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Adobe Photoshop Mix review: Photoshop Mix earns mixed marks

It's well designed and has a reasonable feature set, but some aspects need work.

Lori Grunin Senior Editor / Advice
I've been reviewing hardware and software, devising testing methodology and handed out buying advice for what seems like forever; I'm currently absorbed by computers and gaming hardware, but previously spent many years concentrating on cameras. I've also volunteered with a cat rescue for over 15 years doing adoptions, designing marketing materials, managing volunteers and, of course, photographing cats.
Expertise Photography, PCs and laptops, gaming and gaming accessories
Lori Grunin
6 min read

Editors' note, June 19, 2014: Updated with additional information from Adobe.

7.4

Adobe Photoshop Mix

The Good

A mostly well-designed interface and an excellent cut-out tool makes Photoshop Mix good for creating two-layer collages. And it integrates smoothly with other Creative Cloud tools.

The Bad

Aspects of the interface, like undo and redo, can be frustrating, and it's quite short on features. Plus the "premium" features don't really seem worth paying extra for.

The Bottom Line

Photoshop Mix feels like a version 1.0 product -- albeit a very slick one -- and is mostly worth trying for the curiosity factor.

Adobe takes a new tack with its latest attempt to bring Photoshop to mobile. Photoshop Mix has the more modern, less cluttered interface we expect from an iPad app in 2014, along with a more streamlined, focused toolset than we've seen in previous outings like Photoshop Touch.

While free, and available via the App Store -- in contrast to most of Adobe's other new apps, which are usually only available from the Creative Cloud site -- it still requires at least a free Creative Cloud subscription.

The coolest new features of the app, powered by the company's new software development kit (the Creative SDK), are only available on a trial basis, however: as a splash screen warns you, "Upright, Shake Reduction and Content-Aware Fill are premium features. They are free for a limited time." That means using them will require a subscription; in other words, you'll have to pay at least $10 per month for the Photography plan -- the cheapest available -- if you don't already subscribe.

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Log-in is required. If you're not logged in and you go offline, this is as far as you'll get. Lori Grunin/CNET

Adobe says Photoshop Touch will remain available because it has a different set of tools: they're far more powerful in most ways, including support for text and highlight/midtone/shadow adjustments. Plus it remains part of the company's small foothold on Android.

More on Adobe Creative Cloud 2014

Mix's capabilities are both more basic and more sophisticated than Touch's. It's based on Compositions, an indicator of its slant toward compositing (collages) rather than straight retouching; the company is increasingly pushing folks toward Lightroom for more photographic-related endeavors.

To begin, you initiate a new composition. The app prompts you to load an image. Your source options are from your iPad photos; snapping a photo using the iPad's camera; accessing your Creative Cloud files; retrieving an image from your Lightroom mobile catalog (if you have one); or pulling photos from your personal Facebook account. The latter comes in exchange for giving up your friend list, and I suppose Adobe deserves credit for telling you that, at least.

One surprising omission -- especially given that a former Adobe executive, key to its Photoshop and mobile product strategies, is now working on imaging at Google -- is a lack of support for Google Drive or Google+ photos. You can generally work around a lack of direct support by saving to the Camera Roll.

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When you create a new composition, you're presented with a host of image sources to pull from. The icon in the upper right corner switches between grid and image view. Lori Grunin/CNET

Once you've selected your image, Mix drops you into the main screen. On top are thumbnails indicating one of two layers you toggle between when creating the collage. Touching one either selects that image layer for adjustments or brings up the screen to replace it with a different image.

Toward the side is the ever-present share icon, which allows you to save your composition to Creative Cloud as a Photoshop PSD file, save it to the Camera Roll, post to the portfolio site Behance or bring up iOS's sharing services.

When loading a PSD file, you can pull in an individual layer -- you scribble on the area and Mix identifies which layer that area belongs to -- or a merged version. It doesn't understand blend modes or opacity, however, and even within the app you can't control the opacity of a given layer. According to Adobe, you're limited to files with a maximum dimension of 5,000 pixels. It saves for Facebook and locally at 2,000 pixels in its longest dimension or full resolution when you save to Photoshop/.PSD to Creative Cloud .

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Along the bottom of the screen are your tools: enhance, looks, cut out, crop, and more edits. Lori Grunin/CNET

Enhance includes exposure, contrast, clarity and saturation sliders in addition to full auto. And they work well, as you'd expect from a company with mature retouching algorithms. Once done, your choices are to cancel or apply.

One of my biggest frustrations throughout the app is the undo/redo. In theory, a two-finger swipe in either direction performs those functions. But even after rotating my hand awkwardly 90 degrees to swipe as indicated in the tutorial video, I found the swipes more often ended up moving the image or applying a selection stroke rather than undoing or redoing. I dub this feature "screamworthy."

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You can also apply preset adjustments -- called "Looks" -- which range from standard punch-ups like vivid and brighten to vaguer options like "instant" and "sweet." Lori Grunin/CNET

Cut out generally works very well, which is unsurprising since Adobe's had so long to work on it. The implementation looks and feels more like desktop Photoshop's Quick Selection tool than the scribble in/out method used by Photoshop Touch.

With Smart selection you run your finger over the area you want to keep and it masks out the rest. It does work best with contiguous areas; once you lift your finger it applies the mask and you can't see any other areas to select. Smart selection includes the ability to feather the edges and invert the selection, coupled with the added power of Refine Edges.

When you send the composition to Photoshop, it sends it as the full-resolution image plus a layer mask which you can further refine. There's also more traditional masking option which lets you choose a selection brush size.

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While it doesn't deliver professional-quality masking, cut out does a pretty good job. And you can always tweak it in Photoshop. Lori Grunin/CNET

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In crop view, Mix presents you with various preset aspect ratios plus freeform. Lori Grunin/CNET

But the most interesting aspect of Mix is its initial implementation of a hybrid, almost client-server-like architecture enabled by the SDK. It incorporates the Upright (perspective straightening), shake reduction and content-aware fill features of desktop Photoshop by leveraging cloud computing.

In practice, you choose the tool and the uploads the image to a remote server, which then returns the corrected image to your iPad. It's interesting from a technical perspective, but of mixed practicality.

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The new transforms hide under the More Edits option. Lori Grunin/CNET

I should state outright that I have never gotten Shake Reduction to work usefully in Photoshop, and find it even less effective in Mix. Basically, you select it, Mix uploads the image to cloud and sends it back. At that point, it presents you with a variety of samples with different parameters applied, along with an intensity slider so that you can dial back the typically crunchy, artifact-ridden results.

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I generally find that I have to dial back the intensity so much that shake reduction is equivalent to a hard sharpen. Note the halos along the edges of the bottom red pepper. This is one of the better results I got. Lori Grunin/CNET

To be fair, shake reduction is difficult. And your mileage may vary. But if you're going to call something a limited-time, premium feature, it had better be worth whatever you're going to charge for it.

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Upright works well, but it doesn't automatically crop to the remaining image area. Lori Grunin/CNET

Finally, content-aware fill, another feature that I find hit and miss, works fairly well if the photo is just right; there needs to be a lot of similarity in the region surrounding the blighted area or it overblurs or introduces contamination. In Mix, the biggest drawback is waiting for the roundtrip processing from the cloud to find out if you've make a selection mistake. That's not an issue with shake reduction or upright, which affect the entire image.

Performance of all three of the server-based operations is much better on a newer generation iPad; at the very least, Wi-Fi simply transfers faster. I tested Mix on an iPad Air and an iPad 2 , and it was only just usable on the latter.

The big picture

As Adobe probably intends, the real advantages of Photoshop Mix are in its links to Creative Cloud and its services. And it does have excellent selection tools and a good interface for overlaying two images -- as long as you don't want to just make one partially transparent, which you can't do.

But there are a few too many frustrations. For instance, you can free rotate a layer, but can't easily rotate it by 90 degrees or flip it. Undo and redo are unreliable. You can't add text.

Ultimately, I'm not quite sure who Mix is for, except perhaps developers who want to see how the hooks into the Creative SDK work, or current CC subscribers who'll use it because the convenience of accessing their CC files makes it worthwhile. If you're just looking for a retouching app that can open from or export to the usual suspects, there's just too much competition.

7.4

Adobe Photoshop Mix

Score Breakdown

Setup 8Features 7Interface 7Performance 8