* “The initial scale of the project was somewhat intimidating. Mark Dame, chief product manager at Adobe, recalls the announcement of the transition to the M1 chip and the implications for Photoshop.*.

In an interview with computer World, He recalls that Adobe went through this process between 2005 and 2006 during the migration from Powerpack processors to Intel. Mark Dahm himself, with 28 years of seniority at the publisher, knew the era well, as it did in the running of the iOS platform.

Just like today, Photoshop users don’t want to wait in front of their Macs, so performance is prioritized: ” We wondered how long it would take for Photoshop’s fast blending and rendering capabilities to match years of performance tuning to run smoothly. »

This was not the only challenge, as Photoshop has added time possibilities that go beyond the sole framework of image editing: automatic activation of fonts, synchronization with the cloud, machine learning-based tasks, software deployment on a fleet of machines, and more. . .

The prospect of initially adapting all of these dependencies to Apple Silicon processors was initially quite difficult. However, two factors facilitated the company and contributed to the relatively rapid release of the first version of Photoshop for M1 (all the same with some shortcomings).

First, there was compatibility introduced by Rosetta 2, with which Photoshop was able to run correctly and sometimes even faster than running native Intel. Next, Adobe credits Apple for the good performance of the tools provided to the developers:

Originally reviewing all Photoshop dependencies to run was the first step required to see real hardware performance gains. At this point, focusing on the developer toolchain paved the way for a seamless transition, which allows us to spend more time on conflicts in our code than struggling with complex issues in our code.

Since then, Adobe was able to work on the display, and took some help from Apple to dig into this aspect of porting the M1. This is only the beginning, Mark promises Dahm, it is to be hoped that it will accelerate further. In some cases, this first version of Photoshop for M1 is 50% faster than comparable Intel machines.

A third factor has played a role in this port, which was the force for Adobe / iOS on iOS / iPadOS in recent years:

While we have been here for more than 30 years, recently some of our modernization initiatives have been put to the test after completing the transition from Photoshop to iPad for iOS. And we were satisfied to see that some significant benefits, such as integrated memory systems for metal, paid for all devices.

To date, Adobe has released the original M1 versions of Photoshop and Lightroom, while Premiere Pro, Premier Rush and Audition are in beta by the end of December. For other Creative Cloud members, there are no public bets or specific availability programs yet. In December, Adobe was talking about a 2021 debut for Illustrator and InDesign and the same year for Lightroom Classic and After Effects.