In some fields, the iPad just isn’t suited to take over from a PC. And that’s cool, because it can still help out. Take pro-level Photoshopping, for example: without actions, multiple windows and keyboard shortcuts, no iPad app is going to be better than PS on OS X. But you can put your tablet net to your Mac and let them work together.
Today’s example: Colorotate, a color editing app for your iPad.
The idea of Colorotate is to design color palettes. You can do this in a few ways. The first (and the one that gives the app its name) is a 3-D color space which can be twisted and turned until you get the exact shade you’re after. You can view by tint or hue, and you can show your selected colors on a single screen, like islands in a sea of color, only that sea is made of all the colors between your chosen shades and can be tapped to hone your palette yet finer.
It’s actually a lot more intuitive than it sounds.
You can also open an image and have the app create a palette for you. This is a killer feature, as it lets you generate a 1950s-style palette just by finding a print ad from the era. I would have killed for this back when I did graphic design for a living.
Finally, thanks to Photoshop’s ability to talk nice with iOS apps directly (in CS5 and CS6), Colorotate can send colors straight to Photoshop’s foreground and background color pickers. Thus you can keep the iPad and the Mac on your desk and use them together.
Unlike most high-end graphics apps, Colorotate costs a measly $5. It’s probably worth that just to extract palettes from a couple of your favorite photos.
Source: Colorotate
