Adobe Photoshop Fix
» see adobe.com/products/photoshop-fix as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ how it landed ~
photoshop fix shipped for ios in october 2015. i missed it. i was 31 that year, writing computer vision code in ankara, my phone photo editing was whatever instagram shipped that quarter. fix was the kind of app you installed if you were already paying for creative cloud and wanted a fast retouching workflow on the road. that overlap of "creative cloud subscriber" and "phone retoucher" was small in turkey.
the feature set was tighter than photoshop mix. fix was about retouching, not compositing. face-aware liquify let you push a chin or widen a smile by dragging. the healing brush handled blemishes and stray hairs, the smoothing tools handled skin texture underneath. a paint controller and a defocus tool covered the rest. the finished image pushed to desktop photoshop with the layer stack preserved through creative cloud sync.
fix had its moment as the on-set retouching companion for portrait photographers between 2016 and 2018. wedding photographers used it for client previews. it ran fast on iphone 6s hardware, which mattered before mobile photoshop existed as a real product.
~ the case file ~
| Born | october 2015 on iOS as part of the post-touch six-app cc strategy |
|---|---|
| Peak | 2016-2018 with the face-aware liquify selling point and creative cloud sync |
| Killed | June 4 2024, EOL on iOS and android along with photoshop mix |
| Lifespan | About 9 years from ship to shutdown |
| Made by | Adobe Systems |
| Killed by | Migrated into photoshop express, ios delisting in 2021 was the real death |
~ the long quiet ~
adobe stopped pushing fix in 2019 once mobile photoshop on ipad was on the roadmap. the last meaningful update was 2021. ios delisting that june was effectively the end of new installs even though existing users could keep launching the app for another three years. android hung on a little longer as adobe still saw it as the cheaper retouching surface for users without an ipad pro.
by 2023 the app was a maintenance ghost. the may 2024 EOL announcement was housekeeping. june 4 2024 the servers went down, the saved cloud projects became inaccessible, the apps stopped launching. photoshop express absorbed the retouching tools but lost the face-aware liquify control fidelity that fix had at its peak. for the working photographers who never moved to ipad photoshop, that was the bigger loss.
~ what it leaves ~
the post-touch six-app strategy ended on june 4 2024. fix was the last useful one to die. shape cc went first in 2017, color and brush and comp cc followed by 2020. mix and fix held longest because they had clear workflows that working pros used. mobile photoshop on iphone and ipad inherited the audience by 2022, the older fix-and-mix workflows were no longer worth maintaining.
the help article for fix still exists on adobe.com. it has been a tombstone since june 5 2024. the migration path it points to is photoshop express, which is not the same product, with no recovery option for cloud projects that were not exported in time.
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other software: SpiderNode, Google Native Client, Namesys, FrontPage Express
also died in the 2020s: Google Duo, YouTube Rewind, Google Native Client
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