Photoshop for Apple Silicon
Jonny Evans (via MacRumors, Hacker News):
Adobe has released Photoshop for M1 Macs, delivering a huge boost in application performance on Apple Silicon in contrast to how it performs on similar Intel-based machines.
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“At the moment, Photoshop and Lightroom are both available as native apps for M1 Macs, and public betas of native apps are also available for Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush and Audition. We’re excited to bring more native Creative Cloud apps to Apple silicon devices, and will have updates to share later this year.”
Hopefully Lightroom Classic will be out soon. It’s one of the few apps I use that feels slow.
Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems.
Keep in mind that both the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the Dell XPS 17 boast a full 32GB of RAM to the Mac mini’s 16GB. The XPS 17 is also running a 10th Gen, 8-core Intel Core i9-10875H alongside a GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU with 6GB of VRAM. Finally, both the 13-inch Intel MacBook Pro ($3,000) and the Dell XPS 17 ($3,000) that we tested cost a whole lot more than the fully-loaded M1 Mac mini ($1,700) used for this comparison.
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Unsurprisingly, the M1 Mac mini loses to the competition in raw GPU performance, more-or-less matching the onboard graphics of the quad-core Core i7 that’s in the 13-inch MacBook Pro. But even with this score working against it, the Mac mini running Apple Silicon-optimized Photoshop managed to get the second highest Overall score we’ve ever seen out of PugetBench.
What’s more, none of the computers we’ve reviewed, not even the most expensive 16-inch MacBook Pro you can buy or the Razer Blade Studio Edition, has ever broken the 100 mark on the PugetBench Photo Merge test. Running optimized Photoshop, the M1 Mac mini hit 130+ in run after run after run.
Adobe just dropped its latest software updates via the Creative Cloud and among those updates is a new feature in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) called “Super Resolution.” You can mark this day down as a major shift in the photo industry.
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I immediately tested this out and was pretty shocked by the results. Though it might be hard to make out in the screenshot below, I took the surfing image shown below, which was captured a decade ago with a Nikon D700 — a 12MP camera — and ran the Super Resolution tool on it and the end result is a 48.2MP image that looks to be every bit as sharp (if not sharper) than the original image file.
Previously:
Update (2021-03-19): Joe Cieplinski:
Watching Photoshop launch in two seconds on my M1 MacBook Pro is enough to make a grown man weep.
Update (2021-05-19): Om Malik:
The M1-Photoshop is pretty useless for those — like me — who use third-party extensions as part of their editing workflow. For instance, I use some extensions that allow me to pursue highly granular masking via luminosity masks. Other extensions for color grading (including Adobe’s own Color Themes) and additional tune-ups are also part of my flow. And none of them work with the new Photoshop.
Extensions are not working because Adobe has shifted to a new way of writing extensions — specifically, using UXP. According to Adobe, “UXP provides modern JavaScript, a curated selection of UI components, and a more streamlined workflow for plugin developers.” In the past, Adobe used CEP (Common Extensibility Platform), which used web-based technologies like CSS to make the extensions work. The shift to UXP is visible with the M1-Mac version of Photoshop.
