Samuel Axon
After a beta period of several months, the software company Adobe has publicly released a version of its Photoshop image editing software that runs natively on Macs M1, such as the late 2020 models of the MacBook Air, Mac mini and MacBook Pro 13 inches.
In a blog post announcing the launch, Adobe’s Pam Clark says Photoshop will now run “significantly” faster on M1 Macs. Here is an excerpt:
Our in-house tests show a wide range of features running on average 1.5X the speed of similarly configured systems from the previous generation. Our tests covered a wide scope of activities, including opening and saving files, running filters and heavy computing operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject, which seem noticeably faster. Our initial benchmarking also shows that some operations are substantially faster with the new chip.
Of course, Adobe says it plans to continue to optimize and improve the Apple Silicon version of Photoshop. The blog post highlights some features that were not included in this initial public release of the architecture: “Invite to edit documents in the cloud” and “Synchronize gifts”. There are a few others that are not mentioned in the post, but the post shows that they are mainly features that have been added recently to other Photoshop builds.
The announcement about M1 / Apple Silicon support was accompanied by the introduction of a brand new feature that It is available on this platform, however: the Camera Raw plug-in will have “Super Resolution”, which is basically a machine-oriented version of the often simulated “improve!” functionality appears in TV crime proceedings and sci-fi movies. Trained on a large data set, Super Resolution tries to double the vertical and horizontal resolutions of an image. It improves similar features that were already available in Photoshop, but which had more limitations.
(In a related note, Adobe also says it added two new features to Photoshop for iPad: “Cloud document version history” and “Make cloud documents available offline.”)
Adobe has already brought its Lightroom photo editing and management application for Macs running on Apple’s new chips, and is working on others as well.
In all, this has been a relatively busy week for support for the M1 software. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code received a widely available M1 version for the first time a few days ago, and we also saw native Apple Silicon versions of CorelDRAW, Octane X, DaVinci Resolve and 1Password released this week.