Adobe Photoshop now runs natively on Apple M1 Macs

Photoshop logo on top of a picture of a MacBook Pro

After Apple introduced the first generation of Apple Silicon Macs - including a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini - Adobe didn't take long to add native support for the new architecture to many of its Creative Cloud apps. However, these were in beta, and if you read our review of the MacBook Pro, you'll know that we encountered some issues with those apps.

Today, though, Adobe is announcing that Photoshop is officially available as a native app for Macs with the Apple M1 chipset, meaning you'll no longer need to be running beta versions to leverage the full processing power of the new devices. Adobe says that its internal tests show a roughly 50% increase in performance in various tasks in Photoshop compared to previous generations of the same devices. Of course, you wouldn't be getting those benefits by running emulated apps with the Rosetta 2 emulation layer.

Adobe does warn that a few features are still not available on Apple Silicon builds of the app, though. Namely, inviting users to edit cloud documents and preset syncing are not there yet, but the company says the performance improvements were too significant to force users to wait. You can still switch back to Rosetta 2 emulation if you need those features.

Example image resized with bicubic resampling — Bicubic resampling

Example image resized with Adobe Super Resolution — Super Resolution

Aside from the news for Macs, Photoshop is getting a new Super Resolution feature that relies on machine learning to enlarge pictures, with Adobe giving the example of turning a 10MP image into a 40MP one. This is available in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin, and it will also be coming to Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. You can learn more about Super Resolution here.

Finally, if you're using Photoshop on the iPad, there are a couple of new features heading your way. First, cloud documents version history is now available on Apple's tablet family, storing every version of your projects for the past 60 days, though you can also bookmark specific versions to keep forever. It's also now possible to save cloud documents offline to edit without an internet connection on iPad devices.