Performance Improvements in Adobe Illustrator Beta: Starting Our Journey

Can path manipulation performance be optimized? When I have tens of thousands of anchor points in a document, performance is extremely inefficient, and operations are very sluggish. Grouping or selecting often requires waiting for tens of seconds or even longer.

Hello All,
We understand that performance is crucial to your creative workflow in Adobe Illustrator, and we're excited to share that we've embarked on a significant journey to enhance the application's speed and responsiveness. Our engineering team has begun implementing fundamental architectural changes to substantially improve performance over the coming months.

The latest Beta release marks the first phase of our comprehensive performance enhancement initiative, where we've focused on implementing multithreading capabilities in several key areas. While this is just the beginning, you'll already notice meaningful improvements in common workflows, particularly when working with images and effects. We have an extensive roadmap of performance enhancements planned, and you can expect regular updates and improvements throughout 2024 and 2025.

 

New Performance Improvements

 

Image Import and Export:
- Faster import, place, and drag-and-drop operations for JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files
- Improved performance when converting linked images to embedded images
- Enhanced handling of Photoshop files during import, place, and drag-and-drop operations
- Accelerated export operations to JPEG and PNG formats

 

Effects Processing:
- Improved performance for all Photoshop effects on images
- Faster object rasterization through the Object menu

 

Layer Panel Operations:
- Smoother and faster layer management, including:
- Hide/unhide operations
- Expand/collapse functions
- Panel scrolling
- Layer navigation

 

We Need Your Feedback

Your experience with these improvements is crucial for our continued development. We particularly want to hear from users who have previously encountered performance challenges in these areas, as your feedback will help shape our future improvements.

 

How You Can Help:
1. Test these operations using your typical workflows and assets
2. Pay particular attention to files or operations that previously caused performance issues
3. Share your experience through our brief two-minute survey: https://survey.adobe.com/jfe/form/SV_e2Olp1bJXTun2Zw

 

Accessing the Beta

 

To try these improvements:
1. Open your Creative Cloud Desktop application
2. Navigate to "Beta apps" in the left sidebar
3. Locate Adobe Illustrator (Beta)
4. Click "Install Beta"

 

The beta version will install alongside your current version of Illustrator, allowing you to test the improvements while maintaining your existing workflow.

 

Thank you for being part of this journey with us. Your feedback directly influences our development priorities and helps us deliver the performance improvements that matter most to our users. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance Illustrator's performance in the months ahead.

 

Best regards,
The Adobe Illustrator Team

By @Avinash Singh Kotwal

Glad you guys fixed the font issue where retyping on a current font reverted to the previous font. That was super frustating. I am noticing the Beta doesn't save the preview, which again, super frustrating.

Great to see Adobe focusing on performance improvements! The multithreading updates and faster workflows sound promising. I’ll definitely give the beta a try and share feedback—looking forward to smoother operations!

Can you just start over. Or create a light application for drawing vector graphics without all the million panels.