Walk into a design studio and you are sure to find two things: Apple computers of all kinds and artists staring at Adobe (News - Alert) products. Despite competition on the personal use front by opponents like Snapheal, Adobe is the industry standard when it comes to producing digital illustration and professional design with its Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom products now as good as ubiquitous when talking about all things digital and visual.

To the artists that use these programs, the word “tablet” doesn’t have the same associations that it does to a non-designer. Tablets, to them, are sensitive interface hardware made to emulate a pen and paper style for intuitive drawing controls. The term “tablet” less frequently is associated with iPads, though the gap is being bridged little by little as the tablet wars lead to innovations like the S-pen.

This stands to change even more, at least when it comes to photo editing, with Adobe’s plan to release a cloud -based Lightroom-like app for iOS, allowing for the two uses of the word “tablet” to merge into a single, mobile photo editing solution. The app was shown off on Scott Kelby’s online show “The Grid" on Wednesday.

No one needs to be told that an iPad simply doesn’t have the same capacity as a fully upgraded MacBook Pro, and thus is not the ideal platform for dealing with the editing of high resolution RAW images. But in a demonstration performed on an iPad 2, Adobe’s new Lightroom mobile companion offered a full suite of editing tools and development parameters. It showed some slowdown when taking on some of the more demanding processes, but Tom Hogarty, the group project manager, assures that the development team is aware of the mobile platform’s limits.

Using technology from Lightroom 5 beta called Smart Previews, Adobe’s editing app shrinks the size of the RAW image, converting it into a Lossy DNG file. The editing is done on the compressed version and then, after the work is complete, the original RAW file is synced with the edited DNG to become the final image.