When Apple launched the newest Macs with Apple Silicon M1 chip, Adobe did not have stable native versions of Photoshop and Premiere Pro ready yet. Yesterday, Adobe finally released a stable version of Photoshop that will run natively on the M1 Macs, touting significant performance gains across the app.
Previously, running Photoshop on the M1 Macs would require Rosetta 2, which is Apple’s translation software for non-native apps. While this worked well for the most part, Photoshop could not utilize many of the performance and hardware acceleration capabilities of the M1 chip.
With the native app, Adobe claims performance improvements across various aspects of the app such as opening and saving files, running filters, and compute-heavy operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject. Adobe also stated that these improvements will get better over time as they further optimize it.
Some features are yet to ported from the x86-version to the M1-version, such as Invite to Edit Cloud Documents, Preset Syncing, etc. Adobe has confirmed that these features will arrive soon to the M1-versions.
Adobe also introduced some new features for Photoshop on the iPad. Documents saved to the cloud will now have a version history, and they can also be saved offline locally.
Lastly, Adobe released a new feature called “Super Resolution” in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop. With it, users can enlarge their photos using an advanced machine learning model that maintains clean edges and preserves important details.