The growth of smartphone and tablet photography has made it easy to take pictures on the go without toting around a dedicated camera. That’s great news, but editing those photos can be a challenge. Some apps provide only the most superficial editing tools, while others offer detailed adjustments that aren’t understandable by mere mortals.
Photoshop Mix is a free app developed by Adobe, designed to make it easy for photographers of all stripes to edit photos on their iPad, and then share them or send them off to Photoshop for more editing. It’s simple enough for everyday photographers to use without a manual, while more experienced shutterbugs get powerful tools to tweak their images in a detailed way.
The app requires users sign in with a Adobe Creative Cloud account, though it’s possible to get one for free, and not pay a subscription fee.
The app comes with the standard adjustments many photographers will expect, including exposure, contrast and saturation. Advanced users can adjust all of those controls themselves, while users who don’t want to spend time tweaking numbers can have Photoshop Mix automatically adjust for them.
In addition, the app comes with support for Looks, which are pre-set filters that act like Instagram filters. Users can also choose to selectively apply filters by drawing a mask on the photo. That allows people to boost the exposure of one particular flower in a bunch, or make some sections of a photo black and white.
No product that bears the Photoshop name would be ready for prime time without support for combining images, and Photoshop Mix is no different. The app allows users to import a pair of images into the same file, and manipulate them as necessary. That way, photographers can stick Uncle Harry into the family reunion photo without having to carry a computer to the beach.
While those features are nice, Photoshop Mix’s real power lies in its cloud filters. The app includes a trio of incredibly powerful tools that require users to send the image up Adobe’s Creative Cloud servers for processing. That may seem like a lot to ask for a photo, but the effects it enables are worth it.
The trio includes shake reduction and image straightening, which help people salvage photos that would be otherwise unusable. My favorite, however, is the Content-Aware Fill tool, which removes objects from a photo, and replaces them with what should be in the background behind them. It’s not great for removing large objects, but the tool makes it easy to remove small details that would otherwise distract from the photo’s composition.
People who expect to get a lot of mileage out of Photoshop Mix will probably want a stylus for more precise edits. Adobe started selling its own stylus in combination with a digital ruler for $199, but I’ve had a decent amount of success with the Adonit Jot Script, which retails for $74.99. I’ve had success applying a big mask with only my finger, but a stylus makes it easy to brush over a small area, or select a small object for removal with content-aware fill.
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There is one downside to the app’s powerful editing capabilities: because some of the edits are so resource intensive, there’s often a lag between the touch input on my 4th generation iPad (which I purchased in early 2013) and any change to the image that I’m working on. It’s only a brief gap (half a second at most), but there’s enough latency for me to notice it.
I’ve used Photoshop Mix on an iPad Air, and found it to perform much more smoothly. At the same time, I’d be reluctant to recommend this to someone running the iPad 2, or even a third-generation iPad.
Still, it’s a free app, and its features are powerful enough to justify the annoyance of a little latency. I’ll still be performing quick-and-dirty edits on my iPhone, but Photoshop Mix is the app I’ll reach for next if I want something a bit more complex.
Photoshop Mix is available for free from the iOS App Store.
