Adobe has announced the first build of Photoshop that runs natively on Apple silicon Macs, resulting in a major speed boost. Creative customers can now also run Blackmagic Design’s video-editing apps DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci Fusion natively on M1 Macs.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS:
- Photoshop is about 1.5X faster.
- Some Photoshop features will bring M1 support in the future.
- DaVinci Resolve and Fusion now also support M1 Macs.
Photoshop goes native
Adobe has announced that Photoshop now ships on Mac computers with Apple silicon support, resulting in much speedier selections and filters. Thanks to a bunch of under-the-hood optimizations resulting in a major performance boost on M1 Macs, most tasks on these Macs with the Apple M1 chip are 1.5 times faster than when running on Intel-based Macs.
“These great performance improvements are just the beginning, and we will continue to work together with Apple to further optimize performance over time,” says a post on the Adobe blog.
Some features will need more work before they run natively on Apple silicon Macs, the Photoshop maker has said, including preset syncing and editing cloud documents.
However, the performance gains across the rest of the application were so great we didn’t want to hold back the release for everyone while the team wraps up work on these last few features.
For what it’s worth, people who would like to use any currently unoptimized features on M1 Macs can switch over to the Intel version of Photoshop that uses Rosetta emulation.
New in Photoshop for iPad, more
On Photoshop for iPad, you have two new features: Cloud documents version history and the ability to work on cloud documents while offline. And in Camera Raw, there’s a new machine learning-powered Super Resolution feature (coming soon to Lightroom and Lightroom Classic). The Adobe website has published a great technical explainer on how Super Resolution works.
Adobe previously rolled out an Apple silicon version of Lightroom.
Apple last year released the updated MacBook Air, Mac mini and 15-inch MacBook Pro as its first Mac system supporting Apple silicon. Additional Apple silicon models are in the works as the company continues work on transitioning the entire Mac lineup to its own processors.
DaVinci Resolve and Fusion, too
Meanwhile, Black Magic’s professional video-editing apps DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci Fusion have also received native support for M1 Macs, and more than 100 new features.
In DaVinci Fusion 17.1, you now have all-new HDR color correction tools, enhanced color management, the ability to automatically isolate objects (thanks, machine learning!) along with mesh and grid-based color wrappers, to mention but a few.
In DaVinci Resolve 17.1, you get all of Fusion 17’s updates, “which includes 27 GPU-accelerated Resolve effects and new animation curve modifiers,” according to AppleInsider.
These apps are available in the official update channel on the BlackMagic Design website.
Image credit: Adobe