Adobe Lightroom is known to be a disappointingly slow post-processing tool, especially when it comes to basic operations such as importing, preview generation and image culling, as well as more advanced operations that involve using features such as spot healing. Adobe’s development team is aware of these issues and the company says that it is committed in delivering updates that will make Lightroom faster. The latest version of Lightroom Classic CC 7.2 has been delivered a couple of days ago and it seems like this release is mostly focused on improving Lightroom performance. I decided to see how much faster Lightroom has actually gotten by measuring its performance on a typical laptop, as well as on a desktop PC. Let’s take a look at how Lightroom 6 and CC 7.1 stack up against the most current version CC 7.2.
I wanted to examine Lightroom performance in two different environments – when using an Apple MacBook Pro (Late 2016 Model with Core i7 CPU, 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB Storage) and when using a Desktop PC (i7-6700K Skylake, 64 GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD Storage). The idea was to put three versions of Lightroom to test – Lightroom 6.14 (Last), CC 7.1 and CC 7.2 to see what differences there are when performing three measurable tasks: Import Speed, 1:1 Preview Generation, HDR Stitching, Panorama Stitching and Image Export. Unfortunately, although I really wanted to test Lightroom’s develop performance, there was no way to perform measurable results with consistent data.
To perform the tests, I loaded 500 RAW files from Fuji GFX 50S and Fuji X-T1. For 1:1 Previews and Exports, I only worked with a total of 50 RAW images from the GFX 50S (since it would have taken forever to extract all images). For export, I used JPEG 85% Quality, 2048 pixel long resolution and Output Sharpening set to “High”. For each test I created a brand new Lightroom catalog to make sure that I was starting out clean. Let’s take a look at the comparison of Lightroom 6.14, 7.1 and 7.2 when using the Apple MacBook Pro:
Table of Contents
1) Lightroom CC 7.1 vs 7.2 Performance on Apple MacBook Pro
| Apple MacBook Pro 2017 | Lightroom 6.14 | Lightroom CC 7.1 | % Change | Lightroom CC 7.2 | % Faster |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Import 500 Images | 151 sec | 140 sec | 7.9% | 148 sec | -5.4% |
| Generate 1:1 Previews (50 RAW Images) | 392 sec | 210 sec | 86.6% | 174 sec | 20.7% |
| HDR Stitch (3 RAW Images) | 17sec | 18 sec | -5.5% | 15 sec | 20.0% |
| Panorama Stitch (12 RAW Images) | 188 sec | 178 sec | 5.6% | 231 sec | 22.9% |
| RAW to JPEG Export | 131 sec | 125 sec | 4.8% | 101 sec | 23.8% |
There is definitely a noticeable difference in import speed between Lightroom 6.14 and CC 7.1. However, I found the same process to actually take a bit longer on the new CC 7.2 when using the MacBook Pro. When it comes to generating 1:1 previews, I saw a noticeable boost in performance when going from Lightroom 6.14 to CC 7.1. And with CC 7.2, the process completes even 21% faster, which is impressive. Although there wasn’t much difference in RAW export between Lightroom 6.14 and CC 7.1, there was definitely a change from CC 7.1 to 7.2 – the MacBook Pro was able to export files around 24% faster. Stitching HDR images was also a little faster.
However, I noticed reduced Panorama stitching performance when going from Lightroom CC 7.1 to 7.2. I am guessing that the amount of memory was the culprit here – with 12x 45 MP images from the Nikon D850, the laptop might have struggled with allocating enough RAM for the stitching process. Strangely, Lightroom CC 7.1 was actually the fastest in making panoramas on this machine.
Let’s now take a look at how the results differed in a desktop environment. This time, I’m also including Lightroom 6.14 in the comparison:
2) Lightroom CC 7.1 vs 7.2 Performance on Desktop PC
| Desktop PC | Lightroom 6.14 | Lightroom CC 7.1 | % Change | Lightroom CC 7.2 | % Faster |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Import 500 Images | 110 sec | 49 sec | 124.5% | 51 sec | -3.9% |
| Generate 1:1 Previews (50 RAW Images) | 483 sec | 416 sec | 16.1% | 275 sec | 51.3% |
| HDR Stitch (3 RAW Images) | 13 sec | 12 sec | 8.3% | 12 sec | 0% |
| Panorama Stitch (12 RAW Images) | 179 sec | 178 sec | 0% | 66 sec | 169.7% |
| RAW to JPEG Export | 157 sec | 153 sec | 2.60% | 89 sec | 71.9% |
Based on the above numbers, Lightroom 6.14 is clearly the slowest of the bunch. Its import speed was abysmal compared to CC 7.1 – it was over twice slower. There is little difference in 1:1 preview generation, HDR and Panorama stitching between Lightroom 6.14 and CC 7.1, and practically no difference when exporting images. However, when comparing Lightroom 6.14 and CC 7.1 to the latest 7.2 release, the differences are very clear – preview generation was 51% faster, a large 12 image panorama stitch was a whopping 169.7% faster and the export speed also improved by 72% – big differences indeed. It is worth noting that Lightroom CC 7.2 used more CPU resources compared to 7.1 or 6.14 during the above operations.
3) Lightroom CC 7.1 vs 7.2 Performance on Apple iMac Pro
To test the performance of Lightroom 7.1 vs 7.2, I used the most basic version of the iMac Pro with an 8-core Intel Xeon W CPU, 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB storage. I didn’t bother testing Lightroom 6 on the iMac Pro, because I figured few people would be buying Lightroom 6 for this new machine, since there will never be another update to LR6 anyway. However, it was fun to see how fast the iMac Pro is and how it would do in 7.1 compared to 7.2.
| Apple iMac Pro | Lightroom CC 7.1 | Lightroom CC 7.2 | % Faster |
|---|---|---|---|
| Import 500 Images | 182 sec | 180 sec | 1.1% |
| Generate 1:1 Previews (50 RAW Images) | 122 sec | 77 sec | 58.4% |
| HDR Stitch (3 RAW Images) | 13 sec | 11 sec | 18.2% |
| Panorama Stitch (12 RAW Images) | 98 sec | 82 sec | 19.5% |
| RAW to JPEG Export | 90 sec | 53 sec | 69.8% |
Aside from the unusually long amount of time it took to import images when compared to the MacBook Pro and the Windows PC (although all imports were made from local to local drive), you can see that the iMac Pro is an impressively fast machine overall. It was hard to believe that some of the processes took over 2.5x the speed with Lightroom 7.2 when compared to my desktop, but that’s understandable, given that the iMac Pro has a much beefier CPU and much faster storage. The only benchmark where my desktop excelled at was when stitching panoramas – it turns out that RAM is the most important piece of hardware when doing large panoramas.
Once again, we can clearly see that Adobe certainly optimized its Lightroom 7.2 code to work much better compared to 7.1. There were benefits across the board, especially when generating 1:1 previews and exporting images.
All of the above means that depending on your hardware setup, you will experience different levels of performance improvements. It is clear that for panorama stitching, you need as much RAM as possible to get Lightroom to stitch faster. And it looks like the more CPU cores you have, the bigger the advantage too.
4) Post-Processing and Overall Responsiveness
Sadly, since it is difficult to perform exactly the same post-processing tasks in Lightroom between different environments, I was not able to perform any measurable tests. I tried editing an image with 7.1 and then tried to edit the same image in 7.2 and I did not see any differences in performance. While it is nice to see Adobe improve preview generation and export performance, many of us Lightroom users would love to see performance improvements in the Develop module – that’s where the biggest pain lies. Unfortunately, even when using a fast computer, Lightroom can get very sluggish when doing image editing. It would be nice to see superior performance when using the Adjustment Brush, Spot Healing, Lens Corrections and other tools. I would also love to see Adobe take better advantage of GPU acceleration, so that more processing load could be passed on to a dedicated GPU, for those of us who have fast GPU cards.
Overall, Adobe is certainly heading in the right direction with these updates, but we would love to see more performance improvements, especially when doing post-processing work in the Develop module.
My God, remember film? Back in the good ole bad days, when you had to wait 2 weeks, only to find out your selfies sucked? Back, when your camera was only as fast as you could wind the film. Automatic winders were so expensive, mere mortals could not afford them,
I am older, I am retired { I can actually drive in the slow lane , without having to pass everything in front of me now } and I have the time to burn for those extra few seconds while Adobe loads up.
We have become the, I want it now generation. We can’t wait, those few extra seconds, are now a eternity.
I grew up in a slower atmosphere. Rotary phones, it took forever for the zero to roll around. When touch tone phones first came out, some people suspected, it was witchcraft. Black magic, that used sound , designed to suck your soul out of your head trough the ear piece.
You poor things, would have lost your minds with a dial-up internet connection. The noise, the 20-30 seconds, on a good day to connect. The blazing 28 k speed. It took like 5 minutes to download a song, hours and hour to, maybe, download a movie. You could have a interruption or sometimes it timed itself out, a hour into the download, and lose it all. You would start a download walk away. find something else to do and hope for the best. I downloaded at night, and went to bed. hoping it was like Christmas morning and something would be in my download file. Sometimes yes sometimes no.
I blame it all on the microwave oven. I remember when they first came out. Everyone was amazed, you could cook a turkey in less than a hour. Heat a TV dinner in minutes. They were a small fortune to buy one, but moms all across America had to have one. Now if anything has to cook over a minute and we lose our minds, what’s taking so long?
Yet here you are, whining about the few extra seconds of your precious time.
Wow.
It’s time to put down your cell phones, take a breath, take a look around, slow down, enjoy what life has to offer.
And quit bitching about a few seconds of your life.
Amen. Finally some common sense with regards to these silly speed discussions. If I was a pro making my living at this then I’d have a legitimate concern but for the balance of us serious amateurs I have to agree with Tom to just take another slug of beer and relax.
I heartily agree, Tom. Speed does not equate to quality. Good photographers should know how to pause, breathe and seek that brilliant shot, not just point and click and run for the next image. I recommend seeking out Thomas Heaton on YouTube — lovely landscape photographer who’s driven by his love of Nature, not the latest hot-shot gizmo.
Let the good times roll.
Will
I don’t have a smartphone, micro-wave oven, and instead of going by car, I use a couple of bicycles for daily transport – which is something a lot Europeans do. But I like to ask our retired gang here :) “Why didn’t you stay with film if you’re happy to wait two weeks?”. You could throw in a couple of more beers in that time, no? Besides, even at film era there were one-hour labs or professional labs which offered for more money more care. I’m never happy if a manufacturer steals my lifetime by slowing me down and I hate waiting until it’s done what I have in mind.
I’m fine with a Mac waiting for me and my decisions – I’m not fine with me waiting for the Mac to finish. Mac and me are no equal colleagues, as for equal colleagues I would not have to work weeks to get the money to afford the machine and the software. Oh, and for the glorious film days I want to stress out: I was never happy with color negative prints, it was difficult to master unforgivable slide film and if I couldn’t make my own B/W prints I would have stopped the whole hobby. In short, I would not want to go back in time and spend the night in the lab for 30 pictures or so. Why no more? Because it was expensive.
For the pictures I’d like to hang on a wall I spend more time and effort and still have to wait a couple of days until I get them from my printing service.
I think you are being hugely presumptuous (not to mention off-topic) with regard to the conversation here.
LR does have serious issues and this site is a place to exchange ideas as to what the problem is and how it might be addressed.
If you don’t have anything substantive to add you might want to go to a forum where your thoughts on life and living are relevant.
I
Finally someone i can totally agree with, if i could i would time travel back.
I use Fast Raw Viewer, just copy the folder with my photo’s (.RAF files) onto my external HDD, make some coffee, start Fast Raw Viewer (name, shame and rate) and from there i process tru ACR and finish with in Adobe Photoshop/NIK.
Lightroom hurts my eyes with all the bells and whisless and is way too bloated for me.
Oh and i take my time, for me post processing is fun and relaxing, its part of my hobby called Photography.
So that, and i personally never liked software that uses librarys.
Tom, while I agree with the basic premise of your argument, that many of us don’t have the patience that we need, it is not a valid argument to say that we should let software companies practice bad coding. TVs used to take 15 minutes to warm up in the past to reach their maximum brightness – why aren’t we OK with modern electronics doing the same? Hard drives were much slower before, resulting in extremely performance and slow boot up time. Why go for the faster PCIe drives when you could easily do everything with a hard drive? Actually, why bother upgrading computers, when we could continue using old computers? Windows and MacOS works on pretty old hardware just fine! The answer to that is productivity. We don’t live in film days anymore. We don’t wait for our slow dial-up modems to transfer one single email over several minutes of time.
And by the way, you are assuming that many of us don’t have a clue about what you are talking about, but that’s a wrong assumption – I personally used to be on the net before the Internet. Anyone remember FidoNet and the nodes that you had to connect to? 56K was blazing fast modem speed at the time. You would be lucky to get a stable 28K connection over an analog line (and yes, the modem would dial analog just like a rotary phone!). I shared a phone line with a neighbor and every time she picked up the phone, my Internet connection would die. Do I look forward to those days? Heck no!
The very first “play” computer I used had to load via a tape. It would literally make crazy sounds that you had to listen to and wait forever, for one tiny game to load. The very first computer I built had the Pentium II processor. It seemed to be blazing fast at the time, but it took forever for things to actually load (by modern load times). Would I want to go back to that? No way!
One of the first things I did for the company I used to work at in my IT career, was upgrade every accountant’s computer. They never complained when I asked. They would come every morning to work, turn on their computers and wait for 30 minutes until their computers finished booting! To them this was acceptable, because they took the time to brew their coffee, sort through mail, chat with others, etc. When they needed to run their reports, they would start them at the end of the day and collect results next morning. The accounting department had to rely on overtime, interns and other help to keep up. After I replaced their machines, their productivity went off the chart. Six months later, I asked if they would ever go back to their old stations and the answer was a very direct “Heck No!”. The accounting software was also an utter mess. Everything had to be done manually – payroll crosschecks, bank reconciliation, etc. A year after that, I took the role of a project manager for implementing enterprise-grade ERP system based on SAP. We replaced all accounting software, integrated the whole company into a single platform. After a year of painful roll-out and many sleepless months, the whole company was using a single platform, with the CEO of the company being able to see everything that goes in the company. By now, you can tell what accountants thought of the system when I asked them – it was the best thing since sliced bread as far as they were concerned. They no longer needed outside help and they were able to do a lot more with the resources they already had. Our system even improved employee retention company-wide, because there were minimal errors and full transparency across the organization. But why do all that if we could just stick around to the good ol’ “relax and be patient” methodology? The company would have never succeeded. Now apply the same methodology across the board and see what amazing results we would get.
We don’t live in those times anymore, and thank God! Everything is faster – our tools wait for us to make decisions, and not the other way around. This is the way it is, and thankfully, this is the way it will be. No more dial-up, no more waiting, no more wasting time. Today, we live and embrace the beauty of modern technology.
I never bashed technology advancements. I enjoy them as much as anyone. I have no desire to go back to dial up 28k speeds.
All I said basically said was, lighten up.
This is a matter of mere seconds. Unless, you are zipped to the tits on coke or meth, relax. Smoke a bowl. Enjoy, take that extra sip of life.
Photography is all about patience, the right moment in time. Waiting for the light to be perfect. Waiting for a cloud to move, that subject to face you. That water drop to fall. The difference of taking a picture, and creating art.
If a few seconds of your time is upsetting. I would suggest you find another creative outlet. Maybe pottery.
Tom, we both agree there – many of us do need to lighten up indeed and not be overly concerned about things. However, what I am pointing out in the article is different. We are dealing with software that had a lot of bad coding in it over many iterations, which the company is now trying to fix. In the meantime, those who paid for the software a few years back are stuck with a slow platform, which will never get updated. A 169% improvement is not mere seconds. If a panorama stitch takes twice shorter and I have dozens of large panoramas to stitch, that’s a lot of time that I am saving by going with faster software. To me personally, freed up time translates to more time to write articles and do the research that others can take advantage of. For others, it is extra time they could spend taking pictures, spending time with their family, etc. If we are complaining about software being slow, that’s not because we don’t have patience, but because we know that things could be improved upon. Perhaps you don’t mind sitting and waiting for things to finish, but many of us rely on software to make a living. A professional photographer could save hours each day by going with a more responsive post-processing tool, so efficiency is important. That’s why we have workflow processes that have been tested to work. That’s why some people are struggling to make any money doing photography, while others are prospering and growing.
Everything has been said. Lightroom is Painfully slow on 5k displays.. it’s a disaster. How things stand, not even an egpu would help…
it’s just like after effects, the whole thing needs to be rewritten!!
Since I have been using LR my photos have gone from about 6mp to 36mp. Yes – it takes longer to load.
Turning off the sync while developing will increase speed.
A lots has been said here already. I have to agree with most of you guys. I find Lightroom painfully slow on my 5K iMac (late 2015, 12GB RAM). In my point of view the biggest cause of slowness here is acually the 5K display. It’s almost impossible to scroll in grid view (1-4FPS) on 5K. Once I move Lightroom window to my second 1680px display, all goes with flying colors at about 25FPS.
Also I not sure about “more RAM in better” statement. Lightroom process in my case (even if editing/browsing +2k of 25MPx RAW files) never exceeds more than 5,5GB real memory.
Best example are brushes or clone/heal tool, that has been always brutally slow in LR. Much, much slower than in Photoshop. On all machines.
Or how come LR is unasable while exporting and the rest of the system works just fine. In Final Cup Pro X there is no noticeable slowdown in the app while exporting video.
The real problem is the code and totall lack of optimization for MacOS. This app needs to be rewritten in Swift from the ground up. All the “tweaks” Adobve made recently are just really minor, just trying to fix someting that is already broaken.
I can only agree, though I’m on a Windows Surface Book. Working in the library module on the 3000×2000 display is just painfully slow. It feels like I’m sent back in time 15 years. Hooking up the machine to a full HD display speeds it all up.
The second most painful aspect for me is responsiveness in the grid view. Loading and displaying metadata has slowed down tremendously over the versions. I was once in awe as to how quickly I could edit metadata. It’s really disturbing that the reason to use a database as a backbone is actually the promise of gathering data real fast and efficiently. However, nowadays it feels more like LR is gathering data directly from the files itself. It wont, but feels that way. Every update to metadata takes at least a second, while I could once change a field and tab to the next one without so much as a flicker on the screen.
I frequently shoot sports and events, generating 1k-2k images to review and process, a pretty common situation, I think. I use a fairly standard workflow—make a few passes through the images in the library module to prune down to about a hundred selects, then switch to develop to fine tune the selects. Import and export weren’t a big deal because they were only done once, so I would start them and let them run while making dinner, coffee, doing laundry, etc. But going image-by-image (at 1-1 to check sharpness) in the library and then develop got to be excruciating. It would routinely take multiple seconds, sometime 20 or even more, for each new image to load and resolve. Even going back-and-forth was sluggish. This is with a quad-core, overclocked i7 with 24 GB RAM, a Samsung SSD for the catalog, and the raw images on a 10k RPM raptor drive. I went through all the Adobe (and other) performance tuning docs, upgraded my graphics card, added RAM, etc. to no avail (and I work in IT, specializing in performance).
Psychologists say that after 1 second of response-time delay, your attention has been lost, and after 10 you’ve switched to another task (www.nngroup.com/artic…nt-limits/). The iterative work-wait, work-wait, cycle made the whole process a huge pain, and take many times longer than it should (even if you have a lot of time on your hands, which I don’t). I finally switched to PhotoMechanic for the initial culling. Using a card reader, I would use Explorer to copy the images to my hard drive, review in PM (where I could flip through 1-1 previews as fast as I could scroll my mouse), then import into LR and generate 1-1 preview for only the selects. But I still spent hours in develop. And, of course, I leaned to avoid moving large numbers of images around in LR. Better to move folders in Explorer, then “find” them again in LR.
Performance is obviously exacerbated by the increasing MP count of higher-end SLRs. But I think those of us using such gear and shooting RAW (for whom LR was intended) may have to face the reality that we are becoming a minor part of the photography market. The vast bulk of the photography (and video) market is consumers shooting, editing, and viewing on phones and pads. So that’s where the $$ are. At Photo+ in NYC last Fall, there were few people under 50 (except those working booths). Lightroom CC is targeted at that mobile market. And now that Adobe has migrated us Classic users onto the subscription model where they get paid monthly whether they do anything or not, I don’t expect anything more than negligible, infrequent upgrades for the foreseeable future. LR is a pretty mature product; performance improvements are the only thing it really needs (with Photoshop available for the infrequent special cases). Apparently that is difficult to achieve, given the current LR architecture (witness the struggle to replicate what PM has done for *years*). So I’m not optimistic. If LR CC takes off, I can see Adobe milking us Classic users while they can and when we finally bolt to Capture1 (or whatever), or die off, no big loss.
Interesting that Adobe also updated ACR in this round. Note of the cataloging features of Lightroom are used in ACR, obviously. I really have not noticed a difference in the speed of processing. I am still in awe off the AI auto button in ACR/Lightroom however.
Like some here, I gave up on Lightroom long ago. I use FastRawViewer and Photoshop…
I do not use LR for cataloging at all.
I use Photo Mechanic to:
Create a new event folder.
Add images to that folder.
Rename the images.
Add all metadata.
Rank
Review and cull as desired.
Images that I wish to process are copied within PM to a “hot folder” that automatically imports the image to LR6.
I export processed images to a export folder and ultimatly move them to the original folder when I am sure I am done.
I will use PM to upload to Flickr when I want.
In short I use LR as little as possible.
I maintain a very straightforward folder hierarchy and have no problem finding my images with Spotlight.
In short PM can get you out from under a lot of LR’s limitations and it is extraordinarily fast.
I maintain a very simple folder structure for my images.
There’s a missing “more” in the article, I guess: “And it looks like the …. CPU cores you have, the bigger the advantage too.”
That depends very much on how clever the programmers took advantage of more cores. I’ve seen comparisons of the new iMac Pro with lots of cores and the standard, but contemporary iMac and not each process took benefit of more cores of a better CPU. But if I read “after a while it slows down” it appears Adobe has still troubles to empty the caches frequently. So, the next time you make a coffee or get a drink in between a “develop” session, just quit LR and restart it afterwards. That should empty the cache.
I also suspect that with other files (than Fuji RAW), LR could be quicker. After all, LR is a software targeted for wider audiences than say Capture One. So the engineers will sometimes have to pack in stuff that still works on old machines. I don’t think they have the strategies or skills to speed up all possible combinations. And Adobe made the switch years ago to prefer Windows to Mac Machines. It’s not the only piece of software running faster on PC than on Mac – says me, the Mac user. Fortunately, some apps are better and faster on a Mac :)
Thanks Joachim, I fixed the typo.
As for Windows having better performance than Mac, I actually disagree – I think it is the other way around for some things.
2018. App performance. Basics. Core functionality and usability. Adobe still hasn’t mastered the art of fixing what matters first. In 2018, we should be beyond application performance.
Fully agreed! But having coded in the past, I understand how complex things can get overtime. Sometimes it is easier to start over with a new platform than try to go back and fix things. If Adobe can figure out a way to fix the Develop module and make it perform, it will be an amazing achievement. Layers and layers of code have to be rethought from ground-up…