This week, Adobe has updated Photoshop with Apple’s official silicon support, offering native support to customers on Apple’s latest Mac computers with M1 technology. In an interview with Computerworld, Mark Dahm, Photoshop’s product manager, promoted Apple’s official silicon support, saying Photoshop runs 50% faster on a MacBook M1 compared to last year’s Intel-based MacBook.
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Faced with the team’s challenges during Apple’s transition to silicon, Dahm said performance was top priority. Adobe wanted to make sure it matched Photoshop’s performance in older architectures for customers running Apple silicon.
Photoshop has been fortunate to have been serving Mac customers for over 30 years and to have experienced the transition from Power PC to Intel chips during the 2005/2006 time period, some familiar considerations came to mind when made the silicon announcement from Apple.
On the one hand, performance is the most important thing for our creative professional clients, so we wondered how long it might take to match the years of performance adjustment that ensured smooth operation of sophisticated rendering capabilities and Photoshop combination.
Apple is encouraging all developers to create and compile their applications with official support for Apple silicon. Until the apps are upgraded, they run on Apple’s silicon using Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology, which allows apps created for Intel processors to work with the new architecture. Dahm said Photoshop worked well enough with Rosetta, in some cases even faster than on Intel Mac computers.
Fortunately, Apple’s Rosetta mode allowed Photoshop to run reliably and quickly on M1 devices on the first day, without the need for significant changes to the code base. And many features worked as fast, or even faster, than in previous systems, so those previous performance questions were being resolved very satisfactorily.
In testing, Adobe found that Photoshop on a MacBook M1 runs 50% faster compared to Photoshop on a 2019 Intel-based MacBook with similar configurations. Even with the significant jump in performance, Dahm claimed it’s just the beginning.
We compared a BookM1 tone MacBook with a similarly configured previous generation MacBook and found that in native mode, Photoshop ran 50% faster than previous 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 drive features that have become a staple of Photoshop even more, Dahm said. Features such as Content Aware Fill, Auto Select Subject, Sky Replacement tools and others were reactivated thanks to M1.
We were eager to delve into the more specialized aspects of the M1 chip to see how they could reactivate some of the seemingly magical features that have since become the staples of the Photoshop experience over the years; features such as Content Aware Fill, the healing brush, specialized filters and even relative newcomers such as automatic subject selection and cell selection tools based on machine learning.
Going forward, Dahm said Adobe hopes to “bring more performance gains and the magic of Photoshop” to Apple’s future silicon chips. Dahm also said that the continuous evolution of Apple’s silicon platform will allow Adobe to constantly tune and optimize Photoshop so that it works at maximum performance without the need to rely on Rosetta.