Adobe today updated its ecosystem of Lightroom photography apps, most notably adding native support for Apple Silicon Macs. Lightroom is one of the first Adobe Creative Cloud apps optimized for the Apple M1 chip.
I’ve been testing an optimized build of Lightroom on my M1 MacBook Air for the past few days. The experience is exactly what you’d expect: fast. Lightroom looks and works as it did before, just with an added performance boost. In my experience, Rosetta 2 emulation was already significantly faster for batch photo exports than the same actions on my previous 2019 Intel MacBook Air.
Adobe says it will continue to optimize for Apple Silicon and Windows ARM in future releases while still supporting Intel-based systems. Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, and Camera Raw will be updated “as soon as they are ready.” In the meantime, there’s a beta version of Photoshop available for Apple Silicon that I’ve found to be impressively smooth.
Beyond Apple Silicon support, Lightroom also now supports the ProRAW image format coming to iPhone photographers in iOS 14.3. There’s also a new Lightroom widget on iOS. You can download today’s updates and learn more on the Adobe Blog. Check out this handy database to see which Macs apps are Apple Silicon optimized.
