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Adobe Photoshop is now optimized for Apple Silicon Macs, ML Super Resolution coming to Lightroom

Adobe today updated Photoshop on macOS with native support for M1-powered Apple Silicon Macs. In addition, the company is rolling out improvements to Photoshop on iPad and previewing a new ML Super Resolution feature.

Last November, Adobe previewed M1 support in Photoshop with a pared-down beta build. If you’ve been running the beta on your own machine, expect similar if not greater performance in today’s full build. I’ve been testing the native version of Photoshop released today and found that it’s by far the fastest Adobe app to launch and run on my M1 MacBook Air.

Adobe says they’ve seen 1.5x speed improvements from similarly configured previous generation systems in their own internal testing. There are a few trade-offs. Features like Invite to Edit Cloud Documents and Preset Syncing aren’t yet available on the latest build. In the meantime, Adobe says customers can switch back to Rosetta 2 if they encounter a missing feature or issue communicating between two Creative Cloud apps.

Find more information on Adobe’s website and learn about what’s new in Photoshop on iPad, like Cloud Documents Version History and making Cloud Documents available offline.

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Also new today is a Super Resolution feature in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin that will be available soon in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. Adobe says the tool can turn a 10-megapixel image into a 40-megapixel image with machine learning. The feature is shaping up to be a direct competitor to the pioneering work of ML Super Resolution in the Pixelmator suite.

From Adobe:

Enlarging a photo often produces blurry details, but Super Resolution has an ace up its sleeve: an advanced machine learning model trained on millions of photos. Backed by this vast training set, Super Resolution can intelligently enlarge photos while maintaining clean edges and preserving important details.

Using Super Resolution is easy: right-click on a photo (or hold the Control key while clicking normally) and choose “Enhance…” from the context menu. In the Enhance Preview dialog box, check the Super Resolution box and press Enhance.

Bicubic resampling vs. Super Resolution

You can learn about the technical implementation of Super Resolution and see more example images on the Adobe Blog. Adobe hasn’t announced a specific timeframe for support in Lightroom.

Alongside Photoshop, Adobe today released significant updates to its Creative Cloud video and audio tools. Learn about the highlights below and follow links for additional details from Adobe:

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Premiere Pro

  • New Captions Workflow in Premiere Pro offers a comprehensive toolset for quickly adding, customizing and stylizing captions and subtitles. The Captions workflows will be further accelerated by Speech to Text features later this year.
  • Copy and Paste Audio Track Effects Racks in Premiere Pro: along with the option of copying individual audio effects, users can now copy and paste complete audio effects racks between audio tracks.
  • Faster Warp Stabilizer (also in After Effects) — optimized analysis provides a 4x speed gain for reducing camera shake in UHD footage.
  • Expanded format support (also in After Effects and Media Encoder) now includes the ability to import ARRI Alexa Mini footage.
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After Effects

  • Real-time 3D Draft Preview in After Effects gives users immediate feedback on 3D designs in the Comp panel so they can make creative decisions faster and iterate on designs more easily.
  • 3D Ground Plane in After Effects helps designers orient their designs in space, providing a horizon line, vanishing point, and grid with snapping for positioning and aligning objects with precision.
  • More Efficient Composition Toolbar in After Effects is more logically organized and presents tools contextually, based on the current task.
  • Multi-Frame Rendering in After Effects (public Beta) provides up to 300% faster rendering when exporting compositions with multicore CPUs. Plus, a streamlined Render Queue now highlights the most important information to simplify the export process.
  • Media Replacement in Motion Graphics templates.
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Premiere Rush

  • 24 new color filter presets.

Character Animator

  • New robust project file format for newly created or Saved-As projects that’s faster and more compact as well as being more resilient to power loss and file-syncing conflicts.
  • New example puppet, Hopscotch the Frog that showcases Limb IK and comes with many hand and feet Triggers as well as a Replay for hopping off screen.
  • Timeline snapping options, Snap to Frames and Snap to Objects let you control snapping to frame boundaries and other objects in the timeline.
  • Walk Behavior defaults on the Pin Feet When Standing option.

Audition

  • Insert Recording mode in Audition allows users to punch-in new recordings anywhere in an audio file, rippling existing audio forward, without having to manually cut-in a separate audio segment.

Adobe Stock

  • Dozens of new Motion Graphics templates with Media Replacement are now available.

Adobe has also added equitable language and updated reference imagery across apps to respect the diversity of users. Updates to Team Projects allow users to share changes to projects more quickly and search in projects twice as fast as before.

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Avatar for Michael Steeber Michael Steeber

Michael is a Creative Editor who covered Apple Retail and design on 9to5Mac. His stories highlighted the work of talented artists, designers, and customers through a unique lens of architecture, creativity, and community.

Contact Michael on Twitter to share Apple Retail, design, and history stories: @MichaelSteeber