This was something important to me long before I got into photography and there is almost nothing better than when my two worlds (IT and photography) collide.įor photographers who prefer Mac computers there has been a lot of excitement in 2021. I can’t wait to see the comparisons run in the real-world to see just how much better new chips and configurations handle computing tasks over the previous generation. It’s always exciting when new computers are released. Most photographers who were early adopters and bought the 13″ MacBook Pro should skip the upgrade to the 14″ or 16″ models released later in 2021.

In conclusion, the report states that “many tasks in Lightroom - launching, scrolling, zooming, importing and exporting - are snappier on the new machine.This site is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates and Adorama Affiliate programs. Adobe also users the M1’s Neural Engine cores for AI acceleration. Interpreting the raw files to generate full-resolution previews - the most common delay I experience in Lightroom - was 2.5x faster on the new machine.Īdobe’s Lightroom does run natively which means that the program can take full advantage of Apple Silicon, including its power and efficiency improvements. A panorama merge of two shots took an excruciating 109 seconds on the Intel Mac it was 3.2x faster on the M1 Max MacBook Pro at 34 seconds. Lightroom still struggles to accommodate Phase One’s enormous 151-megapixel raw files, but the new Mac handled it much better than my older machine. The smallest was merging three 30-megapixel shots into an HDR photo, which took 22 seconds on the Intel machine and 12 seconds on the M1 Max, a 1.9x speedup. That was the biggest speedup in my tests.

Merging six 30-megapixel shots into a panorama was 4.8x faster on the new MacBook Pro, taking an average of 14 seconds vs. The average time it took for each machine to complete the actions revealed a significant jump in performance. MacOS 13.3 beta 3 fixes network file sharing issueįive tests of “routine but taxing” Lightroom actions were performed on both MacBooks three times.

Apple m1 chip lightroom