Adobe's new Photoshop-connected iPad apps show what can be done with multitouch.

Forget Flash — Adobe’s latest iPad experiments are way more interesting than a plug-in to let you view restaurant websites. The three apps — Eazel, Lab and Lava — all link to Photoshop Creative Suite 5 running on a Mac or a PC, and let you use the multitouch display to control various functions.

Eazel lets you finger-paint on the iPad and then transmits the results to Photoshop. You can use wet or dry paint, control the size and opacity of the brushes, and a “particle-stroke painting” engine lets paint spread out for a few seconds before it dries. The most amazing part, though, is the control UI.

Plop down five fingers and a control appears at the tip of each. Move the appropriate finger to adjust color, opacity, settings and brush size. flicking your thumb left or right will undo or redo. This looks like something that should be in every app, not just drawing apps.

Next up is Nav, which puts the Photoshop tool palette on the iPad’s screen with big, easy-to-hit icons. The 4×4 grid is customizable, so you can pick your 16 favorite tools, and touching them selects the tool on the desktop machine. It also lets you browse and duplicate open documents on the iPad’s screen. This one is simple, but may turn out to be the most useful.

Finally, Lava is a color-mixer. Anyone who has mixed oil or acrylic paints on a palette (or an old piece of wood, or plastic or whatever) will know that it is far more intuitive than sliding widgets on-screen. Lava lets you do this, interacting with colors directly and using the results in Photoshop.

All of these apps, which aren’t yet available, use Adobe’s new Photoshop Touch SDK. This software development kit lets anyone write iPad apps that interact with Photoshop.

But it’s not a big deal just for iOS developers. The open SDK means developers working on other platforms — like Android Honeycomb and the forthcoming BlackBerry PlayBook OS — can begin coding their own apps based on Adobe Touch. Considering that tablets produced over the last year have been generally considered content-consumption devices, Adobe’s SDK release invites the possibility of a new wave of content-creating users.

These apps show what Adobe can do when it’s not fighting with Apple over Flash. They also show what multitouch can do when you stop thinking in desktop metaphors. I can’t wait to try them. They may even make me start using Photoshop again.

Nav [Photoshop]

Lava [Photoshop]

Eazel [Photoshop]

Mike Isaac contributed to this report.

See Also: