Feb 25 (Reuters) - Adobe said on Tuesday it is

bringing its Photoshop app to mobile phones for the first time,

offering both a free version and a paid version at the lowest

cost yet for the app, at $7.99 per month.

First released in 1990, Adobe's digital image software is

enough of a household name to have become a verb for touching up

photos. But it has always cost money, and the lowest-cost

version previously was a $9.99 per month subscription for

Apple's ( AAPL ) iPad.

Adobe has now released a free version for Apple's ( AAPL ) iPhone,

with an Android app coming soon, Adobe executives told Reuters.

Adobe will offer a premium version for $7.99 a month that

includes more features as well as access to more cloud storage

and the web-based version of Photoshop for editing on larger

screens.

The move comes as mobile operating systems from Apple ( AAPL ) and

Alphabet's Google have replicated, for free, many

longtime Photoshop features such as adjusting a photo's colors

or removing some distracting objects.

Adobe's software for creative professionals still makes up

more than half of its sales at a time when the company in

December gave a 2025 revenue forecast that missed Wall Street

expectations.

Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe's vice president of product

marketing for creative professional apps, said the company is

focused on courting younger users whose phones are their primary

camera and editing device when they need more tools than a

phone's operating system offers.

Even the free version of the Photoshop app will have

features such as splitting a photo into separate layers, masking

off parts of it and adding text - all of which can be used to

create cover shots for podcasts, streaming music playlists or

YouTube videos.

"We spent a lot of time and energy testing directly with our

target user base, which is the next-generation creator who does

a lot on their phone. It is the way that they express personal

creativity, and the application is really built for them,"

Subramaniam told Reuters.