Chocolate and Peanut Butter: Surface Pro 3 and Adobe Photoshop

When people really love a product, they will go to almost any length to use it. Artists love Surface Pro. They love it because it can run the tools they need on a form factor they want with an accurate, pressure sensitive pen experience. Artists love Adobe Photoshop. They love it because as the world’s most advanced image editing app, it lets them enhance and retouch images in any way they can imagine.

Historically, using Photoshop on Surface Pro has been a painful experience, with tiny UX controls and no touch support, but artists have been willing to accept that pain to use the software they need on the device they love. That all begins to change today.

Earlier this morning, Panos Panay was joined by Michael Gough, Adobe’s Vice President of Experience Design, to preview a few of the new features in an upcoming release of Photoshop CC, optimized for the Surface Pro 3. This update is part of a broader partnership between Adobe and Microsoft to bring the full power of Adobe’s Creative Cloud to a powerful mobile experience optimized for touch and pen.

Check out what’s new.

Pen Accuracy and Line Precision

The Surface Pen experience in Photoshop is even more accurate than in Surface Pro 2. The strokes feel natural because the device and software are so responsive, made even better because Photoshop is doing higher frequency sampling so the line is the line you intended to draw.

Touch and Gesture Controls

You can now take better advantage of Surface Pro 3’s touch and pen capabilities. Pinch and zoom with your fingers or pan using two fingers on the screen. You can zoom and pan or zoom and rotate at the same time by coming gestures. Beyond these, by holding your fingers down on the screen for a few seconds, you can also move the canvas around in a completely free form way, just like moving a piece of paper around on a desk.

Bigger Touch Targets 

You will notice this right away. The touch targets and the size of the UX icons are 200% larger than the previous version of Photoshop CC. This makes selecting tools with your finger or the pen much easier than before.

This is just the beginning. We are incredibly excited about this partnership and you will see a lot more from Surface and Adobe in the coming months, so stay tuned.