Ever since Apple released the first Mac running a new ARM-based M1 processor, software developers have been scrambling to get their applications running on Apple Silicon. This week, Adobe released the first version of Photoshop to run natively on M1.
The good news for M1 Mac owners is, they can look forward to a considerable performance boost. Compared to similarly configured previous generation systems, Adobe says the average speed upgrade is 1.5x, and that will be experienced across "opening and saving files, running filters, and compute-heavy operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject."
Adobe says this is just the start and work will continue with Apple to offer further optimizations to Photoshop and improve performance even further. There's also a few features still to be ported over to M1 including Invite to Edit Cloud Documents and Preset Syncing among others. Anyone needing to use those features can do so by switching back to Rosetta 2 for now. When they hit the official build, Adobe will update Photoshop via Creative Cloud.
This week Adobe also released two feature updates for Photoshop on iPad, including Cloud Documents Version History and the ability to work on Cloud Documents while offline. The version history feature allows you to jump back up to 60 days for each document if desired. The company also released a new Super Resolution feature in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin in Photoshop. It uses an advanced machine learning model to intelligently enlarge photos without losing any of the detail. It's very fast and can easily turn a 10-megapixel photo into a 40-megapixel version.