This week, Adobe Photoshop updated with official support for Apple Silicone, offering customers their own support on Apple’s latest M1-powered Macs. In an interview with Computerworld, Mark Dahm, Photoshop product manager, promoted the official support of Apple Silicone, saying that Photoshop runs 50% faster on an M1 MacBook compared to last year’s Intel-based MacBook.
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Dahm said of the team’s challenges during the transition to Apple silicon that performance is a top priority. Adobe wanted to ensure that it matched Photoshop’s performance on older architectures for customers using Apple silicone.
Photoshop has been fortunate enough to serve Mac customers for over thirty years and experienced the transition from Power PC to Intel chips during the 2005/2006 period. A few familiar considerations came to my mind when the Apple silicone was announced.
First, performance is best for our creative professional clients, and we’ve wondered how long it can take to match the years of performance adjustment that ensure the smooth operation of Photoshop’s sophisticated blending and rendering capabilities.
Apple encourages all developers to build and compile their applications with official support for Apple silicone. Until apps are updated, they work on Apple Silicone using Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology, which enables applications built for Intel processors to work on the newer architecture. Dahm said that Photoshop ran adequately with Rosetta, in some cases even faster than it did 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 ran just as fast or even faster than on previous systems, so the earlier questions about performance were satisfactorily resolved.
In its test, Adobe found that Photoshop on a M1 MacBook runs 50% faster compared to Photoshop on an Intel-based MacBook in 2019 with similar configurations. Even with the significant jump in performance, Dahm claims it was just the beginning.
We compared a M1 MacBook with a previous generation MacBook set up in the same way, and found that Photoshop runs 50% faster under native mode than the older hardware. These excellent 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 slide has motivated the team to push features that have become a staple of Photoshop even further, Dahm said. Features such as content-aware fill-in, auto-select topic, air replacement tools and others are enabled again thanks to M1.
We were eager to apply the more specialized aspects of the M1 slide to see how they could revive some of the seemingly magical properties that have since become staples for Photoshop experience; features like Content Aware Fill, the healing brush, specialized filters and even relative newcomers, such as the machine-learning-based Auto Select Subject and Sky Replacement tools.
Dahm said Adobe looks forward to “bringing even more performance gains and Photoshop magic to life” on future Apple silicone chips. Dahm also said that the continued evolution of the Apple silicone platform will enable Adobe to continually tune out Photoshop and optimize it to work at the best performance without relying on Rosetta.