Photoshop on the iPad

Some interesting announcements coming out of Adobe MAX - its annual developer conference in LA. First up is the Adobe Creative Cloud. The company describes it as "a major new initiative that radically redefines the content creation process."

In essence, it's a cloud service where you, or your studio, can access your work or indeed your Creative Suite apps (expected in 2012) from anywhere. The Creative Cloud will, according to Adobe, become the hub for the viewing, sharing and syncing of files created by Adobe Touch Apps and Adobe Creative Suite, and includes 20GB of cloud storage.

So what are these Adobe Touch Apps? Well, there's six in total for Android (soon) and (eventually) iOS: Photoshop Touch, Collage, Debut, Proto and refined Ideas and Kuler apps. Ideas is the only app currently available for iOS.

Photoshop Touch (above) enables you to transform images with core Photoshop features in a custom-built tablet app. According to the company, with simple finger gestures, users can combine multiple photos into layered images, make popular edits and apply professional effects.

The tablet-exclusive 'Scribble Selection Tool' enables you to extract objects in an image by scribbling on what to keep and then what to remove. Additionally, the app helps users quickly find images, share creations and view comments through integration with Facebook and Google Search. Using the syncing capabilities that are a component of Adobe Creative Cloud, files can be opened in Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe Debut (above) also looks very interesting – enabling users to present designs to clients virtually anywhere. According to Adobe, Debut "quickly opens tablet-compatible versions of Creative Suite files for convenient and beautiful viewing on the tablet, including Photoshop layers and Illustrator art boards". Feedback is gathered using a markup pen tool to add notes and drawings on top of the work.

Collage (above) is essentially a tool for creating moodboards that can then be transferred to Photoshop, and Proto enables the development of interactive wireframes and prototypes for websites and mobile apps on a tablet.

Adobe tells us that "ideas are communicated and shared with teams and clients using a touch-based interface. Gestures quickly express a design concept, explain website structure or demonstrate interactivity. The wireframe or prototype then can be exported as industry-standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and shared in popular browsers for immediate review and approval."

Kuler, which we've seen before, aims to make it easy to create colour themes; and Ideas – already available on the App Store – enables you to quickly sketch out ideas and send them to Photoshop or Illustrator for further refinement.

In other Adobe news, the company has announced Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition. An extract from the press release reads as follows:

"Single Edition allows users to publish single-issue content such as a brochure, highly-visual book, annual report or personal design portfolio as an application for the iPad. As an extension of the Digital Publishing Suite line, Single Edition enables users to leverage Creative Suite 5.5 workflows to create an application for the iPad. This gives freelance designers access to many of the same creative and publishing technologies that leading publishers, such as Cond Nast, have used to reinvent their publications for delivery on tablet devices."

So basically you don't have to be a big publishing company to publish with the DPS tools any more. No UK pricing as yet, but in the US for a single folio it costs $395.

And there's more: Adobe has also announced that it has acquired Web font company Typekit, Nitobi – creators of PhoneGap and has struck a new deal with WoodWing. The latter means that WoodWing will cease the sale of its Reader app and integrate Adobe DPS into its Digital Magazine workflow. Full press release here.

More images and updates when we get them.