Surface Dial support hasn't exactly been widespread since Microsoft first introduced the accessory in late-2016, but some apps, particularly in the design space, have added novel support. One heavy hitter, Adobe Photoshop, has technically supported the Surface Dial, but in a pretty limited way: The accessory could only be used to zoom in and out on the canvas. Fortunately, Adobe is stepping things up a little more with its latest Photoshop release by adding the ability for the Surface Dial to tweak some select settings on the fly.
Announced as part of a broader set of updates to its suite of design apps (via The Verge), Adobe revealed that Photoshop will now allow Surface Dial to "change tool parameters without taking your attention from the canvas." This essentially just lets you change brush settings like opacity, hardness, and size by rotating the dial as you work.
It's still a fairly limited implementation, but it makes the Surface Dial far more useful in Photoshop than it was previously. As The Verge points out, other apps like Sketchable, which was one of the first to support Surface Dial, have enabled far more robust integrations.. Still, the added support arrives with convenient timing, just ahead of the launch of the new Surface Book 2. At the same time, Microsoft has also announced that anyone who buys a Surface from now through January 18 will get a free three-month trial to an Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan with 1TB of cloud storage.
