We started off with single purpose apps like Camera Bag for Photo processing, Lights for digital lighting, Brushes for digital painting, Cropulator for image adjustments. But the ‘photoshop feeling’ was never captured by any app on the iPhone. PhotoForge attempts to fill that gap, and it fills it pretty nicely I’d say.

The iPhone touchscreen is both a boon and bane for doing image manipulation. For one you have the natural feeling of touch, accurate enough to create stunning drawings, and on the other it’s a small screen, with limited precision, and lack of multi-tasking in the app makes it difficult to do any serious editing. That said, let’s dig into what exactly PhotoForge offers.

For those who have used any image manipulation app on the desktop, PhotoForge will feel just like home. GhostBird Soft has done a pretty good job with the UI design. At the top lies a thin toolbar which includes the Hand tool, Brush, Eraser, Fill, EyeDropper, Smudge, and Clone Stamp. At the bottom is sort of a working toolbar which includes options to load in images, Brush options, Colour palette, Crop tool, Filters, undo/redo, and Save. This is pretty much what PhotoForge stands for. Of course, each of these tools are fine tuned to getting the most out of them, as we shall see.

Just brushing around

Let’s take the act of brushing around. You just drag your finger around, and it paints the selected colour. You go into the Brush options at the bottom, and change the brush dynamics, the options of which are average, but good enough for a mobile device. You then use the EyeDropper tool to select a new colour. PhotoForge makes up for the lack of precision of the finger, by putting a ring around the tapped area showing you what colour you’re picked. You can then adjust the transparency by going into the colour palette. Real slick. The rest of the tools work just as advertised.

So what if you want to get detailed into an image. There’s the Hand tool, for moving around in the image, and pinching it to zoom. However, this is where the fault lies. Images when loaded into PhotoForge, are seen pixel for pixel. So no matter what resolution image you’ve loaded in, when it’s in PhotoForge it’s stuck at 320x480 pixels. Even if you zoom in and start brushing, it shows a pixelated brush stroke. If you’re looking to freak out and create some amazing paintings that will go up on the New Yorker, I’d suggest you stick to the tried and tested Brushes app (for now, at least).

Image Manipulation

PhotoForge has a full set of filters, coupled with an excellent cropping tool, and a perfect Clone/Stamp tool and Smudge tool. Here’s a few of the filters you can run on the app, which include controls for intensity, radius, and other settings: Unsharp Mask, Blur, HDR simulation, Brightness/Contrast, Vibrance, Auto Exposure, and a bunch of effects like “Dreamy”, “Watercolor”, “Emboss”, all of which provide stunning output. Really, it’s good. I want to take a minute to talk about the Curves filter. This is like a perfect clone from Photoshop, with controls for each channel, across RGB, CMYK or CIE Lab colour specs. It’s really powerful.

Splash!

Is PhotoForge the Photoshop of the iPhone? Yes it is. I’m thoroughly impressed with the way they’ve implemented most features that make an app ‘feel like Photoshop’. The performance was surprisingly good on my first gen iPhone, although it did drag a bit when painting something. The user interface is very pleasing, and fades away leaving you with only your canvas.

They do need to fix that horrible bug with the image resolution (I believe there’s an update pending approval), and perhaps implement something for Layers and blend modes. Also, as someone in the app store reviews noted, there’s no way to paint in greyscale or full white. That’s a serious omission. Oh, and a better icon.

The app usually costs $4.99, but for some weird reason they’ve dropped it to a low low $1.99 which is totally insane.

Update: Fixed the price.