Adobe updates Photoshop for M1 Macs, adds Super Resolution to Camera RAW

Apple’s new M1 mobile chip got a big endorsement from the graphics community with the release by Adobe Inc. of Photoshop for M1. The application now runs natively on the M1 chip and provides faster performance, the company said.

“Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems,” writes Pam Clark, who is in charge of product management at Adobe. “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.”

Super Resolution

A feature of more interest to photographers is the new Super Resolution feature is available in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop (and soon Lightroom.) This feature uses machine learning technology to boost the resolution of an image by 4X.

“Enlarging a photo often produces blurry details, but Super Resolution uses an advanced machine learning model trained on millions of photos,” writes Clark. “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.”