As a loyal Android user (my wife has the iPad & iPhone in the family) I’ve been moping over the last year as one hot app for photographers after another came out for the “i*” products, and Android was left behind. Best sellers like Instagram, Snapseed, and even Adobe’s original tablet applications for use with Photoshop, were and are still only available on Apple devices.

Fortunately, Adobe has started to change all that, with a line of tablet applications for Android. Without a doubt the flagship is Photoshop Touch. Essentially a mini-version of Photoshop, it comes complete with layers, filters, gradients, blending modes, text, and special effects. More importantly, unlike many early tablet programs, it is actually really easy to learn and use. After a compelling demo from Marissa and Allison from Adobe at a press event at CES, I was extra-motivated to get it running on one of my tablets – Touch requires Android 3.1 or greater, so it won’t run on many earlier Honeycomb tablets, or any Gingerbread tablets. In my case that meant finding a custom Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) ROM I could run.

Once I got Touch fired up, it was almost as easy to figure out as it was to watch the demo (which is saying something – since often even products with great demos are hard to learn on your own), and even more fun to play with. For anyone familiar with Photoshop, it’s really a no-brainer to find the clearly laid out layers and tools menus and familiar concepts like Adjustments, Blending, Opacity, and Filters all work just like they do in the “big” Photoshop.

After my initial euphoria, I settled down to the more mundane task of deciding how I would actually use this new tool. Unfortunately, that’s when some of the limitations and rough edges surfaced. First and foremost, Touch can only work with images up to 1600 x 1600 pixels, so it is only useful for web and mobile images. If you want to capture images at a higher resolution, you’ll need to work on a separate copy in Touch and then repeat your work later. Touch also doesn’t work with Raw files. Since tablets don’t actually allow you to capture Raw images, that’s not a problem at first blush, but if you want to use your tablet connected to a camera (either tethered, or sharing a hard drive, or using an Eye-Fi card) then you’re likely to have Raw images you want to process.

There is one other wrinkle, at least for now. Tablets don’t make great cameras. Most mobile photos are still taken with phones or small point and shoots. So having an editor on your tablet is fun, and possibly a convenience, but you still need to get the image onto the tablet – and resized to less than 1600 pixels – before Touch can come into play. Adobe starts to address this by integrating their Creative Cloud into the software, so you can make your images accessible from any device – if you are willing to buy into their Cloud subscription.

Other sharing options include sending the image to your Facebook account or through email. You can of course save the images locally, but at quite a low quality. Since Touch won’t handle large images, it is also frustrating that it can’t directly edit the images captured by most cameras – including the one in your tablet – unless you set them to a very low resolution.

Touch is great fun, and a definite leading edge for great tablet applications to come, but until the tablet ecosystem allows better handling of larger images – including better support for large flash memory cards and disks – as well as raw images, and seamless camera transfer, Photoshop Touch is likely to get filed away in the “social media” corner of creative tool options. It is fun and remarkably powerful, so I look forward to the day I can use it to process my Raw files in the field without setting up a laptop – after all, the keyboard is probably the least essential part of Photoshop if you have a quickly accessible touch interface.

Hats off to Adobe for an amazingly clever application. I’m looking forward to reviewing and comparing it with the Android version of nik’s SnapSeed when it is available, as it has gotten rave reviews on the iPad.