Adobe Photoshop Reviews

I’ve been using PS desktop since 1995 so I’ve been really looking forward to this. The hype said we would get the full version of Adobe PS on iPad Pro. Some people even bought the iPad Pro in anticipation of this. I don’t think anyone really thought it would be a perfect mirror of the desktop program, but this is a disaster. It’s more like a “sample” and it feels like a slap in the face. This is not by any stretch a full version. I’ve only played with it a few minutes but I’ve been frustrated. I can’t add custom brushes. There appears to be no magnetic lasso or polygon lasso in selection tools. Transform function is severely limited. Super limited filters, no layer effects. The list goes on and on. Artstudio or MediBang or Affinity Photo are all better alternatives. Heck they could have just copied Artstudio and labeled it PS and the reception would have been better. Since I’m now working more on my iPad than my desktop its likely that I will cancel my adobe subscription. Huge disappointment. If you’re just starting out or don’t already use the desktop version, this isn’t worth the monthly subscription. There are better alternatives. I really hope Adobe gets their act together with this, but I’m not holding out much hope.

I love How finally I found a photoshop app that is good and I was so excited to finally try it out, but then I realized you had to pay to actually be able to have fun and experience AdobePhotoshop, now I’m not trying to complain I’m just saying I don’t like how you have to pay it should be an option, I think if you paid the money you should get better features and more stuff you should just have to pay to be able to experience the whole app. It looks like you guys did I really good just making AdobePhotoshop, and all the features it comes along with but that fact that you have to pay just to play sets me off, I just think if you pay the monthly access you should get more features and extra nicknacks then the people that didn’t pay, I still would just love to be able to make cool photos and learn how to work all this stuff and how everything goes, but now I have to keep searching for another photo shop app, the reason I want the paid monthly access to be an option is so you you could try out the game and see if you maybe like it and then if you do you can’t pay the money, I would just love to try AdobePhotoshop out to see how everything works and learn stuff and how to get better. Well I don’t you if anyone will spend the time reading this, but if you do happen to come across this please maybe consider making some changes, and it’s not up to me it’s up to you I’m just sharing my point of view.

Thank you.

Let me start by saying I’m aware it will inevitably be a somewhat different experience whenever an app designed for PC’s is adapted for a mobile format. I have used a number of Creative Cloud apps on PC and been fairly pleased with their capabilities (once I got past the initial learning curve). That unfortunately has not been the case with the mobile versions. One would think that in this day and age it wouldn’t be that hard to come by apps from reputable developers that allow for FULL functionality and creative freedom without costing what feels like an arm and a leg. I’m not sure if it’s Adobe or Apple that’s not pulling their weight here, but in my experience the apps themselves take up a ton of storage on most devices, and you can’t get anything close to the full experience without paying, and even then they don’t seem to be compatible with 90 percent of the media on something like an IPad. Some might say I should try the PC versions, but I’m left to wonder, would I have to pay more than anyone should have to try and justify for a hobby or anything else for that matter? That aside, would I even be able to create well-made projects without it breaking my device’s brain? If I am to use any Creative Cloud apps in the future, I’m afraid it may have to be on PC, or at least some device that can handle what they would normally have to offer.

BLUF: Overpriced, there are other programs (even from Adobe) that do it better and it’s not ready for prime time.

Adobe, I’m not sure what you were thinking with this other than “hey, I’m sure we can dupe some poor suckers into paying monthly fees because we call it ‘Photoshop,’” but I hope you’re wrong on that. You’ve waited so long to bring full programs to the iPad that we’ve all found alternatives we like. Hell, for true photography editing, I use your Lightroom on iPad. When I want to do photo illustration, I use Procreate (and so do a LOT of other people), which is awesome. So you’ve got to bring your A-game if you want us to go back to Photoshop. But you didn’t. You released another half-baked program, gimped out without all the features of the desktop, and you want us to pay a subscription fee? I want whatever you’re all smoking, because apparently it’s good stuff. For years we’ve heard you tell us “tablets aren’t powerful enough, there are too many limitations with iOS to create apps like you’re asking.” Weird that other companies have managed it. Just like Quark failed to adapt and died, so will you. The first company that comes up with good pagination software for a iPad gets my money, and I’m betting it’s not you, judging by Comp and your “full version” of Photoshop. Which is too bad; I used to love your programs.

As much as ive always loved photoshop on my computer, this version for ipad is pathetically unusable. I cant use it for more than maybe 10 mins before it crashes. Quicker than that if you want to use more than 2 layers in an image. It runs fine if you only use one main image layer and only do minor color balancing tools…but at that point there are plenty of other apps that offer that basic level of photo editing for free. Any of the great photoshop pro level editing tools that AdobePhotoshop has, and merits the cost of a monthly subscription, make AdobePhotoshop completely unstable and causes constant crashes, to the point where it will start crashing even before it can fully open to the main screen. And i have tried uninstalling and reinstalling several times. It fixes the isssue, for maybe another 10 mins. Then its back to crashing quicker and quicker again to the point of not even being able to successfully open all the way. Not worth the effort anymore fussing with uninstalling and reinstalling every half hour or so, cannot get any work done because so much time is wasted trying to deal with this unstable version.

This is an amendment to my earlier review. After a day wrestling with AdobePhotoshop and with Fresco, I can safely safely say both are riddled with bugs and neither should’ve been released to the broader public. I can’t believe that you can’t do something as basic as draw a box, triangle, or ellipse (in Fresco, it’s filled with decorative garbage I don’t want that I can’t get out and can’t fill with the paint bucket; in Photoshop, I can’t find an option to draw a shape, let alone establish rules and guidelines that would allow me to, you know, draw straight lines so I could make my own shapes— since I make comics and that sort of thing is pretty crucial to making comics). The glitches are unbearable. I was just eating dinner, studying the image of an octopus I was drawing, and I had zoomed in to work on the detail of the eye. Photoshop just spontaneously zoomed out without me touching the screen. Fresco does the same. And they do it while you’re drawing. Both litter the canvas with garbage marks. I spent more time correcting the damage the program did to my documents to today than I actually did illustrating. I’ve had these programs one day and I want a refund.

I have always loved photoshop for everything from personal to professional use. So I was very excited to finally get a full version of photoshop for my 12.9 iPad Pro. What I found though was that this is not a “full” version of photoshop at all. This does have many of the features I know and love, but lacks a SIGNIFICANT amount of the functionality I have enjoyed on my PC experience. I am a current paid membership user of the desktop version, so I was hoping for more of a one to one translation.
My biggest grievance isn’t the lack of features though. My largest issue is the downscaling of the “cloud” files. When I upload a photo project I am working on for a client, and the PC is showing a file size of 4700x5600, I am expecting that same pixel count on the ipad. What I got was a loss of about 15% across the board on any file I uploaded to the cloud. This means that projects I want to take with me on the go are not the same resolution as they are on my personal computer. This also means that any retouching I want to do will be absolutely a moot point as I wont be able to have control of the finer details that I do on PC.
I still love everything that photoshop is capable of doing, but this version feels more like a Photoshop “lite” than it does Photoshop. I am excited for the possibility moving forward but for now unfortunately I will have to stick to my computer.

First, AdobePhotoshop is missing a lot of useful tools that I use all the time on the desktop version. There are several cheaper apps that include many more tools for a lot less money. ArtStudio Pro and Procreate are just 2 examples that charge a one time fee (no subscription required) and are way more useful for drawing and manipulating photos on your iPad. Seriously, Adobe, you couldn’t even manage to include dodge and burn tools in PHOTOshop?
But I have a subscription, so I figured I might as well give it a chance. Until I realized AdobePhotoshop REQUIRES you to save everything to the Adobe Cloud. You can also save it to your iPad. But you cannot turn off the autosave to the cloud. I DO NOT WANT TO SAVE TO YOUR SERVER! I’m a physician at a medical school and periodically use photoshop to prepare patient photos for presentations. It would be a privacy violation if it were to end up on your servers. I need to be able to turn off the autosave function.
The only possible reasons for making this a requirement, are nefarious. It is either to force you to use up your cloud space and then be forced to purchase more storage or it is a data mining scam. There is no good reason you can’t make this optional. Allow the customer to decide where they want to save their work. You will eventually cause someone to commit a HIPAA violation if you don’t change this feature.

I have been using Photoshop to create my digital illustrations for over nine years now, and was elated when I realized it also existed for the iPad when I first got mine ten months ago. I absolutely love the fact that I can work on any document on either my desktop or my iPad, and this feature alone is what has been motivating me to power through the broken mess AdobePhotoshop has become in the past couple of months.

It started with frequent crashes, then after an update about a month ago I began experiencing these white blocks popping up whenever I merge layers, only going away if I physically erase them. The thing that my finally prompt me to abandon AdobePhotoshop all together is that all of my brushes, save the one I happened to have selected the last time I put my iPad on the charger are gone! This is 100% untenable! How is anyone supposed to create anything with only one brush?! Mind you I only had the basic ones that come with AdobePhotoshop as to my knowledge there is no way to import brushes to the iPad version; sadly this fact also means that there simply is no work around for this issue either.

AdobePhotoshop was a boon and made working between two devices so easy, so it’s honestly heart breaking that it’s suddenly completely unusable.

DISAPPOINTMENT. I’ve been a devoted professional Photoshop desktop user for decades. Mastersuite actually. All of my photo processing skills and workflows are completely integrated with Adobe products - Photoshop serving as my baseline workhorse. Sure… Adobe is expensive, but its worth it to the professional user because of the extensive features for professional commercial use. So for me, extending use of that to my ipad is a no-brainer… OR SO I THOUGHT. My honest initial reaction to trying to use this on my iPad was confusion at first. Where off power features? I thought maybe I had made a mistake and downloaded the wrong version so I double and triple checking sure enough it’s the one I paid for. Then I thought, there must be some extra steps to get it set up properly in order to get the feature sets that I needed… apparently not because they don’t exist.

“WHAT IS THIS CRAP, ADOBE? Shame on you for calling this Photoshop and then charging me as if it is even remotely deserving of that product label!” Adobe dropped the ball on this. Now I’m having to resort to learning and using something like ProCreate just to get some features and capabilities that should be in this so called Photoshop Mobile.

This is a half-baked product. As usual Adobe released it with a skeleton set of features and continues to add to it SLOWLY. I would say it probably has 10% of the power of the desktop version even though an iPad Pro is more than capable of running a full version of Photoshop. They keep focusing on features like streaming in-app instead of features that are actually useful to their product. Is anyone really going to stream inside of Photoshop instead of just screen sharing with an app that we all already have? Probably not. Yet they’ll delay all sorts of needed features while they work on that. Meanwhile Photoshop for iPad remains a shadow of it’s true self. It’s just bad decision making at the top. All of this to say, Adobe consistently underwhelms and disappoints with their products for professionals. If there was another game in town, then I’d be using it. How is it that Affinity Photo is about 5x more powerful than this, and yet they are a tiny company with a fraction of the funding that Adobe has. Their product is harder to use for sure, but it at least has desktop level features. My point is that Photoshop for iPad COULD have the same features as desktop, Adobe just chooses for it not to.

So, I used Adobe Photoshop incessantly for my personal enjoyment for the last nine years, and let me tell you all how extremely disappointing this “new” version is. You simply cannot compare the two as they are clearly two different apps under the same name. Clearly they were on a budget this time around. Though the filters and add ons are great, it is the drawing/paint feature us artists care so much more about. This new format is too different and the navigation just simply isn’t the same. Some of simplest tools such as the Eraser for example does not have the Intensity level adjuster as the old one, which is vital when drawing on a picture. The other feature that’s missing is the Brighten/Darken Adjuster. This feature in particular was a favorite of mine, which you could easily do highlights on a face, eyes, hair, jewelry; as well as darkening a particular object, or other facial features, or the entire picture to achieve a more vibrant vivid colored image. How could y’all leave off such an important feature? Please fix this on your new update ASAP.

I paid for a one year subscription and the features work great when available, especially Retouch and replacing the eyes on facial photos. However, they are not always available. Sometimes when I want to use these features, they are inaccessible and AdobePhotoshop informs me that the content is downloading and I will receive an notification when it is complete. It happens when I’m trying to work on photos on an iPad. It is frustrating to wait, especially considering that I have a paid subscription. However, after the content has downloaded the features are available for a short time, even when I’m working offline. However, the features become inaccessible again and I have to wait until the content downloads again. And AdobePhotoshop tends to freeze. I use an iPad Air and have the latest iOS settings and latest app update, but the inconsistency of the features availability is surprising and frustrating. Again, the aforementioned features are great for the price of a full year. But I urge potential subscribers to bear in mind what I have described.

The idea is there, but I just don’t think AdobePhotoshop is worth paying for when I have a full working version of CC 2020 on my PC. I downloaded this in hopes of working on my projects on the go, but it’s lacking many features CC has. In all reality they should make AdobePhotoshop either cheaper or free until they finish building AdobePhotoshop .

Edit: After a bit of playing around with it, I did notice my hand keeps hitting things in the tabs. I have accidentally closed my projects and switched layers,etc. If you could add a feature to close out the tabs and make it to where you can possibly swipe or something of that nature to access them, it would make AdobePhotoshop much easier to use with the pencil. I would also like to ask if we will be able to see then lines we are drawing in real time eventually. I feel as if this would make life a little easier. I understand this isn’t like a display tablet, but it makes things really nice to edit on the go. I have also had a hard time accessing my files in the cloud and have resorted to using google drive and Dropbox. Maybe something worth looking into.

So, I just got an iPad and got procreate excitedly as I've heard good things. I was immediately disappointed by the lack of stabilizing tools in Procreate. Even though they technically have them, they aren't great, so I figured I'd roll back to photoshop since I know the program anyways. I was happy to find a stabilizer! And subsequently sad to find I can only use the default brushes. And the defaults in AdobePhotoshop aren't even like the ones on the PC. What's the point if this program works better for me but none of the brushes work for what I need to do? I tried adobe sketch as well, and I'm happier with the brush options and that you're technically able to import more, but then they don't have stabilizing options! I feel like Goldilocks trying to find the program that fits just right. If AdobePhotoshop actually allowed me to use my own brushes, it would be perfect for me. I'm a loyal adobe user but the whole point of me getting an iPad was so I didn't always have to use my computer and could draw on the go-- it's completely pointless if I can't even have good lineart brushes. PLEASE either expand the amount of brushes available or preferably allow us to import our brushes and settings.

So far I’m liking AdobePhotoshop . True, it’s not in parity with the desktop Creative Cloud version of Photoshop. It’s pretty suitable for my needs. (Though I do look forward to smart object compatibility).

Pricing will make or break Adobe’s presence on my iPad. I’m fine paying for a subscription but I encourage exploration of bundle pricing or lower cost pricing. As it stands I feel I have to decide between Fresco or Photoshop (each $9.99) —and then apparently Illustrator is around the corner. I’m assuming that will be another $9.99.

I implore Adobe to make these products cheap enough that I don’t need to decide. Look at Apple Arcade —everyone I know feels that Apple made that a great value. Thus I’m paying for Apple Arcade even though I don’t play that many games. BUT it’s inexpensive enough that I don’t think about it. Or Microsoft’s model: for $6.99 a month you get the entire Office Suite and 1TB of storage. I’m not saying Adobe needs to go that low but you can see how that kind of pricing is very inviting, especially to amateur hobbyists.

Revised Version 2.0.1 Review

Thanks to the response of my initial review for this version, after deleting AdobePhotoshop and then re-installing it, all of the brushes were restored. Finally, it’s now usable once again after stressing out over this for a couple of days.

Version 2.0.1: Brushes nonexistent and useless without it

This latest update pretty much makes it unusable because the brushes are no longer available. And to go along with the delayed support for the M1 chip on the Desktop version makes it a double whammy for me. Being a user of Photoshop for 5 years, I’ve never been so disappointed than ever before.

Original Review titled “PSDC Files nearly deleted after update”

I really enjoyed AdobePhotoshop until I updated to version 1.6.2.

What happened after updating was all of my work in the past versions was offloaded, which is fine to free up space on my iPad, but it also almost deleted all of my work that were stored in folders.

Luckily they were moved in the recently deleted folder and I restored it all as soon as I saw it. But imagine if all of my work was permanently deleted as a result of an update.

A hard chew to swallow, but I’ll backup my work as regular PSD’s on my computer after this near-chaotic experience I encountered when using AdobePhotoshop.

I didn’t realize until I got an iPad today that they had ported the real photoshop over, but this is amazing. It’s not quite as refined or as capable as desktop PS, but the most essential features are there, it generates real PSDs and was able to open a few of the odd PSDs I’d already had saved to my CC account that were created on desktop. There are a few areas where it even feels nicer than desktop, namely being able to pinch to zoom so smoothly. You don’t mind the floating UI bits because it’s so easy to move the canvas around them, even on an iPad mini it works very well.

Further refinements are certainly needed, but there’s no denying that this is the real deal. I don’t think it will replace desktop for anyone yet, but in a pinch, it’s excellent. Just like an extra-portable camera, it will shine the most in settings where you wouldn’t have had the full experience available. Definitely looking forward to seeing more features and quality of life refinements.

This is a great app and I think as the development continues it will only get better with time! The fact that I can open large PSD files is a win for me. The tools that I’d like to see on the iPad app would be all the filters and layer styles. These are a must for me, I found myself feeling very limited without these tools. If all the tools from the desktop app are transferred to the iPad over time, I believe this will be the best piece of artwork Adobe has ever made. When Photoshop Touch first came out I was so excited for the possibilities and now I’m more excited than ever because this is the closest it’s ever been to a full desktop experience for iPad. I want to thank the developers, please know that I’m happy with the efforts you all are putting into this project and please don’t pay any attention to those who are writing negative reviews. Keep up the good work, I’m impressed with everything so far and can’t wait for the next updates to come!

As a product manager and designer myself I do sympathize with this kind of reaction to a major release. But it wasn’t unavoidable. It was waaaay easier to spend the last year thinking that an iPad version of photoshop that had feature parity with the desktop version was coming. Many of the outlets reporting on the announcement left out the caveat about v1, and even the official Adobe announcement article only had a single bullet point mentioning it. Most people who read about it walked away with the impression of “full” and “real” photoshop, not “a limited feature v1 that will grow overtime”.

From an announcement hype standpoint that’s fine. From the standpoint of expectation setting, that was precisely what led to the blowback currently manifesting itself as one star reviews.

The optics and narrative mistakes of the whole thing aside, what y’all have shipped in this v1 is really solid. It’s obviously limited in functionality, but everything that did make the cut is smooth, easy to pick up with knowledge of desktop photoshop, and just feels really good to use. If future functionality is added with the same care, I’ll very much look forward to trying it out.