Adobe will launch a "full version" of Photoshop for iPad in 2019, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and Nico Grant. The report claims Adobe will preview the app at its annual MAX creative conference in October.
Adobe's chief of Creative Cloud software Scott Belsky confirmed that the company is working on a new cross-platform version of Photoshop and other apps, but declined to specify the timing of their launches.
"My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible," Belsky said in an interview. "There's a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era."
Adobe already offers a range of companion apps for Photoshop on iPhone and iPad, including Photoshop Fix for basic retouching, Photoshop Express for basic photo editing and creating collages, Photoshop Sketch for drawing and painting, and Photoshop Mix for creating multilayered images.
The full version is expected to offer a wider range of tools, enabling users to start a project on the desktop and continue editing on the iPad, or vice versa. The app is said to have a mobile-friendly interface, as part of an architecture overhaul that will extend to other Adobe apps, such as Illustrator.
The app will presumably be named Photoshop CC for iPad, and will likely be a free download, but like the already-available Lightroom CC for iPad, a $9.99 per month Creative Cloud subscription will likely be required to access the full feature set and syncing with Photoshop on the desktop.
Photoshop CC would compete with other photo editing apps on iPad, including Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, and Snapseed by Google.
