Many traditional computing tasks can be accomplished on a smartphone – albeit on a smaller screen and without the benefit of a mouse and keyboard – and those tasks extend to photo editing. If you want to make improvements and adjustments to your photos on the go, your phone can handle them just fine.
There are plenty of photo editing apps to choose from, including the Apple Photos and Google Photos options that come with iOS and Android respectively. Here, however, we’re going to focus on a company and a name that is synonymous with desktop image editing: Adobe Photoshop.
Photoshop on phones comes in the form of the Photoshop Express Photo Editor, which you can download for free iOS And Android. You can use it for free, with more advanced features and cloud storage available for $4.99 per month or $34.99 per year (this works separately from a subscription to Photoshop for the desktop).
Using Photoshop Express Photo Editor
Don’t expect the same features in Photoshop Express Photo Editor on mobile as Photoshop on desktop: it’s a cut-down, simplified version of Photoshop for smaller screens and less powerful devices. That said, you can still do a lot with your images through this stripped-down interface.
Tap to get started in the app Photo editor and retouchingand then choose an image from your phone’s gallery. At the bottom of the screen you can see which tools are available: Adjustments for adjusting colors and brightness, for example, or Crop to crop out the parts of the image you don’t need.
The Cured brush can be used to correct blemishes and inconsistencies in the image, as well as to clone or erase certain areas, while Background you can apply various effects to the background of an image. The app tries to distinguish between the background and everything in the foreground, but you can fine-tune the default selection if necessary.
Photoshop Express Photo Editor also comes with built-in AI generation capabilities: Tap the Insert objects For example, pressing the button enters a prompt and you can place an AI-generated animal or object wherever you want. You can keep adjusting the directions as needed to get something that matches what you need.
There are tons of other features you can explore: you can apply filters to entire images (like a warm filter or a bold-color filter), you can combine images, you can place stickers, scribbles, and text on top of your images, and add also add a wide selection of borders (swipe left and right to see all available tools). Once you like how an image looks, you have tons of options for sharing or saving it.
Other Adobe options for mobile
There is also a more fully featured mobile version of Photoshop available, but you can only enable it iPadOS (not iOS or Android). The app offers support for the PSD format, layers, advanced retouching features and selection tools. Considering the accessories you have with the iPad, such as the Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard, the experience doesn’t differ far from the desktop version.
Adobe Photoshop for iPad isn’t free, though: you’ll need to subscribe to a Creative Cloud plan that includes Photoshop and comes with the iPad app. If you don’t use Photoshop on a computer, you can subscribe separately to Photoshop for the iPad, which will set you back $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year.
The companion app for Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, is also available for iOS And Android. As with Photoshop Express Photo Editor, you can use much of the functionality for free, with a subscription ($4.99 per month or $49.99 per year) that gives you more features like the healing brush and batch editing. You also get all the premium features if you have a Creative Cloud subscription including Photoshop.
We also mention Adobe Express, for which you can install it iOS And Android. This app is more focused on AI-based graphic design and art creation, but it’s something to consider if you want to create images with Adobe software using just your phone. You can apply basic effects and adjustments, combine text and images, crop images to size, and more.
Ideal for quickly creating social media posts, for example, and you can get started with one of your own images or one of the many templates. It is separate from the Creative Cloud plans and can be used for free or with a subscription ($9.99 per month or $99.99 per year). With a subscription you get more cloud storage, more AI image generation credits, and more features (like advanced background removal).
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