Adobe Photoshop won't be updated for new MacBook Pro's Retina Display til later this year

Adobe is working to build support for the new Macbook Pro's Retina Display into Photoshop, but you're going to have a bit of a wait.

One detail from Apple's WWDC keynote that many digital creatives will find interesting is that Adobe is working to build support for the new Macbook Pro's Retina Display into Photoshop. Photoshop was mentioned alongside Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Aperture – and Autodesk's AutoCAD – by Apple's Phil Schiller as tools Apple has been actively participating in helping work with the new display.

"The Photoshop CS6 preview for the MacBook Pro with Retina display takes full advantage of the incredible pixel density and allows our users to see more of their work at one time," says David Wadhwani, Adobe's senior vice president and general manager in a quote we received by email. "Photoshop users expect unparalleled fidelity, power and precision and we're pleased to have worked with Apple to support this leap forward for imaging."

However, you'll likely have a bit of a wait before this is released.

"What was shown at WWDC 2012 was an unreleased build of Photoshop," Marissa Lee, a spokeswoman for Adobe, said in an email to our sister site Macworld on Tuesday. "This updated version of Photoshop is expected to be available later this year."

So why is an update necessary? Photoshop already runs fine on all-in-one computers with 2,560 x 1,440-resolution displays such as Apple's own 27-inch iMac and the HP Z1 workstation. Well, with a display as small as the 15-inch MacBook Pros, interface elements such as buttons will be too small to easily click on – and much text will be unreadable. For comparison, the 27-inch iMac has a dpi of 109, the Retina display on the new MacBook Pro is more like 220dpi – so interface elements will appear half the real-size.

Mac OS X and its built-in apps such as Mail and iCal have been updated to scale up to a readable resolution. Photoshop will need to be updated in similar fashion.

No information has been released yet as to when the Photoshop update for Retina Display Macbook Pros will be released, nor whether Adobe will update the rest of Creative Suite 6 (CS6) for the new display. We've reached out to Adobe and will update the story when it responds.