When you launch Photoshop on your iPad it opens to the Home screen which shows you thumbnails of your recent documents and offer some options for where to start your workflow.
One option is to start work by opening a new blank file.
To do that you would tap the Create new option at the bottom of the screen.
Then in Photoshop on your iPad you could add other documents to the canvas using the Place Image tool as you'll see how to do later in this tutorial.
A second option is to start work on your iPad by importing an image from another location.
To do that you would tap the Import and open option and then you choose the source of the file which could be your Camera Roll, a Files storage location you use or your iPad's Camera.
A third option and the one we're going to focus on in this tutorial is to start by opening a cloud document.
The first question you probably have is: What's a cloud document?
Cloud documents are your Photoshop documents saved in Adobe's cloud.
What makes cloud documents so useful is that you can see them and work on them whether you're using Photoshop on your computer or Photoshop on your iPad.
To see all your cloud documents on your iPad, tap the Cloud Documents option on the left side of the Home screen.
That opens your Cloud documents organizer where each of the thumbnails is already a cloud document.
Tap one of the cloud documents to open it in Photoshop on your iPad.
This is a Photoshop document, a .
PSD file that already has two layers.
To bring in another document on a third layer, tap at the Place Image Tool in the Toolbar.
Here you can see the various sources from which you can bring in a document.
I'll choose the Camera Roll on my iPad.
In the Camera Roll I'll navigate to the photo that I want to bring in and I'll select it and that returns me to Photoshop on the iPad in Transform mode where I could scale, rotate and move this new document.
But it looks like it's a pretty good fit as is so I'm just going to tap Done to exit Transform mode.
To finish up this composite I'll apply a layer blending mode to the selected layer of the dancer.
In the Taskbar on the far right I'll tap the Layer Properties icon and in the Layer Properties panel I'll tap the Blend Mode menu and I'm going to choose the Multiply Blend Mode which hides the white background around the dancer against the colours on the layers below.
Now if you're an experienced Photoshop user at this point you may be looking around for a Save button.
But here's the important take home point about Photoshop on the iPad.
There is no Save button and that's because every image is automatically and regularly saved to Adobe's cloud every few minutes while you're working on it in Photoshop on the iPad.
And that means you don't have to worry about saving and it means you'll always have access to an up to date file wherever you're working in Photoshop whether that's on your iPad or on your computer, whether you go idle, flip to another app or head back to the home screen your documents are automatically saved.
When you are done with this editing session, tap the Home button at the top left and that will take you back to the Cloud documents organizer where you started.
The Cloud documents organizer helps you manage and organize all your cloud documents.
At the top right, you can use the View icons to change your view of your cloud documents.
You can use the Sort menu at the left to change the way your cloud documents are sorted in the Cloud documents organizer.
You can even create a folder by tapping the Folder icon at the top right.
And then you can drag cloud documents into the folder to organize them.
If you tap the three-dot menu under a thumbnail as I'm going to do down here at the bottom right, you can find the actions that you can take on that cloud document including deleting it from the Cloud document organizer.
I'll tap Delete there to delete this image of the pink sunset.
If you do delete an image from the Cloud document organizer you have a safety net.
To show you that I'll tap Deleted over on the left.
And now we can see all the cloud documents that I've deleted over time, including down at the bottom that pink sunset that I just deleted.
And I can restore any of these.
I'll tap the three-dot menu under the pink sunset image and here I can choose to either Permanently delete it or Restore it.
I'll tap Restore.
Now when I tap back on Cloud documents on the left to return to my Cloud documents organizer, you can see the pink sunset document safely restored to my Cloud document organizer.
So that's how to start your workflow and how to work with cloud documents in Photoshop on your iPad.
