This week, Adobe updated Photoshop with official support for Apple’s silicon, offering customers native support on Apple’s latest M1 Mac computers. In an interview with Computer worldPhotoshop product manager Mark Dahm promoted official support for Apple’s silicon, saying Photoshop runs 50% faster on a MacBook M1 compared to last year’s Intel MacBook.
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Speaking about the team’s challenges during the transition to Apple’s silicon, Dahm said performance was a top priority. Adobe wanted to ensure that it matched Photoshop’s performance on older architectures for customers running Apple silicon.
Photoshop has been fortunate to have served Mac customers for more than 30 years and experienced the transition from Power PC to Intel chips in the 2005/2006 period, some familiar considerations came to mind when the announcement of Apple’s silicon was made.
On the one hand, performance is the priority for our creative professional clients, so we wonder how long it can take before we can match the years of performance tuning that ensured smooth operation for Photoshop’s sophisticated rendering and matching features.
Apple is encouraging all developers to build and recompile their applications with official support for Apple’s silicon. Until applications are updated, they run on Apple silicon using Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology, which allows applications developed for Intel processors to run on the latest architecture. Dahm said Photoshop ran enough with Rosetta, in some cases even faster than natively on Intel Mac computers.
Fortunately, Apple’s Rosetta mode allowed Photoshop to run reliably and quickly on M1 devices on the first day, without requiring significant changes to the code base. And many features were running as fast, or even faster than in previous systems, so those previous performance issues were being resolved quite satisfactorily.
In its tests, Adobe found that Photoshop on a BookM1 MacBook runs 50% faster compared to Photoshop on an Intel MacBook 2019 with similar configurations. Even with the significant jump in performance, Dahm said it was only the beginning.
We compared a M1 MacBook with a previous generation MacBook with a similar configuration and found that in native mode, Photoshop was running 50% faster than older hardware. These major performance improvements are just the beginning and we will continue to work with Apple to further optimize performance over time.
The power of the new M1 chip motivated the team to promote even more features that have become a staple of Photoshop, said Dahm. Features such as filling with content recognition, automatic subject selection, sky replacement tools and more have been re-energized thanks to the M1.
We were eager to explore the more specialized aspects of the M1 chip to see how they could reenergize some of the seemingly magical features that have since become the basis of Photoshop’s experience over the years; features such as Content-aware Filling, the curing brush, specialized filters, and even newcomers, such as Auto Select Subject and Sky Replacement tools based on machine learning.
Moving forward, Dahm said Adobe hopes to “bring even more performance gains and Photoshop magic to life” on Apple’s future silicon chips. Dahm also said that the continued evolution of Apple’s silicon platform will allow Adobe to constantly tune and optimize Photoshop to work at peak performance, without the need to rely on Rosetta.