Adobe officially releases Photoshop for Apple M1, says it’s 50% faster

Adobe today officially unveiled Photoshop for Apple’s M1 chip. According to the company, the ARM-compatible version should deliver “significant performance gains” for users on Apple’s custom silicon.

While Adobe has had a beta version of Photoshop for M1 available since November, this is the first time it’s been available widely. Previously Apple users could run the Intel version through Apple’s Rosetta technology, which didn’t fully take advantage of the new chip’s power.

The M1 version of the app, Adobe claims, provides a 50% performance boost compared to analogous Intel Macs:

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.

Be warned that there are a couple of recent features missing on the M1 version of the app, most notably inviting others to edit cloud documents and preset syncing.

It’s not clear how much faster the M1 version would be compared to current Intel chips, but it’s clear Adobe sees the benefit from moving to ARM architecture. “Don’t blink. You might miss the splash screen launching,” says Adobe

For more on these improvements, as well as new features for Photoshop on iPad, check out Adobe’s blog post here.