Last month, Adobe made the announcement that they would offer Photoshop along with other Creative Suite applications on a per rental basis in an updated CS 5.5, saving customers from plopping down $700+ for a powerhouse they may not always need. Along with this announcement, Adobe stated they had been working on a set of iPad apps to compliment Photoshop. The first three have been released, and they look great (and very reasonably priced).

First up is Eazel ($4.99), an advanced painting application that will let you create some stunning works of art.

With Eazel, you can:

• Paint beautiful works of art using just your fingertips.
• Mix “wet” and “dry” paint to create rich, realistic color blends. Breakthrough technology allows digital paint to “dry” over time.
• Paint more freely using the entire iPad screen. Controls for changing color, opacity, brush size, and other settings appear only when you place all five fingers on the screen.
• Send your paintings directly to Photoshop CS5, where they’ll be re-rendered at a higher resolution and can be saved in any file format you choose. (Photoshop CS5 must be open, and a network connection between your iPad and computer is required.)
• Save paintings to your iPad Photos app, and then email them as JPEG files.

The next in the set is Color Lava ($2.99), a digital palette/swatch that will let you mix colors like paints until you get that perfect shade. As with Eazel, it is completely integrated with Photoshop, so you can mix colors on your iPad and send it right back to the desktop.

Other features include:

• Dab, smudge, and swirl your way to creating unique individual color swatches and five-swatch color themes.
• Interact with Photoshop CS5 in real time. Simply tap a swatch on your iPad to make it the foreground color in your Photoshop CS5 Color panel—or create a color theme and see your colors instantly in the Color panel.
• Make fine adjustments to your color creations using Hue/Saturation sliders, and view HSB and RGB values.
• Mix colors even when you’re away from your computer. You can save them on your iPad to bring into Photoshop CS5 when you’re connected.
• Easily share your swatches and color themes by emailing them directly from Adobe Color Lava.

Last but not least is Nav ($1.99), a navigation app that gives you fast access to shortcuts and tools for Photoshop. I find this much, much easier than having to memorize the hundreds of keyboard shortcuts for all the different tools in Photoshop. Now I just point and tap.

Full feature list of Nav:

• Use your fingertips to select Photoshop CS5 tools from your iPad screen.
• Customize the way the Photoshop CS5 toolbar appears on your iPad screen to make your most-used tools easily accessible. You can save one Adobe Nav toolbar configuration with up to 16 tools.
• Browse, reorder, view, and zoom in on up to 200 open Photoshop documents on your iPad screen.
• Tap any open document in Photoshop on your iPad to make it the active document in Photoshop CS5.

Definitely a strong start, I look forward to seeing what more comes out of Adobe in the future. Check out their demo video below.