Converting to B&W in ACR on iPad

[Alan9940]

When I tap the B&W button in ACR on the iPad, the image converts to grayscale, as expected, but I don't have any control over the luminance values for the various colors found under Color Mix. The only way I've found to get this control is to adjust the color image in ACR, open it into PS, then apply a B&W adjustment layer. Shouldn't tapping the B&W button cause the Color Mix panel to morph into the B&W Mixer panel the way it does on the desktop? Am I missing something?

[Conrad C · Accepted solution]

I see the same thing. Not sure what’s going on, but maybe customized B&W is one of the many desktop ACR features that hasn’t made it to the iPad yet.

If you don’t mind using Lightroom for iPad OS, the B&W Mix panel does appear there after clicking the B&W button, and does currently provide control over the luminance of different colors. If you wanted the edited image to end up in Photoshop for more editing, you could do a customized B&W conversion in Lightroom, then tap the Share icon, and tap Edit in Photoshop.

[Alan9940]

@Conrad C Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, I know I could work up a grayscale image in LR Mobile, then move it into PS for further editing, but I try hard to keep my cloud usage to a minimum, since I have only the basic 20GB storage level. Raw files can eat up quite a bit of space.

Since I already pay for more iCloud storage, what I was hoping to do is to download a selected image from iCloud, edit in PS (including grayscale conversion that way it should work), and then export for printing and/or posting to the web. Hopefully, Adobe will expand the capability of ACR in PS mobile someday. I keep hoping to be able to use PS on the iPad more, but, for now, it looks like I'll have to stick with Affinity Photo 2. I don't like AP's interface nearly as much as PS, but AP functionality is far beyond PS on the iPad.

[Conrad C]

…but I try hard to keep my cloud usage to a minimum, since I have only the basic 20GB storage level. Raw files can eat up quite a bit of space.

Since I already pay for more iCloud storage, what I was hoping to do is to download a selected image from iCloud, edit in PS (including grayscale conversion that way it should work), and then export for printing and/or posting to the web.

By @Alan9940

If that’s the goal, then it might not be met by using Photoshop. Or in other words, the result in terms of cloud usage won’t be any different than Lightroom.

Because like the other mobile versions Adobe apps, Photoshop on iPad OS saves ongoing work to cloud storage only. When you open any image in Photoshop for iPad, it works similar to Lightroom: The image is immediately uploaded to the Adobe cloud. If you open a raw image in Photoshop for iPad, and after editing in Camera Raw for iPad you tap Import As and use either import option, the moment ACR closes to Photoshop, you have created a new Photoshop document, so Photoshop starts uploading it as a Photoshop Cloud Document so that it’s available to sync down to any other desktop or mobile version of Photoshop that you have.

The only way for Photoshop on iPad to edit without using the cloud is (maybe) to import, edit, and export (using the standard share icon, not the blue Share button) while the iPad is absolutely shut off from the network the entire time. But the second you enable the network again, Photoshop uploads anything that was imported while offline, so before enabling the network again, you also have to remember to delete anything in the Your Files section that you do not want uploaded. That’s a lot to remember, but even that might not work (not sure, haven’t tested too deeply), because like many Adobe mobile apps, Photoshop retains a Deleted section in case you want to restore a deleted file within 30 days. So it might upload “deleted” files anyway, to sync them up to the Deleted cloud section.

You will probably need to keep using your current solution (other software) until Photoshop starts to allow local-only editing on the iPad, but it is unknown whether Adobe intends to do that.

(This thread is posted under Bugs, but if Adobe has it on their roadmap to add the B&W Mixer controls to ACR on iPad, a moderator should move this thread to the Ideas (feature requests) section.) 

[Alan9940]

@Conrad C Thank you for the detailed explanation. I guess what I've been trying to not so eloquently say is: I don't want to come back from a days shoot, import all the photos into LR on my iPad, then have all that data sync to the cloud (assuming I have enough cloud storage to hold it all.) I tend to review what I have, and then work on a few for export to other uses. Sure, I could cull the entire shoot in LR, then delete all the rejects but that seems like unnecessary extra steps.

If PS (iPad) had just a wee bit more functionality, I could fully edit a few images (yes, these would upload to the cloud) and move on. For me, the whole mobile experience is so close to being truly workable that it's a little frustrating sometimes. Yes, I could lug along my laptop and not have any real limitations but the iPad allows me to work anywhere!