Om:

Photoshop was the solitary reason I owned an iMac Pro and a MacBook Pro. My models were packed with memory and top-of-the-line graphic processors, and as a result, I could breeze through my photo edits.

Lots of Intel-based Macs out there, similarly kitted out for Photoshop.

With Apple ready to switch to its silicon, I decided it was time to sell those machines. What made my decision easier was that Adobe’s Photoshop Beta was spectacularly fast.

Yup. So far, so good.

The application has garnered gushing reviews across the board. Many have been gobsmacked by the software’s performance on M1 machines. I am no different. I love the performance of M1-Photoshop.

Except for one small thing.

Here comes the kicker:

The M1-Photoshop is pretty useless for those — like me — who use third-party extensions as part of their editing workflow. For instance, I use some extensions that allow me to pursue highly granular masking via luminosity masks. Other extensions for color grading (including Adobe’s own Color Themes) and additional tune-ups are also part of my flow. And none of them work with the new Photoshop.

Read Om’s post for the details. Part of this is the low-level pains involved in moving to a brand new chip architecture. If you build an app using third party libraries, for example, until those libraries are ported to the new architecture, you might just be stuck, waiting for that port so you can fully take advantage of the M1 speeds.

Not quite what’s happening here, but the solution is likely the same. Until those critical path extensions are ported to the new architecture, Photoshop users like Om are stuck in emulation.