Is anyone tried to edit images on a tablet ?

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Have you tried to edit images on a tablet ?

  • Yes

    Votes: 1 100.0%
  • No

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    1

Jack

Love Macro
Staff member
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Mar 13, 2020
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Nowadays you have very modern tablets and you can even install Adobe software on them . How practical is to edit images on a tablet ? Has anyone tried ?
 

H3AdBaBY

New Member
1
Oct 12, 2021
12
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421
With photo editing in mind, I purchased my iPad Pro in 2018 primarily due to the promises from Adobe that Lightroom and Photoshop for iPad were "coming soon". Years passed with not much progress from Adobe. Finally I gave up. There are much better options available at a much lower cost. For me, that translates into better images, and breaking free of the monthly subscription seriously improves my photography budget.

As a graphic designer I've used Adobe products for nearly thirty years, so naturally I used Photoshop to edit my images. In the early days of digital I experimented with Lightroom but it didn’t quite meet my needs and I always defaulted back to Photoshop. Eventually I switched from Windows to MacOS and began using Aperture which was a perfect RAW image process for my purposes.

Unfortunately, Apple decided to sunset Aperture so back to Adobe I went. Lightroom had matured by then and I was quite happy using it although there were far more options and capabilities than I needed or wanted. I have no need of catalogs, collections, keywording, etc. but Lightroom was still the best option for me at the time. I wasn't pleased when Adobe implemented the subscription plan but reluctantly signed up and paid my monthly dues for years.

Eventually my MacBook Pro no longer received OS updates and was unable to run the latest software versions. Then one day my computer failed to power up. At that point I was forced into using my iPad Pro as my workstation. There were a few hurdles early on but I've overcome them all. My current setup consists of a 2018 12.9" iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Mouse II. I archive my images on a Western Digital RAID and I also use iCloud storage.

One of the first hurdles I encountered was finding a replacement for Lightroom. In my opinion, the iOS version of Lightroom Mobile is in no way comparable to the desktop version. I was going from a full-featured professional tool to an app that felt like it was an afterthought - something Adobe just threw together to have a presence in the App Store. Photoshop for iPad Pro lacks a number of key features I consider essential to my workflow.

After a good bit of research and trying different apps I finally found a workflow that suites me. I now use RAW Power for my culling, rating, and RAW processing. RAW Power is an iOS and MacOS program created by Gentlemen Coders, the former lead developer for Apple's Aperture and fills the role in my workflow formerly occupied by Lightroom. Although it is not yet quite as full-featured as Lightroom I find I prefer the more streamlined approach. I can do all my RAW processing in RAW Power and then do more extensive editing by simply opening the file in Affinity Photo. This is analogous to using Lightroom and opening the image in Photoshop. Same thing only better.