Photoshop companions for iPad: Adobe Nav, Adobe Color Lava, and Adobe Eazel

    About a month ago, Adobe announced the new Photoshop Touch SDK for developing mobile applications designed to work in conjunction with Photoshop. And this morning, the first programs for the iPad appeared in the Appstore. These are


    the Nav navigation bar, the Color Lava palette, and the Eazel drawing tool.

    All three applications are designed for the iPad and can somehow interact with Photoshop starting with version 12.0.4, in the menu of which it is possible to enable connection reception. Since I'm a fan of all sorts of extensions for Photoshop, of course I tried all these things and would like to share an opinion.

    First, a small introduction. To connect applications with PS, wifi is used, applications do not work through the cable. All you need to do is to check the enable checkbox in the Photoshop Edit> Remote Connections menu and set a password for the connection.

    And then connect to the FS through the icon in the corner of the application.

    The cheapest ($ 1.99) of the new companion programs is Adobe Nav . It serves for two purposes. Firstly, this is an additional panel, the tools on which you can arrange at your discretion:


    Nav settings:


    Secondly, it is a navigator for open documents.


    A 4x4 grid is available for tools, switching occurs with a minimum delay. In navigator mode, you can view information about open documents.

    The usefulness of the program is proportional to the price. It would be very interesting for me to try it in conjunction with Cintiq tablets (which are a screen with an active area and, I can imagine, make it more difficult to work with the keyboard), but otherwise it’s more convenient to switch the keyboard. For regular Photoshop users, the thing is pretty pointless, for those who are too lazy to memorize hotkeys can do it. My main complaint is actually no room for extensions. If it was possible to assign buttons, menu items or scripts, the utility would be much higher (I hope to finish it in the future). Another disadvantage is the lack of the ability to save Presets from different panels.
    Navigator can be conveniently used on a bunch of open documents, but Expose (or its analogue on Vin) do the same and faster.

    The next application is Color Lava ($ 2.99) . A palette for mixing colors: choose a color from the left jar, smear beautifully, moisten a finger with water, take another paint, mix, throw color in PS. In idyllic words, in fact - complete junk. The trouble with Lava is that the colors are interfering with a dumb algorithm that has nothing to do with mixing real colors. Here's a look at this shame:


    And this is when in ArtRage (a raster editor produced by Ambient Design) from time immemorial, blue + yellow = green . I would not recommend it to anyone.

    And another application - Adobe Eazel ($ 4.99). That's cool. Eazel is a drawing machine, it feels a bit like watercolor according to the sensations of the material : the paint remains “wet” for some time, so the next color mixes with the previous one (needless to say, it mixes with the wrong algorithms too, well, God bless them) and, most importantly , Adobe had the first, in my opinion, it turned out to make a convenient multitouch interface. At first it’s absolutely inconvenient, but after ten minutes it’s impossible to get enough.
    The principle is that while you are drawing on the screen there are no interface elements, and on tap, with a five on the screen under each of the fingers a menu appears: undo, color, size, opacity and settings. And, releasing 4 fingers, with the rest we change the selected parameter. Sounds wild, but Eazel really has the best drawing experience of all the programs I've tried. Here is a screenshot (I had to get up in a very funny pose to make it)


    Colors interfere quite interestingly (it may well be that people from Moxi's creators Adobe purchased were working on this program : it looks like a simplified model of their watercolors) The feeling of magic does not let go. The finished picture can be transferred to PS in a fairly high resolution (2x1.5k)
    There are also drawbacks and limitations: no layers, only one document (!), Only one Undo level, only one brush without any additional settings, not the most outstanding Color Picker, drawing in general is not very convenient: sometimes the color flows unpredictably , and blotting out twice will not especially roll away. But I really hope that in the future Adobe will develop this program and direction.

    In parting, here is my ten-minute masterpiece about a humanoid robot, subsequently ruined by excessively fluid paint:

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