At first blush, the idea of trying to edit photographs of any resolution on a teeny cell phone screen is a little preposterous…not that hasn’t put a dent in the popularity of in-camera and in-phone editing features that let folks swap out backgrounds, correct for red-eye, smooth skins, adjust exposure, and apply all sorts of “creative” filters and borders. If mobile photo editing is your thing, though, Android may just have become your preferred mobile platform: Adobe has announced that third-party application developers can now tap into its Photoshop.com Mobile for Android, letting those developers get top-flight photo editing and image sharing capabilities from other applications.
“Unlike iPhone, the Android platform allows us to make the Photoshop.com editor broadly available to developers so they can provide it within any application they are working on,” said Adobe’s VP and general manager for digital imaging and rich media solutions Doug Mack, in a statement. “Photoshop functionality can then easily be accessed from an online auction, real estate, or social media application so users can quickly fix photos and make them look their best, before being showcased.”
By hooking into Photoshop.com Mobile for Android, developers can let users apply a bundle of image editing and filter effects to their pictures without having to write (or license) all the image-manipulation code themselves. Photoshop.com Mobile enables users to apply dramatic filters, as well as apply vintage effects and perform color corrections. Images can then be shared with social media and photo sharing sites.
Adobe and Apple are currently engaged in a war of wills over Adobe’s Flash technology; neither the iPhone nor the forthcoming iPad support Flash, which puts a serious dent in Adobe’s claims that Flash technology is ubiquitous. Adobe characterizes Photoshop.com Mobile as the “go-to” photo editing application for both iPhone and Android, but the company is clearly offering more to Android developers than to programmers for Apple’s devices—although that may have as much to do with Android’s architecture than any political wrangling between the two companies.
