iPad App Teaches Photoshop

Pam Pfiffner

Here’s a little-known gem: Adobe has created a free iPad app that lets you learn Photoshop through interactive tutorials. The Tutorial Player for Photoshop includes 12 step-by-step tutorials that teach image-editing tasks.

Connect the iPad to your computer, launch Photoshop and then run the app. The Tutorial Player will then walk you through different image-editing techniques, like turning a color image into black and white, removing a foreground object, and simulating tilt-shift photography.

If you get interrupted during your tutorial, the player remembers where you left off, so you can resume the lesson later. If you get stuck and need help, click the “Show Me” link. The player then sends a message to Photoshop to show you the step in question — where the tools are, what settings to use, and so on.

Presumably Adobe will be adding new tutorials to the iPad app over time, but a new product in development in Adobe Labs offers another option: making your own tutorials.

Tutorial Builder for Photoshop, currently in beta testing, is a Photoshop plug-in that you can use to create your own interactive tutorials that can be published to the Tutorial Player on the iPad. The process of creating tutorials is similar to that of making actions in Photoshop: you click a record button, perform the tasks you want to show, and the builder captures your on-screen movements. It will prompt you to select before and after pictures and includes a dialog box for entering information about the tutorial. Hit the Process button and the builder generates an HTML file of the tutorial that you can preview in a Web browser.

Watch a video explaining Tutorial Builder and Tutorial Player:

The Tutorial Builder is still in development so some functions are not yet ready. Still, the idea that anyone can record and play back tutorials from within the application or on the iPad is intriguing. One can imagine these tutorials being sold on iTunes or showing up in number of community-building and social-networking sites such as Adobe’s own help system in which users support other users.

To use Tutorial Player for Photoshop you need Photoshop 12.0.4 (CS5) or later and iOS 5.0 or later.