This week, Adobe updated Photoshop with official support for Apple silicon, giving customers native support on Apple’s latest M1-powered Mac computers. In an interview with Computer worldPhotoshop product manager Mark Dahm promoted official Apple silicon support and said Photoshop runs 50% faster on an M1 MacBook compared to last year’s Intel-based MacBook.
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Regarding the team’s challenges during the transition to Apple silicon, Dahm said performance was the top priority. Adobe wanted to make sure it matched Photoshop’s performance on older architectures for Apple Silicon customers.
Photoshop has been fortunate enough to serve Mac customers for over 30 years, experiencing the transition from Power PC to Intel chips in the 2005/2006 timeframe. When I announced Apple Silicon, a few familiar considerations occurred to me.
First, performance is top-of-mind for our creative professional clients, so we wondered how long it would take us to match the years of performance tuning that ensured smooth operation of Photoshop’s advanced blending and rendering capabilities.
Apple encourages all developers to build and recompile their apps with official support for Apple silicon. Until apps are updated, they run on Apple silicon using Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology, which allows apps built for Intel processors to run on the newer architecture. Dahm said Photoshop worked sufficiently with Rosetta, even faster in some cases than native on Intel Mac computers.
Fortunately, Apple’s Rosetta Mode enabled Photoshop to run reliably and quickly on M1 devices on day one, without the need for significant code base changes. And many features worked just as fast or even faster than on the previous systems, so those previous performance questions were satisfactorily resolved.
During its testing, Adobe found that Photoshop on a M1 MacBook runs 50% faster compared to Photoshop on a 2019 Intel-based MacBook with similar configurations. Even with the significant leap in performance, Dahm claimed this was just the beginning.
We compared an M1 MacBook to a previous-generation MacBook that was similarly configured, and found that Photoshop ran 50% faster in native mode than the older hardware. These great 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 push features that have become a staple of Photoshop even further, Dahm said. Features such as Content Aware Fill, Auto Select Subject, Sky Replacement tools and others were re-energized with M1.
We were eager to tap into the more specialized aspects of the M1 chip to see how they can revive some of the seemingly magical features that have since become a staple of the Photoshop experience over the years. to blow in; features like Content Aware Fill, the healing brush, specialized filters and even relative newcomers like the machine learning based Auto Select Subject and Sky Replacement tools.
Looking ahead, Dahm said Adobe is looking forward to “bringing even more performance enhancements and Photoshop magic to life” on future Apple silicon chips. Dahm also said the continued evolution of the Apple silicon platform will allow Adobe to constantly fine-tune and optimize Photoshop to deliver peak performance without relying on Rosetta.