Recent Photo Software Updates for M1 Macs
Since the release of Apple’s new MacBooks and Mac mini powered by their own Apple Silicon, software ported to these new M1 processors has steadily been released. While we’re still waiting on some of the key applications, there has recently been some bigger names releasing M1 optimised versions.
Lightroom
Adobe released an updated version of Lightroom a little while ago. Unfortunately this is only Lightroom Desktop (the cloud version of Lightroom) and not Lightroom Classic. If you’re using Lightroom Classic and you have one of these new Macs you’ll have to wait a bit longer, but if you are a Lightroom Desktop user, then you now have a fully optimised version.
DXO PhotoLab 4.1
DXO Photolab announced an M1 version recently, and they were pretty excited about it in their press release, citing significant performance improvements. This is an interesting one, because the software uses AI for its “Deep Prime” noise reduction technology, so if they’re using compatible frameworks, this should be accelerated by the M1’s machine learning cores. I couldn’t get an answer from them as to whether or not this is the case, but judging by the performance improvements, I’m guessing that it is.
Here’s what the press release says:
“Users can now process their images three to five times faster compared to the most recent 13” MacBook Pro and Mac Mini for nearly half the cost—and in silence. Images are exported at 1.5 mpix/s, which is faster than the previous version of DxO PRIME. In fact, the Apple M1 chip greatly reduces the time it takes to complete all edits. Because the technology applies a denoising and a demosaicing algorithm simultaneously, the quality of photos (including low-ISO images) processed with DxO DeepPRIME is unmatched. When paired with Mac computers outfitted with the M1 chip, the technology can be applied seamlessly every time.”
I don’t have an M1 Mac to try this yet, but I’m hoping to get my hands on one soon, and when I do I’ll have a full test of various applications. I’m really curious to see how this performs, as its quite slow on my old Mac Pro (mind you, so is everything these days!)
Exposure X6
Exposure software just announced that their Exposure software has been ported to M1. This should see an improvement over the rosetta translated version, and is available now as an update if you already use the application.
Here’s what they said about performance
Our development team ran a series of tests to compare Exposure’s performance on Intel vs. Apple Silicon Macs. They noted that using Exposure on an Apple Silicon Mac was snappier and speedier overall. Throughout the entire process in Exposure, there was a performance boost. It included faster file organization tasks, editing adjustments, and exports. For example, image duplicates appear almost instantly on the Silicon Mac, where a comparable Intel Mac takes a moment or two.
Our testing showed the following performance increases.
Launch Speed – 100% faster (1sec M1 vs 2 sec Intel) Slider performance speed – 30% faster (98ms M1 vs 140ms on intel) Export Speed – 25% faster (50sec M1 vs 1min 07sec intel)
You can read more about it here.
Earlier Releases and Still to come
As I mentioned at the start, the above are just the more recent releases. In the first few weeks following Apple’s releases, there were a flurry of releases too. This included Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro. There is also a beta of Photoshop, although this lacks a number of key software features including Camera RAW.
This leaves some of the big players still to come. Lightroom Classic and Capture One both have yet to put out a version that is optimised for M1 Macs, although form reader reports, these both perform quite well even translated.
Surprisingly, Skylum’s recently released Luminar AI doesn’t support the new systems either. Given the focus on AI I would have thought that this would make an ideal showcase app for the technology, but I presume it will come fairly soon.
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