A professional photographer tests the Apple MacBook M1

As a professional photographer, I was intrigued when Apple abandoned Intel chips and started using its own M1 silicon instead. MacBook alignment. The performance increases promised by Apple were attractive – as was the supposed improvement in battery life – but I was nervous about having to run my professional software on a platform that was not yet properly supported by some of the tools I use every day. .

I spent some time now with the 13-inch MacBook Pro based on M1 (with 16 GB of RAM) and I went through several tests to see how I can work on it. Is it a safe update for photographers or other creative professionals? Or should you wait for the promised software updates?

Apple’s use of its own chips may seem like a small change that you never need to think about, but it has a big impact on how the software will run. To get the best performance, the programs used will need to be rewritten to take advantage of the new hardware.

This is potentially a problem, as it requires software developers to support two versions of their products; an Intel version and an Apple M1 version. At the time of this writing, Adobe released an M1 version of Lightroom, but not Lightroom Classic (the version that I, along with most photography professionals, still use). Industry-standard Photoshop only supports M1 when you download the beta, and Adobe has not officially given any type of timeline for when the entire Creative Cloud app package will fully support Apple M1.

So is it useless for photographers?

No way. Although these applications are not optimized, they will still work, thanks to Apple’s Rosetta 2 software, which allows Intel software versions to function normally. This means that any application you would normally like to use on your MacBook will still be able to run on the new model without any difference in how it operates, and you are unlikely to see much performance degradation, although this may vary from application to application.

In my practice tests, I found that the M1 versions of Adobe applications run extremely fast. Lightroom worked very fast and allowed for extremely fast editing and exporting. Even the Lightroom Classic (the Intel version) still worked well when used via Rosetta 2.

The improvements are noticeable when using versions optimized for M1. I tested how long it took Photoshop (in the beta versions of Intel and M1) to align 19 raw full resolution images and then merge them into a stacked focus image. It is a technique that I use regularly in the photography of my product, so it is important for me to have good efficiency here.

Intel-based Photoshop, via Rosetta 2, took 50.3 seconds to align the layers and 1 minute and 37 seconds to merge them. I compared that to a Exceptionally powerful Windows desktop PC which was built with an AMD Ryzen 9 3950 X CPU, Nvidia RTX Titan graphics and 128 GB of RAM, specifically to be a beast with 8K photo and video editing. It took the PC 20 seconds to align the layers and 53 seconds to merge them – a clear victory for the PC.

Then I ran the same tests on the beta version of Photoshop that supports Apple M1. It took 22 seconds to align the layers and 46.6 seconds to merge them – an overall faster time than my immensely powerful editing equipment was able to achieve.

In the version of Lightroom with support for M1, the MacBook took 6.4 seconds to import 100 raw images, reducing the PC time by 7.1 seconds to complete the same task.

Total time to complete the focus stack in Adobe Photoshop (align and merge layers)

MacBook Pro (Intel Photoshop version)

MacBook Pro (M1 optimized for Photoshop beta)

The story was similar when it came to exporting video in Premiere. The Intel-based version of Premiere took 6 minutes and 25 seconds to export on the M1 MacBook, but the M1 optimized beta version took about half the time, with 3 minutes and 24 seconds. For reference, my desktop did the same export in 1:20.

Total time to export Full HD video in Adobe Premiere

MacBook Pro (Intel version of Premiere)

MacBook Pro (M1 optimized Premiere beta)

Other software that is not optimized still works normally, and you would never know that it is running “emulated” versions of the software, as the overall performance of the machine is still excellent. It took 51 seconds to import 100 raw images into the professional image editing software Capture One, and the desktop wasn’t far ahead in 48 seconds. Capture One said that an M1-optimized version will come in an update, but we don’t know exactly when it will be.

Pro DaVinci Resolve Studio video software is also available in beta for M1, and I found it to be extremely fast to use, with no problems viewing 4K files on a timeline.

Overall, I am impressed. Even when running non-optimized versions of applications, the M1 MacBook Pro still faces a major battle against a superpowered editing PC, and the fact that it is able to outperform the PC in some tests when using beta applications optimized for M1 is surprising. I am certainly excited about the performance improvements that we will see as more developers fully optimize their software for Apple’s silicon.

If you are a photographer and are considering upgrading, I would definitely say that the M1 MacBook is a safe bet. At a minimum, you will still be able to use all of your current software normally through Rosetta 2, and over time when the official M1 versions are released, these performance increases – and probably battery savings too – will be hugely received.

Read More: Analysis of the MacBook Air M1: major changes in Apple’s silicon and Big Sur