Samuel Axon
After a beta period of more than a month, the software company Adobe has publicly released a version of its Photoshop image editing software that will be available on M1 Macs such as the late 2020 models of the MacBook Air, Mac mini and 13-inch MacBook Pro is used.
In a blog post announcing the release, Pam Clark of Adobe claims that Photoshop will now run “significantly” faster on M1 Macs. Here is an excerpt:
Our internal tests show a wide range of features that average 1.5 times the speed of previous generation systems. Our tests covered a wide range of activities, including opening and saving files, using filters, and computer-heavy operations such as Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject, all of which feel noticeably faster. Our early benchmarking also shows that some operations are going significantly faster with the new chip.
Of course, Adobe says it plans to optimize and improve the Apple Silicon version of Photoshop. In the blog post, some features are noted that did not reach the first public publication for the architecture: “Invite to edit cloud documents” and “Present Syncing.” There are a few others that are not mentioned in the post, but the message points out that these are mostly features that have only recently been added to other Photoshop add-ons.
The announcement of M1 / Apple Silicon support was accompanied by the launch of a brand new feature that is available on this platform: the Camera Raw plugin gets ‘Super Resolution’, which is basically a machine-learning version of the ‘mock!’ functionality occurs in TV crime proceedings and science films. Super Resolution is trained in a large data set and tries to double both the vertical and horizontal resolutions of an image. It enhances similar features that were already available in Photoshop but had more limitations.
(On a related note, Adobe also says that it added two new features to Photoshop for iPad: “Cloud Documents Version History” and “Cloud Cloud Documents Offline Available.”)
Adobe has already brought its Lightroom photo editing and management application to Macs working on Apple’s new chips and is working on others as well.
All in all, it’s been a relatively busy week for M1 software support. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code first got an M1 version a few days ago, and we also saw that Apple Silicon versions of CorelDRAW, Octane X, DaVinci Resolve and 1Password were launched this week.