Adobe today showed off a version of Lightroom, one of the Photoshop maker's signature photo editing apps, running on an Apple iPad.
Adobe Group Product Manager Tom Hogarty appeared on the photography web show The Grid to give a demonstration of the mobile Lightroom app.
Lightroom on iOS appeared in an early, rough state, yet it possessed all the functionality that Lightroom users would expect. That said, Hogarty admitted that attempting some of the functions that were not optimized for the mobile version would likely "make the iPad explode."
The Lightroom app is a photo management and editing suite that photographers use to make non-destructive changes (meaning the original file is not altered) to large RAW format photographs.
Lightroom on a light device
It's clear that Lightroom for iOS is still early on in development, and Adobe hasn't yet decided how it might release a finished version of the app - whether as a standalone purchase or as part of Adobe's $49.99 (UK£46.88, AU$49.99) per month Creative Cloud subscription suite.
Hogarty showed it off on a second-generation iPad, and despite the app's slightly half-baked appearance it was still capable of manipulating a large 5D Mark III RAW image's shadows, highlights and color temperature.
RAW images, which are often enormous, aren't stored on the tablet itself, but rather on a computer that the tablet would access through the app.
The changes to RAW photos are saved as smaller, separate files that could then be synced through the cloud to other devices.
The mobile Lightroom app could make it easy for photographers to manipulate professional-grade files on the go without having to drag a laptop around - if it ever gets beyond a prototype stage, of course.
We asked Adobe to clarify whether it plans to release Lightroom on iOS or any other mobile platforms at any point, and a company spokesperson responded that today's demonstration was merely "a sneak peek look at future technologies and not specific product plans or news."
Via The Verge
