i am eagerly awaiting full apple silicon support.
i am also using RAW Power which is fully optimized for M1 and
it’s astonishing the difference when opening a folder with several hundred RAW files.
RAW Power does all the indexing, thumbnail generation very quickly and no loss of responsiveness in the UI.
i want that performance in PL!
PL5.2.2 gets totally bogged down to the point that i’ve created subfolders for any JPEGS when i shoot RAW+JPEG to reduce the burden on PL5.
What I hear you saying is if I buy DxO PL5 now, it will still run when Rosetta is no longer supported? That’s the risk I’m talking about.
When will Rosetta no longer be supported?
Mark
They haven’t said yet. But Apple isn’t exactly accused of keeping legacy support for too long.
It still needs Rosetta. But I wouldn’t worry about DxO not making an Apple Silicon native version before Rosetta disappearing though. By that time at the majority of DxO’s existing and potential Mac customer base will on Apple Silicon Macs and not having a fully native version would be very bad for their sales. I’d actually worry more about how long they will support Intel Macs (if had I just got one and don’t upgrade very often).
My bet is that PL6 and PureRAW 3 will be fully native.
Currently, DxO’s Apple support is based on the MacOS operating system being used. They only support the current version and two previous versions, I believe.
Mark
Thanks for the input folks.
To be clear: my question was about when Apple Silicon would be fully supported. As it stands, without full support software is already outdated. I have been bitten too many times in similar situations.
As I am a photo hobbyist, I cannot justify the expense of buying PL5 without full support. I cannot justify the expense of buying the software more often than every 4-5 years.
I have a copy of DxO 10 or so. I also have plenty of old MacBooks around that can still run it. I’ll get by with that and check back on the situation when PL6 comes out.
For now I’ll consider the question answered. Thanks.
Well, you decide what to spend your money on, but I, for one, have to disagree with your approach. Rosetta 1 was released in 2006 with macOS Tiger and officially discontinued in 2011 with macOS Lion (thought you could still run versions of the OS for a while without upgrading to Lion). Given that Intel versions of Macs can still be bought today, it is very likely that you will be able too run software that has not been fully ported to Apple Silicon for several years, not to mention that DxO and others would obviously move to update the application if Apple discontinued Rosetta 2 support.
Second, you’re missing out on tons of cool stuff! I work a great deal with DeepPRIME; on my quad-core iMac i7 at 4 Ghz, processing a single image (DeepPRRIME plus all edits) took an average of around 45 seconds per image. No big deal, you say, but when you’re running a batch of 100 or so photos, it starts to count. On my 14" MacBook Pro (M1 Max with 32 GPU cores), the average drops to under 5 seconds per image! Would I want to forego this leap in performance just because I may be forced to upgrade to a new version of PhotoLab in the next five years or so? Certainly not!
Third, DxO has limited developer resources. I would much rather see them spend these on adding features to PhotoLab than to port insignificant parts of the program to Apple Silicon. They recently gave us DeepPRIME/PureRAW and Fujifilm X-TRANS support—as far as I’m concerned, they can run the UI on Rosetta 2 for as long as Apple supports it.
But as I said, you choose to spend your money the way you want to. I just think it’s a pity that you will be missing out on so much.
Doesn’t sound like I’m missing a whole lot. Again, this is just a hobby. Between now and PL6 I might do 400 photos across maybe 3 exports.
I think I can have the older computers chew away at that while I do something else.
Remember I have been bitten before and I don’t have $100+ to blow each year release to keep up. Peoples’ instance that I do so anyway feels a bit tone deaf to me.
Ultimately, it was up to you to decide how much you want to spend and what functionality you need. Personally I find it difficult going back to previous versions of PhotoLab once the new ones are released. Once I start to use new features I find them indispensable. However the processing requirements of many users may be much simpler than mine. There are many PhotoLab or OpticsPro customers still happily using older versions of the software with no strong motivation to upgrade.
Mark
its nice PL5 can use M1 neural engine to accelerate. but the UI is sluggish under rosetta
PhotoLab 5.3 is out, offering full native support on Apple Silicon.
Steven.
PhotoLab 5.3 is out, offering full native support on Apple Silicon.
Steven.
Great news Steven!
How much performance improvement can we expect? Any early indicators?
First thing first: the most demanding (computing-wise) calculations (like, but not only, demosaicing & denoising using DeepPRIME) were already ported to the new chip a few months ago (achieving huge gains leveraging the ANE).
With PL5.3, all the “remaining old code” is now Apple Silicon native code. This new version should get you an additional performance boost of about 12-15% (your mileage may vary…).
Steven.
I have a couple of hundred images I need to edit tomorrow, so looking forward to downloading and trying this release out 
OK, downloaded and initial impression is that images render (Correction Preview) much more quickly when first opened ‘full screen’, and when zooming in to 100% to check focus.
This is great news, thanks DxO.
Looking forward to pushing it some more tomorrow when I do the actual editing
The app also launches faster now. Not that this matters too much as one typically opens an app only once or twice a day but still nice.
Edit: M1 Mac Mini with 8Gb memory and 512Gb SSD, and Nikon Z6ii raw images loading from a 500Gb Samsung T5 external SSD (connected by a USB-C cable).
Hey all! Shortly after my last reply I had an urgent delivery of our new baby so I haven’t checked back in a long while.
@StevenL That’s great news! I downloaded the trial and can confirm that it shows up as an Apple Silicon binary.
Unfortunately, this summer has produced several much larger than expected expenses (such as the urgent baby delivery). Had this been out much sooner, I would have been able to purchase it. Now, I will sadly have to wait.
Thank you!
@StevenL Really nice to see an update on this, in a dot release even!
Heads up that the support article on this topic is now outdated, since it only mentions support via Rosetta 2:
According to my activity manager here on my M1 it seems as if I is already native M1.
At least it states “Apple” instead of “Intel” in the area where usually non native apps are mentioned.