They’ve already made strides toward bringing it up to feature parity with the desktop version, and it won’t be long now before the full spectrum of tools and capabilities is fully cross-platform, including Lightroom / Photoshop round-tripping. This time, it’s not a cut-down experimental version, it’s the real thing. Third-Party App Improvementsĭevelopers have understandably jumped at the opportunity to take advantage of these improvements to the platform.Īdobe, besides bolstering Lightroom’s import and file management capabilities, also launched Photoshop for iPadOS just in time for its 30th birthday.
You can use it instead of a Wacom or similar drawing tablet for pen-based retouching, which remains a staple of professional portraiture workflows. It’s also worth noting that macOS features like Sidecar have opened up new ways of using an iPad as part of your desktop workflow too - without having to involve any third-party apps. With the newer generations of iPad Pro, this all happens over a familiar USB-C connection for dongle-free simplicity.Īpple Photos has also been significantly overhauled, not only in terms of its beautiful new way of presenting photos, but also in terms of its editing tools.
It was a cumbersome workflow at a crucial juncture in the process, and I know many photographers wrote off the iPad as a result, asserting (very reasonably) that it was too much of a hassle to be worth it.Īpple has opened up file management significantly since then, not only allowing Adobe to build the direct import flow we’ve always wanted, but also allowing for external storage devices to be used across the operating system. You had to first import photos to the native Photos app, pull them into Lightroom from there, and then delete the redundant copies in Photos to save space. In the past, it was impossible to do something as simple as import photos directly into Lightroom on an iPad. The most impactful changes have been the ones that pertain to the handling of files.
The net result for photographers is that working on an iPad feels more like working on a Mac than ever before, with the added benefits of a more versatile form factor, more flexible input options, better battery life, and support for LTE. We’ve gained the ability to directly import photos into Lightroom, we have cursor support built in, we have a desktop-class web browsing experience, we can connect to external displays, access and use external storage, and the hardware line-up is more diversified and generous with functionality across the price spectrum. Send me the roundup » The New iPad Landscapeįor photographers, the iPad experience of 2020 is almost unrecognizable compared to where it used to be. Our team here at The Sweet Setup put together a short list of our must-have, most-used apps for taking and editing photos on iPhone and iPad. We spend an inordinate amount of time sorting through hundreds of apps to find the very best.