New Adobe iPad Apps - Color Lava
With touchscreen technology now cheap enough to become a household feature, Adobe has jumped on the bandwagon (finally!) and released three new apps for the iPad which connect with your desktop version of Photoshop, but are they worth it?
As it turns out, the rather surprising answer for them is probably not. In this post, I'm going to first take a look at, what I consider, the most useless one, Color Lava for Photoshop(iTunes Link).
- Some different views of the Color Lava interface
Why You'd Want It
Just look at it! It's cool. It has the feel of those little plastic mixing palettes that you had in kindergarten! Also, you use your freakin' fingers to mix the paint around. Probably the most gratuitous and visually awesome feature is that water well in the upper left corner where you "wash" the paint off your finger!!!
Its entire purpose is to provide a clever, intuitive way to create color schemes using a finger painting method, then you can email them to friends and colleagues or send them directly to your desktop Photoshop. I'm not sure if that means it goes into the Kuler tool or if it's a swatch file.
Why It's Useless
One simple point. The iPad isn't calibrated for color. The same problems that affect your desktop monitor, also affect the iPad. The one difference is that there isn't a system of calibration or profiling or "colorspacing" so that you can keep color the same visually between it and your desktop monitor.
If that giant glaring hole gets plugged, then this app becomes really useful, but for now you should only use it as a "gee whiz" toy and not as part of your color workflow. The creator wants it to be a tool to continue the conversation of color in collaborations, but for the reason above, it fails to do it because you'll be talking a dialect that won't translate exactly when injected into the production process.
