk of all media production on the planet. You can’t easily replicate that featureset in a 1.0 release on a platform with a different user interface paradigm.
But Adobe is also nearly a decade late to the party here. After the success of the iPhone and the instant success of the iPad, it should have been obvious which way the wind is blowing in computing, and Adobe was still trying to keep a dead platform limping along rather than embrace the future. Since Adobe hasn’t stepped up, smaller developers have made very nice programs that are great in part because they are designed for the iPad first.
I’m starting to wonder if Adobe is paving the path for its future ruin by its relative inaction. The switch to a subscriber revenue model and the power of the interconnected Creative Cloud synergy between applications is not to be trifled with, but while some parts of Adobe CC have no real peers, that’s not the case with Photoshop. A lot of work will continue to be done on the “real” computers of yesteryear, but if Adobe can’t demonstrate that it can produce a first-class tablet experience, it’s basically ceding the market and the mindshare of an emerging generation.