Pro-grade Photoshop will soon arrive on touchscreens

Photoshop CC is getting friendly with your fingers.

The fully-fledged, cloud-based version of Photoshop is now optimized for touch devices, as Adobe demonstrated today at Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 launch event.

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When Adobe launches the new software features for tablets, graphic-design warlocks (“wizards” was getting old) will be able to zoom, pan, and rotate images with their fingers, just as they’re used to doing inside other iPad, Android, and Surface apps.

Photoshop CC already works on Microsoft’s Surface tablets, but that support is mostly limited to pen accessories. Adobe is introducing a number of enhancements to make its Photoshop software more viable for touch devices, such as enlarging icons by 200 percent.

Adobe has put out a few mobile apps bearing the Photoshop moniker — Photoshop Express and Photoshop Touch — but they are far from full-featured. Photoshop CC is the real thing: Photoshop for pros.

We don’t have an exact timeframe for the rollout of Photoshop CC for touchscreens — and if Photoshop CC will arrive on iOS and Android — but they’re likely to arrive on Surface within the next few months or perhaps even weeks.

This is a big deal for graphic designers. It’s unlikely they’ll use Photoshop primarily on their tablets — a keyboard/trackpad/stylus/Wacom tablet combo will almost surely remain the optimal interface — but with a touch-capable version of PhotoShop CC, they could keep working on their projects on the go.

And Microsoft is hoping they’ll buy a Surface Pro 3 to do so.