Adobe updates Photoshop with native support for M1 Macs

Apple's M1 Macs now run Adobe's Photoshop software natively on the new hardware bringing massive performance improvements, the company said on Wednesday.

M1 Macs now run Adobe's Photoshop software natively. (Unsplash)

Apple released the first of its Apple M1 Macs late last year, which gave app makers a very short while to adapt their software to the new hardware and take advantage of the chip's new capabilities. However, software developers have been rather quick at bringing support for Apple Silicon Macs, and Adobe's popular Photoshop app is the latest program to support the new hardware.

In a post on the Adobe blog, the company stated that starting today, its powerful Photoshop app would run on M1 Macs and take full advantage of the hardware. The company says that it found the software could run a ‘wide range of features' at an average of 1.5 times faster than on ‘similarly configured previous generation systems', according to its internal tests.

The company says it tested several activities (that users might perform while using the software) including filter operations, opening and exporting files, and even processor-intensive operations like Select Subject and Content-Aware Fill, which it says now “feel noticeably faster” on the M1 Macs running the latest version.

Adobe is so confident about the performance improvements due to the native code that it goes so far as to say: “Don't blink. You might miss the splash screen launching.” The optimisations were the result of lots of testing, though - the company says that once Apple's chips were available, it began to distribute public beta builds of the software through the Creative Cloud desktop app.

Some features will still be missing, the company says. These are features that the company has recently launched like Invite to Edit Cloud Documents, and Preset Syncing. “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,” the company said, adding that users who wanted those features right away could switch back to the Rosetta 2 software emulation option for the time being.