Performance Improvements in Adobe Illustrator Beta: Starting Our Journey

[Avinash Singh Kotwal]

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

[mranthony]

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

[Monika Gause]

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@mranthony  schrieb:

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

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So you basically want Illustrator to be in beta for years to come? And a couple of functions not working anymore, because they are implemented differently? That's an interesting idea.

[Bobby Henderson]

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

By @mranthony

Adobe Illustrator has a variety of stock work spaces that can be applied to the user interface at any time. The UI can also be customized pretty extensively to show panels or other tools that are or are not needed. Panels, tool bars and even documents can be dragged over to a second computer monitor. Plus the Tab key can be pressed at any time to make the whole UI disappear or reappear.

I would much rather have this kind of flexibility in Illustrator rather than have the development team "start over" creating a "lite" application. Many people use Illustrator differently. It would not be right to force a minimalist style UI onto everyone. Also none of us want to risk the kind of mess that happened when Apple went from Final Cut 7 to Final Cut X. That's what "starting over" with a new code base, user interface and feature set can do. Some of us have art files dating back 30 years or more and want compatibility maintained with them.

[walid_6785]

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!

[Avinash Singh Kotwal]

Hi, Did you get a chance to try the Beta? Did you notice any improvements?

[studio_10_graphic_design]

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.

[KI2987904179ff]

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

[Avinash Singh Kotwal]

Thank you for bringing this up. We understand that path manipulation performance with large numbers of anchor points is a critical concern. We're actively working on significant vector performance improvements as part of our roadmap, specifically targeting:

- Faster operations with complex paths and large numbers of anchor points
- Improved selection and grouping performance
- Enhanced compound path handling

If possible, please share your problematic file at file@adobe.com (subject: Performance issue) to help our engineering team better understand and address your specific use case.

In the meantime, you can try the latest Beta version of Illustrator, including our first wave of performance improvements. We'll continue rolling out additional optimizations throughout the year.

Your feedback helps guide our development priorities. Stay tuned for more updates.

[Alex_5553]

What specific architectural changes have been implemented in Adobe Illustrator Beta to enable multithreading, and how do these changes enhance the performance of image import/export and effects processing workflows?