- Photoshop on Android (Beta) drops to devices running Android 11 or later
- It’s free for a limited period of time
- Creative Cloud -Subscriptions Unlock Upobe Equity Assets and Generative Editions
Following the release of Photoshop to iPhone earlier this year, the largest photo editing app has finally reached Android in Pro-Grade form, complete with Photoshops Marquee features and generative capabilities.
The free beta version of Photoshop for Android offers much of the same functionality as the iPhone app and has an intuitive interface designed specifically for phones, with core photoshop tools such as stratification, masking and mixing.
I am not yet using the app, but I saw a demonstration of its capabilities presented by Adobe, and it looks super impressive, apparently being one of if not the most fully equipped and powerful photo editors for Android phones.
You can import images from your camera roll, start from an empty canvas, use Adobe Stock assets and take a photo with your phone to edit then.
As a regular photoshop user, I can’t wait to try the app on my Google Pixel phone, and here are three tools I start with …
1. Press Select
Simplifying Photoshop’s topic and background choice tools on a mobile phone is no easy task, but what Adobe calls ‘Tap Select’ seems to make the trick neat.
During a demo, an Adobe professional went through an editing of a classic car photo using TAP Select to make image adjustments to just the car itself and then to other topics.
Press Select Suggesting Different Objects in an image that you may want to edit selectively, display thumbnails of these, and once you have made a choice, it will suggest a large arsenal of Photoshop tools such as color routes and so on.
Topic selection can be improved with Photoshops brushing tool to add / pull from the selection when it has missed the brand.
And with these edits that work within Photoshop’s lagging capacity, changes can be adjusted at any time in the editing process.
Press Select is the kind of tools I can see myself using on almost any editing, and its implementation of Android phones looks well thought out.
2. Generative Firefly
Adobe has recently focused much of its energy on developing Firefly – the generative AI tools that sit within its leading apps like Photoshop. Of course, Photoshop for Android phones can also take advantage of these tools.
For example, generative filling can replace topics and backgrounds to your liking, no matter how imaginative your ideas are. Again, under the demo, we saw these tools practiced in practice – remove parked cars in the background and replace the surrounding trees for palm trees, with several generated options to choose from.
Of course, there are limits to Fireflo’s capacity, but the Android phone version seemed to be as powerful and effective as the full version of Photoshop with the word -prompt tasks it was assigned.
3. Tapping in Adobe Stock assets
Despite having a creative cloud subscription, I generally do not use the ‘commercially secure’ adobe share assets at my disposal, whether it is images or textures or other assets. However, on the mobile version I can see myself having a proper game with these.
Let’s say I will add text to a picture that there is a large selection of fonts to choose from. Then I can mask that text layer and change the letters with almost any structure or image of my choice from hundreds of thousands of stock assets.
In the demo we saw ‘Aloha’ text added to the classic car photo, taken in Hawaii and then modified with a picture of a hibiscus flower within the letters.
I got away from the demo with the feeling that the extent of the edits I can make for photos from my phone is large and only limited by my imagination.
I really look forward to playing with Photoshop on my Android phone to get a proper sense of it.
