According to dppreview.com. Adobe has announced a Lightroom performance update coming soon. One of my frustrations with Adobe has been the slow performance of Lightroom.
According to Adobe the update will show an improvement on multi-core computers running at least 12gb of RAM. This is somewhat disappointing given that many new Computers Come with 8gb of RAM installed, and would need to be upgraded to see any improvement.
How much faster?
According to Adobe’s own testing they noted that they saw 29-48% faster performance. However, the test computers were running 32-64gb of ram. The video cards were running 8-16gb dedicated ram memory. In other words, not your typical off the shelf PC or Mac.
DP Review got a chance to try it out and on a MacBook Pro running 16gb of ram they only saw about an 11% faster improvement.
My thoughts
I really was hoping for better. Adobe has touted they were working on this update as a priority. If I have to update my computers to make Lightroom work faster that is an additional cost that will chase away even more unhappy subscribers. Yes, Lightroom is powerful and does a lot. Perhaps they need to rethink how things are done and come up with a better way.
If Adobe doesn’t find more ways to improve their software across lesser specified machines, they are going to find themselves losing more customers than just the ones they chase away with their subscription model. As painful as switching to a new DAM will be, I am anxiously awaiting the new Luminar update due out later this year. The slow performance is not the most frustrating aspect of Lightroom for me, but it is on my list. My mid 2011 iMac still runs everything else just fine. Buying a new iMac is not in my budget this year. The only things I can do to improve performance are add more ram and swap to an SSD. I would rather put that money towards lenses and photo trips.