About A gallery of art work and photography by Cin Hackman. For working photographers, though, this preciousness can be a drawback.But how does that translate to real-world performance, especially where it concerns photography? Should you even consider one of these Macs when Apple has more powerful silicon on the way? These are the questions I hope to address in this post.Categories & Keywords HomeAll PhotographsEquine Event PhotosDerbyshire. While Apple's performance claims seemed too good to be true, early benchmarks paint these chips as some of the more powerful on the market today.I have worked for the past couple of weeks to set up a test Aperture Library so that I could begin to evaluate Photos for Mac, the application to replace.The overarching quality, rarity, and jewel-like precision of the cameras have made them second only to original prints as perhaps the most collectable objects in all of photography, and they're swapped and resold among collectors almost like a form of currency. The app offers powerful photo editing features in an easy-to-use interface.When Apple announced its first batch of Macs powered by its in-house M1 processor, I was cautiously optimistic. Create incredible photos anywhere with Lightroom and 1TB of cloud storage. The cloud-based service for people who love photography, Lightroom gives you everything you need to edit, organize, store, and share your photos across desktop, mobile, and web.
![]() For Photographers 2014 Software Right IsHaving the a super-fast processor is nice and all, but it won’t do you much good if none of your software works.Getting the software right is arguably the most important part of making this transition work. Apple nailed the softwareThe new chips are only part of the story. Apple plans to phase out all of its Intel Macs in favor of its own chips over the next year and a half. This brings us to today and Apple's M1.I bring this up because it's the reason these new Macs have gotten so much attention. This is why, until now, all Macs produced since 2006 have been powered by Intel chips.Over the last few years, Arm processors have caught up, with many now rivaling the performance of Intel and AMD's laptop chips, while consuming a fraction of the power.The difference is this time Rosetta isn't a dog. Rosetta 1 — then just called Rosetta — launched with the first Intel Macs back in 2006. Since a lot of apps, including most of the Adobe suite, haven't been updated to run natively on Apple's processors, this was really important to get right.If Rosetta sounds familiar, that's because this isn't Apple's first rodeo. It just felt like any other Mac, albeit a pretty fast one.All of this is possible thanks to Apple’s translation layer called Rosetta 2, which enables customers to seamlessly run apps written for Intel Macs on the new chip. I think everyone was expecting it to be a little more painful, at least for the first year or so.But within a few hours of unboxing my MacBook Pro, I’d all but forgotten that this thing didn't have an Intel chip in it. Everything just works.By all rights, Apple’s transition away from Intel and x86 processors to its own Arm-based chips shouldn’t have gone this smoothly. Overall performance was excellent, far better than what you’d expect on a thin and light notebook.Merging 13, 30-megapixel images into a single 160-megapixel panorama took just over two minutes in Lightroom Classic. Photoshop and Lightroom ClassicI had no problem running either Adobe Lightroom Classic or Photoshop on the new Macs. Intel apps are fast and stable running on the M1, and more importantly, broadly compatible. Gameboy color mac emulatorFor the moment, only Lightroom CC has gotten native support for the platform.I’m particularly interested in seeing whether Photoshop or Lightroom will take advantage of the M1’s 16-core Neural Engine, a machine learning processor that other imaging apps are already taking advantage of to speed up computationally intensive tasks. Thankfully, Adobe has promised native versions of its most popular Creative Suite apps by 2021, and several of them are already in Public beta.I expect performance in both apps to improve dramatically as Adobe updates more of the Creative Suite to support Apple Silicon. The only time I ran into any slow downs was when using Content Aware Fill to generate large gaps around the edge of the image.It’s also important to remember that neither of these apps are running natively on M1 Macs, at least not yet. This same task used to render my old notebook — a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 — completely unresponsive for 5-10 minutes, depending on the size of the photo merge.Likewise, I had no problem applying multiple adjustment layers and corrections to the finished panorama in Photoshop. If Skylum does add native support, my guess is it will be limited to the company’s latest release, Luminar AI.Thankfully, you should have no problem running either version through Rosetta until a native version is ready. Luminar is well regarded for its use of machine learning to automate meticulous tasks like sky replacements and portait airbrushing.Skylum hasn’t committed to supporting Apple Silicon yet, but I suspect that we’re unlikely to see Luminar 4 get updated to support Apple’s new chips. The latest release takes advantage of the M1’s Neural Engine to speed up ML Super Resolution, a feature which uses machine learning to intelligently upscale images.While I don’t think Pixelmator Pro is ready to replace Photoshop or Illustrator for most professional photographers just yet, it is at the very least a sneak peek at what is possible when applications are properly optimized for the hardware.It was a similar story with Luminar 4, although like Photoshop, it is still running in Rosetta 2. With the move to Apple Silicon, the app is not only faster, but more powerful. ![]() Stick with 16 GBs of RAMI want to get this one out of the way first since it seems like everyone wants to know if these Macs are as memory hungry as the previous generation.All three of Apple’s new M1 Macs come equipped with 8 GBs of RAM and can be configured with up to 16 GBs. If you do go ahead and pick up one of these Macs, AppleCare Plus+ — the company's three-year extended warranty and accident protection plan — is probably a good idea.
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