Adobe says Photoshop on the M1 is running 50% faster than the Intel-based MacBook in 2019

This week, Adobe updated Photoshop with Apple’s official silicon support, providing native support to customers on Apple’s newest M1-powered Mac computers. In an interview with ComputerworldPhotoshop product manager Mark Dahm praised Apple’s official silicon support, saying that Photoshop runs 50% faster on a MacBook M1 than last year’s Intel MacBook.

Speaking about the team’s challenges during the transition to Apple silicon, Dahm said that performance is the highest priority. Adobe wanted to make sure it matches Photoshop performance on older architectures for customers running Apple silicon.

Photoshop has been fortunate to serve Mac customers for over 30 years and experienced the transition from Power PC to Intel chips in 2005/2006, some familiar considerations came to mind as it was made Apple’s announcement about silicon.

First, performance is top notch for our creative professional clients, so we wondered how long it could take to match the years of performance tuning that ensured smooth operation for the sophisticated mixing and playback capabilities of Photoshop.

Apple encourages all developers to build and recompile applications with Apple’s official silicon support. Until applications are updated, they run on Apple silicon using Apple Rosetta 2 technology, which allows applications built for Intel processors to run on the newer architecture. Dahm said Photoshop worked well with Rosetta, in some cases even faster than it did natively on Intel Mac computers.

Fortunately, Apple’s Rosetta mode allowed Photoshop to run reliably and quickly on ‌M1‌ devices on day one, without requiring significant code base changes. And many features worked just as fast or even faster than on previous systems, so those previous performance questions were resolved quite satisfactorily.

In its testing, Adobe found that Photoshop on a MacBook ‌M1‌ works 50% faster compared to Photoshop on an Intel-based MacBook from 2019 with similar configurations. Even with the significant leap in performance, Dahm claimed it was just the beginning.

I compared a BookM1‌ MacBook with a similarly configured previous-generation MacBook and found that in native mode, Photoshop runs 50% faster than older hardware. These tremendous performance improvements are just the beginning and we will continue to work with Apple to further optimize performance over time.

The power of the new ‌M1‌ chip motivated the team to push features that have become even more important for Photoshop, Dahm said. Features such as Content Aware Fill, Auto Select Subject, Sky Replacement tools and others have been reactivated due to ‌M1‌.

We were eager to access the more specialized aspects of the ‌M1‌ chip to see how it could revive some of the seemingly magical features that have since become essential elements of the Photoshop experience over the years; features such as Content Aware Fill, healing brush, specialized and even relatively new filters, such as automatic subject-based machine learning tools and sky replacement tools.

Going forward, Dahm said Adobe is looking forward to “bringing more performance gains and Photoshop magic” to Apple’s future silicon chips. Dahm also said that the continuous evolution of Apple’s silicon platform will allow Adobe to constantly adjust and optimize Photoshop to run at maximum performance without having to rely on Rosetta.