Adobe acknowledges Lightroom is too slow

[Mike Buckley]

I had no idea that Lightroom has a reputation for being slow, but Adobe thinks so. See this.

[DanK]

Interesting. I'll welcome the improvements, but frankly, I haven't found it to be slow enough to be bothersome all that often, other than the time it takes to render the images the first time. Maybe I'm just slow myself...

[Shadowman]

Some things are slow, moving back and forth between plugins can be time consuming.

[davidedric]

Yes, interesting. Some activities are widely acknowledged to slow the system down: multiple spot removals being the most cited example. If it were me, and an occasional need, I'd bounce it over to a "pixel editor", Photoshop if you are on the CC licence. If it's a regular part of your workflow, I'd look for another product.

The GPU one is interesting. At the moment it just offers some gains for high resolution screens, and is best turned off for other users. There has been an expectation (hope?) that Adobe would push more processing that way, so it will be interesting to see what they actually do.

The puzzling one, which seems to crop up from time to time on Lightroom forums, is when a perfectly adequate machine just runs slowly. There are a few things to try, but occasionally it just seems intractable.

Dave

[DanK]

Yes, interesting. Some activities are widely acknowledged to slow the system down: multiple spot removals being the most cited example. If it were me, and an occasional need, I'd bounce it over to a "pixel editor", Photoshop if you are on the CC licence. If it's a regular part of your workflow, I'd look for another product.

The GPU one is interesting. At the moment it just offers some gains for high resolution screens, and is best turned off for other users. There has been an expectation (hope?) that Adobe would push more processing that way, so it will be interesting to see what they actually do.

The puzzling one, which seems to crop up from time to time on Lightroom forums, is when a perfectly adequate machine just runs slowly. There are a few things to try, but occasionally it just seems intractable.

Dave

This bears on the recent comparison between pixel editors and parametric editors. The thread became pointless after a while, but the distinction is useful. In the case of a parametric editor, you keep adding mathematical steps as you edit, and the computer has to execute most of them to display the image. That is why people often recommend leaving math-intensive adjustments, such as lens corrections, for the end. In contrast, if I understand correctly (someone can correct me if I am wrong), a pixel editor is writing temporary files as you work, so the accumulation of additional steps shouldn't slow things down as much.

[Mike Buckley]

In the case of a parametric editor, you keep adding mathematical steps as you edit, and the computer has to execute most of them to display the image.

The parametric editor I use allows me to selectively and temporarily turn off edit steps, which allows for increased speed when working on a new edit step that doesn't require seeing the effects of certain other edit steps. Lightroom has the same before-and-after capability of displaying each edit step but I don't know if using the "before" mode results in displaying the other edit steps at an increased speed.

[Manfred M]

In the case of a parametric editor, you keep adding mathematical steps as you edit, and the computer has to execute most of them to display the image.....

....In contrast, if I understand correctly (someone can correct me if I am wrong), a pixel editor is writing temporary files as you work, so the accumulation of additional steps shouldn't slow things down as much.

That is my understanding as well Dan. I have used Lightroom since it came out as a beta product and seem to remember telling Adobe that their underlying architecture was fatally flawed at the the time when I sent them some feedback during that stage of Lightroom's development. When it first came out it was primarily designed to be an asset management tool with some very basic editing capabilities. These editing capabilities were expanded over time, whereas much of the other functionality (other than the robustness of the catalogue) have really not changed all that much.

The comparison (analogy) I use for people who have an IT background is that the process that the Lightroom Develop Module (and it's twin ACR) use is similar to how an interpreted programing language works; where each instruction has to be converted into machine language every time the program is run, where as Photoshop runs a bit more like a compiled language, where the machine language conversion is made up front. In general, compiled programs run a lot faster than interpreted ones.

Both Photoshop and ACR / Lightroom have evolved and neither purely fit that analogy any more. Lightroom supports HDRI and Panoramas, which were formerly only doable in Photoshop with its support for layers. Photoshop now supports a non-destructive workflow when applying filters through the use of SmartObjects.

For anyone that uses the CC products, there is a fairly easy workaround. Do the raw conversion and some of the global adjustments in Lightroom, but then jump to Photoshop by telling Lightroom to open the file in Photoshop as a SmartObject. The only downside is that this approach will require more disk storage space and larger files will of course take longer to load or save.

[Mike Buckley]

Perhaps off-topic, as I really don't know if that's true

For anyone that uses the CC products, there is a fairly easy workaround. Do the raw conversion and some of the global adjustments in Lightroom, but then jump to Photoshop by telling Lightroom to open the file in Photoshop as a SmartObject.

There has always been the argument that rather than taking the time to learn how to use Lightroom, we could instead learn how to use ACR, as both products use the same engine. If more edits then need to be made in Photoshop that can't be made in ACR, is it not possible to make them as Smart Objects or perhaps it's not necessary in that workflow to make them as Smart Objects?

[Manfred M]

Perhaps off-topic, as I really don't know if that's true



There has always been the argument that rather than taking the time to learn how to use Lightroom, we could instead learn how to use ACR, as both products use the same engine. If more edits then need to be made in Photoshop that can't be made in ACR, is it not possible to make them as Smart Objects or perhaps it's not necessary in that workflow to make them as Smart Objects?

That argument is one I have heard before and is not that hard to debunk, Mike.

Anyone who uses Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) will also be a competent Lightroom (LR) (Develop Module, which is the part of Lightroom we are discussing) user as they are driven by the same underlying "engine". The only real difference is the look and feel of the user interface, so the learning curve between the two is very short. Any RAW shooter has to do some prep work in that tool, and the one I use most often is ACR, but could just as easily use LR. I just happen to prefer the ACR user interface and find the export to Photoshop as a SmartObject is done in fewer steps than in LR.

There are certain things that ACR / LR do very well and other things that Photoshop (PS) is better at. It is not a black and white argument as the editing style of the user certainly comes into play. My workflow tends to heavily rely on Adjustment Layers (with their associated layer mask and blending mode functionality) and SmartObjects that allow the non-destructive use of filters.

The preferences are more or less what I listed in #7. PS has one major strength over the LR Adjustment brush. When using that particular LR (and ACR) tool, any "mistakes" have to be corrected by hitting Ctrl / Cmd "z" (Windows / Mac) and stepping back to where the "error" was made and then reapplying all of the edits again. The layer masks let me make corrections without stepping back and having to redo anything at all.

I find that the ACR / LR gradient tool is far superior to the PS implementation, as a stand alone, but as it cannot be used in conjunction with adjustment layers, I find I rarely use it. The spot healing tool is great, especially when editing a series of similar images with sensor dust on them. The Adjustment brush is something I never touch as Photoshop has far more powerful (and faster) tools.

I actually have the opposite view to what you have written. I think a lot of people are so overwhelmed by PS, that they do not bother to learn it and try to depend too much on the tools in LR that are simply not up to the task.

[Black Pearl]

I would like to see Adobe full overhaul Lightroom and have it make better use of multi core processors, full utilise the GPU's added performance and in the case of Apple utilise METAL to push its performance forward.

I found this link which seems to show that there is little difference in performance on a range of processors - you would think there could be?

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/ar...rformance-880/

[Manfred M]

I found this link which seems to show that there is little difference in performance on a range of processors - you would think there could be?

This is not really all that surprising as all of the "benchmark" measurements dealt with operations that are highly I/O dependent, i.e. reading data from / writing data to the SSD and / or RAM. There is some processing work involved and that is where we see the differences between the various processors that were tested. While an SSD is fast compared to a mechanical hard drive, the interface is still using the SATA interface. System RAM is of course faster, but nothing can come close to what happens on board the CPU die.

In general, Lightroom and Photoshop are not particularly processor intensive operations, with the possible exception of some filters. These benchmarks clearly demonstrate this.

[Jim A]

Our group of nine, here in Auckland New Zealand, have just switched from Photoshop to Serif Affinity. Two of us, myself and one other, use Lightroom and will continue to do so, and then process some images further in Affinity. It has been forecast that Affinity may come up with an Lightroom alternative. Interesting times!

[davidedric]

Our group of nine, here in Auckland New Zealand, have just switched from Photoshop to Serif Affinity. Two of us, myself and one other, use Lightroom and will continue to do so, and then process some images further in Affinity. It has been forecast that Affinity may come up with an Lightroom alternative. Interesting times!

Hi Jim,

Currently, I use On1 when I need to do things that Lightroom won't, but I'm certainly concerned about their future. Is it possible to summarise the kinds of things that you use Affinity for?

Cheers, Dave

[Manfred M]

It has been forecast that Affinity may come up with an Lightroom alternative.

I never make my decisions based on software that someone suggests "might" be coming... Vapourware is all to common in the software industry.