Adobe announced today that its Photoshop is now available natively on M1-based Macs, offering significant performance gains on that platform.

“Starting today, Photoshop runs natively on Macs powered by the M1 chip and takes advantage of the performance improvements built into this new architecture,” Adobe’s Pam Clark writes. “Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems. Our tests covered a broad scope of activities, including opening and saving files, running filters, and compute-heavy operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject, which all feel noticeably faster. Our early benchmarking also shows that some operations are substantially faster with the new chip.”

I enjoy that everything “feels” faster but that only “some operations” are, in fact, faster. But whatever: The M1 chipset that is kicking off the Apple Silicon revolution on the Mac is absolutely a big improvement for users of that platform. And Photoshop is clearly a key workload for many of those users.

Adobe says it will continue to work with Apple to further optimize Photoshop for Apple Silicon over time. And there are still some features missing from this version of the product, including recently-added features like Invite to Edit Cloud Documents, Preset Syncing, and most notably. Adobe advises that users who need those features should stick with the Intel version of the app, which works using Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation technology, until they’re available natively on M1.

Additionally, Adobe announced two new features for Photoshop on iPad today: Version history in Cloud Documents and offline access to Cloud Documents.

Tagged with Adobe, Adobe Photoshop, Apple M1