Adobe Photoshop with MacBook Pro Touch Bar support now available as Project Felix enters beta

Adobe demoed a new version of Photoshop that works with the MacBook Pro’s new dynamic Touch Bar back at Apple’s event in October, and starting today customers can update to gain the new feature. Project Felix which was shown off at Adobe Max last month is also now available in beta.

As for Touch Bar support on the new MacBook Pros, Adobe shares in great detail how the new design tool works with this documentation. For a summary, there’s this from Adobe’s blog post detailing availability:

First, the Touch Bar is useful for surfacing a contextual “next step”. This is helpful both for a beginner who might not know how to navigate Photoshop, and for an experienced user in giving them speedier access to the desired next action. Second, the Touch Bar is useful for accessing controls in a new way, especially controls that were sometimes clumsy with a keyboard and mouse.

In designing the interaction with the Touch Bar, we imagined three distinct categories of functions that would be useful to our customers: Layer Properties, Brushes, and (true to Photoshop’s ethos) your customizable Favorites.

Touch Bar support is available in the Photoshop 2017 for Mac.

For graphic designers, Project Felix enters beta today with the first release available here. Here’s a summary of the new tool from our coverage last month:

Project Felix is a new design tool that Adobe calls an industry first for letting graphic designers “easily create high quality, photo-realistic images by combining 2D and 3D assets for projects such as product shot comps, scene visualization and abstract design.” Adobe Stock provides Project Felix with in-app access to 3D models, materials and lights for putting projects together in Photoshop.

Adobe is also bringing Experience Design to Windows starting today plus new updates for X D on macOS and iOS as detailed here.