Adobe Photoshop ships on Macs with Apple Silicon: Gains speedier selections, filters and performance boosts

We’re excited to release the first version of Photoshop to run on Macs with the new M1 chip. Tests show that Photoshop delivers strong performance gains.

Download Photoshop on desktop and Photoshop on iPad

I am thrilled to announce that today we are releasing the first version of Photoshop to run natively on Macs with the new M1 chip. Our internal tests show that Photoshop delivers significant performance gains across the application for customers using these latest Macs.

We are also shipping two important new Photoshop on iPad features — Cloud Documents Version History and Cloud Documents offline access.

Additionally, a new Super Resolution feature is now available in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin. This feature uses pioneering machine learning technology to boost the resolution of an image with one click, producing higher quality results than ever before.

Photoshop on Macs with M1

Starting today, Photoshop runs natively on Macs powered by the M1 chip and takes advantage of the performance improvements built into this new architecture. 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.

These great performance improvements are just the beginning, and we will continue to work together with Apple to further optimize performance over time. We think our customers using these new Macs will love the difference, too. Don’t blink. You might miss the splash screen launching…

As part of our mission to provide you with the best tools quickly, we distributed public beta builds of Photoshop through the Creative Cloud Desktop application as soon as Macs with M1 chips became available. This allowed us to share our progress and gather critical feedback from customers to help us extend Photoshop to this new architecture. Thank you to all our beta customers for your role in making Photoshop on Macs with M1 an even better experience.

There are still a few features we haven’t finished porting to run on the new M1 chip, primarily a couple of those we most recently shipped (Invite to Edit Cloud Documents, Preset Syncing, most notably). 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. If those features are critical to your workflow, you can simply switch back to Rosetta 2 until they make their way into the official build.

Photoshop on iPad

Today, we release two big features for Photoshop on the iPad: Cloud Documents Version History and the ability to work on Cloud Documents while offline.

Cloud Documents Version History

Because Cloud Documents are auto-saved, every document also has a version history. Now you can browse and revert back for up to 60 days of your history. Versions can be bookmarked so they don’t expire, renamed and saved permanently.

Revert or rename documents for significantly greater versioning and editing flexibility.

For more information about Cloud Documents Version History, read more here.

Make Cloud Documents Available Offline

Now you can select the Cloud Documents you want to store locally and access while you are offline. Download Cloud Documents from the home screen. Or, to free up space on your iPad, you can also remove the document from your local cache by selecting “Make online only.” If you change your mind, you can always download it again later.

For more information about working with Cloud Documents offline, go here.

Super Resolution in Adobe Camera Raw Plugin

Imagine turning a 10-megapixel photo into a 40-megapixel photo with one click that produces very high-quality results. Today, we release the new Super Resolution feature in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin in Photoshop, which does just that. Soon, it will also be available in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.

Enlarging a photo often produces blurry details, but Super Resolution uses an advanced machine learning model trained on millions of photos. Backed by this vast training set, Super Resolution intelligently enlarges photos while maintaining clean edges and preserving important details. And because it’s powered by your graphics card (GPU) it’s super fast. There’s a lot of crazy science behind this one button. For much more information about how it all works, check out this blog post by Eric Chan, one of the top imaging scientists working on the Adobe Camera Raw plugin and Lightroom.

Thank you

As always, thank you to all our dedicated friends and customers around the world who use Photoshop to make the world a more beautiful place. You are always our inspiration.