Adobe Announces Photoshop Touch SDK, iPad Apps

Adobe today announced that it will release an SDK (software development kit) that will enable developers to create applications that interact directly with the market-leading imaging application, Photoshop.

As a proof of concept, the company also announced three iPad apps.

• Adobe Color Lava for Photoshop CS5—a color mixer that lets users swirl and mix colors with their fingers, creating a palette of five color swatches that are immediately available in Photoshop on the desktop.

• Adobe Nav for Photoshop CS5—a interface for controlling Photoshop menus, tools, and scripts using the iPad. The app will allow its users to save custom palettes of up to 16 tools and preview Photoshop files on the road.

• Adobe Eazel for Photoshop CS5—A freehand finger-drawing app that can either save art locally to the iPad or make it available to Photoshop. Placing five fingers down on the iPad activates controls in Eazel for changing color, opacity, brush size, and more.

The three iPad apps will be available in Apple's App store this May. Nav will cost $1.99, Color Lava $2.99, and Eazel will be $4.99. All of the applications work using a your local Wi-Fi network.

But Bryan O'Neil Hughes, Adobe's senior product manager for Photoshop, seemed more excited about the Touch SDK.

"A big part of our story is to imagine what developers can do with this," he said during a conference call last week. "And if there's one really exciting thing we've learned from making Photoshop extensible, is what we imaging people doing with things, and then there's what they do with them. That can be really mind-blowing. The three iPad applications just begin to touch on what's possible."

Photoshop CS5 users can enable the connectivity provided by the SDK by installing a free Photoshop CS5 update when Creative Suite 5.5 is released, which the company says will happen within 30 days. Since Photoshop CS5's price is prohibitive for a lot of users, the company offers a subscription plan, starting at $35 a month with a year's subscription, running all the way up to $195 a month for the CS5.5 Master Collection edition.

For more on CS5.5, Photoshop, and the new iPad apps, visit photoshop.com.

Check back for full reviews of the apps on PCMag.com after their full release in May. For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.