Gallery: Fingers-On: Adobe's Photoshop Touch Apps for iPad
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Adobe on Tuesday released three lightweight iPad apps to complement its famous Photoshop editing tool. Priced from $2 to $5, the three apps are called Adobe Nav, Adobe Color Lava and Adobe Eazel. The apps don't replace Photoshop, but they aim to enhance the experience for artists and designers. Here's a quick look at the three apps.
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Adobe Color Lava ---------------- My favorite among the three apps is Adobe Color Lava, because it should appeal to the broadest audience. It's a virtual color palette for you to dab around with different color combinations to help you nail a solid color scheme. Trying to pick the colors of a website you're designing or a PowerPoint presentation you're compiling? Poke around with Color Lava; just mix around some blues, reds and maybe some yellow, until you find the colors that suit you. You can save up to five colors in a swatch and refer to it later. I like this idea a lot, because using your fingers to dab and swirl colors around makes the color-picking experience more intimate. And because the iPad is so lightweight and you're more likely to carry it with you than a bulkier PC notebook, you could mix around with colors on the go, in moments of inspiration. ([Adobe Color Lava](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-color-lava-for-photoshop/id417634383?mt=8), $3)
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Adobe Eazel ----------- Adobe also released Adobe Eazel, an app for creating paintings with your fingertips. It's a simple painting app: Tap with five fingers to show four options to adjust color, brush size, opacity and other settings. After you mock something up you can transmit it wirelessly to Photoshop or save it in the iPad's photo album. It's decent for a painting app, but a tad too minimal. For a painting app, I prefer Autodesk's SketchBook Pro, an app with more controls and a layer editor, also for $5. ([Adobe Eazel](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-eazel-for-photoshop/id421302663?mt=8), $5)
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Adobe Nav --------- Finally, Adobe Nav is an app just for Adobe Photoshop CS5 customers. It gives you a nice, big view of all the Photoshop tools in a grid, basically turning the iPad into a remote control for choosing Photoshop functions. When you launch the app, it attempts to connect to your computer running CS5. We're all familiar with how painful it can be to navigate around Photoshop, so this should be plenty nifty for CS5 customers. ([Adobe Nav](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-nav-for-photoshop/id426614130?mt=8), $2)
