Note that these tests are a little different than previous benchmarks we’ve run, where we used Standard previews at import. The imports were configured with 1:1 previews, all other boxes unchecked, and exports were performed in two flavors: sRGB JPEGs at 100 percent, and AdobeRGB TIFFs at 16-bit with no compression. Most enthusiast and professional photographers prefer Lightroom Classic to its cloud-based sibling Lightroom CC, and Capture One 21 - Lightroom Classic’s biggest rival - showed significant performance gains in almost every category with the release of Version 14.2 optimized for Apple Silicon.

Photoshop, on the other hand, experienced a massive performance uplift when it was optimized for Apple Silicon, blowing us away with its GPU, Filter, and especially its Photo Merge scores in Puget Systems’ PugetBench benchmark.įor Adobe, the stakes are particularly high with Lightroom Classic. When Lightroom for M1 was released in December 2020, we found meager performance gains above and beyond what M1 could already do via Rosetta 2 emulation of the Intel version. Our experience with Apple Silicon-optimized apps from Adobe has been 50/50 so far. The latest version of Lightroom Classic was up to 25 percent faster on the M1 than on our more expensive Intel-based Mac.

Could Apple’s M1 processor deliver a hefty performance boost for photographers? In short: yes. Our hopes were high for a program so famously sluggish.

This morning, Adobe unveiled the long-awaited version of Lightroom Classic that is fully optimized for Apple Silicon devices, and we had a chance to test it out before release.

Lightroom apple m1