Adobe ships Photoshop 22.4
Photoshop now supports ARM processors when running under Windows 10, which may finally make it feasible to use the software on ARM-powered tablets like Microsoft’s Surface Pro X, pictured above.
Adobe has released Photoshop 22.4, the latest update to its image-editing and digital painting software, updating the new Neural Filters panel and adding the option to save documents as copies.
The update also adds native support for ARM processors when running on Windows 10, which should improve performance on devices like Microsoft’s Surface Pro X.
Reworked Neural filters panel, plus new option to save documents as copies
The update reworks the Neural Filters panel added in Photoshop 22.0 last year, which provides access to a new set of AI-trained image-manipulation filters.
The changes are largely quality-of-life improvements, grouping both stable and beta filters into one place, along with a list of upcoming filters that are still in development.
The only other new feature is Save a Copy, making it possible to… well, save a document as a copy, rather than overwriting the original file.
Updated 20 May: For such a minor change, Save a Copy sure has caused a lot of irritation among users used to saving copies of documents via the existing Save As command.
Petapixel has an good article on this, and why the change was made. (Spoiler: it’s a change to Apple’s APIs.)
Updated 10 June 2021: Adobe has now made the new workflow optional, restoring the legacy Save As workflow in its June update to the software, Photoshop 22.4.2.
Native support for the ARM processors in Windows devices like Microsoft’s new Surface Pro X
However, Photoshop 22.4 does have one significant change hidden under the hood: the software now runs natively on ARM processors when running under 64-bit Windows.
That should improve performance on mobile Windows devices that use ARM chips – previously one of the stumbling blocks for creative professionals when considering whether to adopt Microsoft’s Surface Pro X.
On the Surface Pro X’s release in 2019, The Verge noted that while “apps like Photoshop do technically run on this computer … they’re so slow they may as well not”.
(It got worse: a follow-up review in 2020 found that the Adobe installer didn’t work at all on the device.)
Howeover, Microsoft now seems to have benefited from Apple’s decision to ditch Intel CPUs in favour of its own ARM-based processors, beginning with the M1 chips in new MacBooks and iMacs.
Adobe introduced native support for M1 processors in Photoshop 22.3 in March.
As with the macOS implementation, support for ARM processors on Windows 10 is still a work in progress, with several features not yet supported when running in native mode.
The list is longer for Windows than macOS, with one key omission being support for Microsoft’s Surface Dial control device, on top of a lack of playback of embedded video layers and import of U3D files.
Pricing and system requirements
Photoshop 22.4 is available for Windows 10 and macOS 10.14+ on a rental-only basis. In the online documentation, the release is also referred to as the May 2021 update.
Photography subscription plans, which include access to Photoshop and Lightroom, start at $119.88/year. Single-app Photoshop subscriptions cost $31.49/month.
Read a full list of new features in Photoshop 22.4 in the online documentation
Find out which features of Photoshop are supported natively on ARM processors under Windows 10