Adobe finally made its move to the iPhone by releasing Photoshop.com Mobile. As so often, corporate policy seem to have trumped market requirements and thus, they missed a great opportunity to grab market share quickly.
In principle, Adobe made the right move. Release a good, but not best-in-class, app with the most commonly requested features and price it at an irresistible price point: Free. Use the app to get into the minds and hearts of consumers, then use the Adobe brand and mind-share to convert these consumers to where they can make money: Photoshop Elements, their consumer product. Clever strategy that makes a lot of sense to me.
On the feature side, there is enough for a quick fix, but a lot missing for power users. You can correct exposure, tint, saturation, add soft focus or apply one of many filters. It would have been great to not only let me rotate at 90 degree angels, but also freely rotate my images. Crop and flip are also supported. This is clearly good enough for consumers. No levels, curves, masking, brushes, transparency aso. for Pro’s, but then Professionals are not the targeted audience for this app anyway.
100% crop - Photoshop.com Mobile shows slightly less noise than Photogene after Exposure compensation
I expected Adobe to be at least on par with Photogene and PhotoForge with regards to photo editing algorithms and I was not disappointed. Their corrected images looked the same or slightly better to me and also seemed a little bit less noisy. No complaints at all in this department.
Where Adobe plundered it, though, is with regards to Online features. You cannot upload to Facebook or Flickr, just to Photoshop.com. While I understand the corporate reasoning behind it, it’s not where the iPhone market is. Nor do I want to upload and organize my images on yet-another-online service. As mighty as Adobe is on the software side, Flickr and Facebook is where the online photo action is. Just not in this iPhone app.
If you do not mind editing in one app, then saving your photo back to your iPhone and uploading it to Flickr or Facebook from another app, Photoshop.com Mobile offers excellent price-performance on the iPhone. If you feel the need to upload from within your photo editing app, this one is not for you.
Verdict: Recommended.
Price: free from iTunes.
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I agree with your analysis entirely. It was a big blunder not to include uploading directly to popular social networking apps or Flickr. I expect that Adobe will get enough negative feedback on this after intro, that they will add this feature in a future release.
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