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Adobe optimizes Illustrator, InDesign and Lightroom Classic for M1 Macs

It comes as part of a bumper Creative Cloud update.

Devindra Hardawar

Adobe is today launching M1 native versions of Illustrator, InDesign and Lightroom Classic as part of a raft of Creative Cloud updates. The new launch bundles in a bunch of quality of life tweaks to a number of applications, many of which will delight regular users. But the highlight of the news is the arrival of these M1-native editions which, Adobe says, offer enormous performance gains.

These new versions join the M1-native editions of Photoshop and the newer, mobile-and-cloud Lightroom. In addition, Premiere Pro is already available in beta, although full versions of Audition and Rush are expected in the near future. Adobe recruited its chums at Pfeiffer Consulting to benchmark the Apple Silicon versions to sell folks on the change. It said that an M1 can run Creative Cloud applications up to 80 percent faster than “an identically configured Intel system.

A number of smaller updates are also launching today, including custom brushes in Photoshop on iPad. Lightroom and Lightroom Classic users are now able to use Super Resolution, and can set custom crop aspect ratios in the former. Photoshop Express, meanwhile, gets better skin retouching and smoothing features, content-aware healing and caricature modes.