Author Topic: Why is Lightroom so painfully slow ? (Read 14598 times)

Phadrea · « **on:** October 31, 2013, 06:26 »

I have Lightroom 4 and I love it BUT as I am doing a lot of brush editing I am finding it sloooooooooow. I mean I have a new i5 8GB ram Windows 7 PC built for music making which processes a lot of audio as fast as lightning. So why do I have time to go and make a cup of tea before the movement of my editing executes ? Not good enough Adobe Grrrrrrrr $:-\$

And while I am on the subject, why when you want to erase some marks with either the brush or the clone does the mark still show despite all your efforts ?

Ron · « **Reply #1 on:** October 31, 2013, 07:01 »

Speed on brush and clone has improved with LR5 but it still an issue. Doesnt matter if you have lots of power, its LR that is the culprit.

stockphotoeurope · « **Reply #2 on:** October 31, 2013, 07:02 »

Lightroom is a great software in every aspect EXCEPT for brush editing.

I suspect the non-destructive model is not really suitable for this sort of editing, which is better done in the old fashioned way with your favourite photo editor instead.

Phadrea · « **Reply #3 on:** October 31, 2013, 07:15 »

I don't want to pay for LR5 until the upgrade is worth the money. I didn't think the new features were very exciting.

Ron · « **Reply #4 on:** October 31, 2013, 07:21 »

Quote from: stockphotoeurope on October 31, 2013, 07:02

Lightroom is a great software in every aspect EXCEPT for brush editing.

I suspect the non-destructive model is not really suitable for this sort of editing, which is better done in the old fashioned way with your favourite photo editor instead.

+1

DonLand · « **Reply #5 on:** October 31, 2013, 09:08 »

If you have lens correction on it slows things down.
You can turn it off while using the brush and then turn it back on when your done.

melastmohican · « **Reply #6 on:** October 31, 2013, 09:17 »

Add more memory.

DonLand · « **Reply #7 on:** October 31, 2013, 09:21 »

Quote from: Herg on October 31, 2013, 06:26

And while I am on the subject, why when you want to erase some marks with either the brush or the clone does the mark still show despite all your efforts ?

Increase the opacity to 100%

mlwinphoto · « **Reply #8 on:** October 31, 2013, 09:49 »

I'm running LR4 on an older iMac with 8 gigs of RAM and see no slow down with brush editing. I read somewhere, on Adobe's site perhaps, several tips on improving LR performance. You might want to search around and see if you can make some changes to the way you have the program set up that will help it run quicker.

Phadrea · « **Reply #9 on:** October 31, 2013, 15:00 »

Quote from: DonLand on October 31, 2013, 09:21

Quote from: Herg on October 31, 2013, 06:26

And while I am on the subject, why when you want to erase some marks with either the brush or the clone does the mark still show despite all your efforts ?

Increase the opacity to 100%

Always is.

DonLand · « **Reply #10 on:** October 31, 2013, 15:53 »

Make sure the clone copy area does not have a spot and finally the only other thing is the retouched area falls within the inner circle of the brush and not just the outer circle of the feather area.

Snufkin · « **Reply #11 on:** October 31, 2013, 16:36 »

I've got i7-3770 3,4 GHz with 32 GB RAM.
Win 7 64-bit installed on a good SSD from OCZ. Lightroom catalog and previews live in another SSD with good write/read speed. Photos are stored on a 4TB HDD.
This is not a new PC, it was built by a retailer according to my specs more than one year ago.

Lightroom is pretty fast, I cannot complain at all, I barely notice processing times.
In fact, everything is pretty fast. I forgot what it meant to have a slow PC.

Phadrea · « **Reply #12 on:** November 01, 2013, 03:23 »

Quote from: Snufkin on October 31, 2013, 16:36

I've got i7-3770 3,4 GHz with 32 GB RAM.
Win 7 64-bit installed on a good SSD from OCZ. Lightroom catalog and previews live in another SSD with good write/read speed. Photos are stored on a 4TB HDD.
This is not a new PC, it was built by a retailer according to my specs more than one year ago.

Lightroom is pretty fast, I cannot complain at all, I barely notice processing times.
In fact, everything is pretty fast. I forgot what it meant to have a slow PC.

32 GB ram. Isn't that a bit overkill ?

Snufkin · « **Reply #13 on:** November 01, 2013, 15:41 »

Quote from: Herg on November 01, 2013, 03:23

32 GB ram. Isn't that a bit overkill ?

I don't think so.
I didn't think along these lines but rather "Will it be fast enough for the next 4-5 years or should I get a mainboard supporting 64 GB RAM?". Now I'd say 32 GB RAM + i7 + SSD is "fast enough for me".
I simply don't have any performance-related issues and the PC can do many things at once.

DonLand · « **Reply #14 on:** November 03, 2013, 13:14 »

Quote from: Herg on October 31, 2013, 06:26

And while I am on the subject, why when you want to erase some marks with either the brush or the clone does the mark still show despite all your efforts ?

Just ran into this myself with LR 5.2 with an image that was retouched in 5.0. I had to go back into the corrections and decrease the feather radius. Go figure.

ingwio · « **Reply #15 on:** December 24, 2013, 18:12 »

No slow:

LR 5.3
Catalogues with up to 43.100 images

System
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hersteller TOSHIBA
Modell QOSMIO X870
Prozessor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz
Gesamter Systemspeicher 16,0 GB RAM
Systemtyp 64 Bit-Betriebssystem
Anzahl der Prozessorkerne 4

Speicher
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Datenträgerpartition (C:) 250 GB SSD
Datenträgerpartition (D:) 1 TB

Grafik
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Grafikkartentyp NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670M
Insgesamt verfügbarer Grafikspeicher 10985 MB

Goofy · « **Reply #16 on:** December 25, 2013, 05:03 »

First off with windows 7 or 8 there is no overkill with system the more the better! 32gb is fine heck I have 64 gb myself. The video card is where you will gain the biggest on your photo editing applications I prefer nvidia cards and don't like on board cards that come with the main boards.

topol · « **Reply #17 on:** December 25, 2013, 06:42 »

Quote from: Goofy on December 25, 2013, 05:03

First off with windows 7 or 8 there is no overkill with system the more the better! 32gb is fine heck I have 64 gb myself. The video card is where you will gain the biggest on your photo editing applications I prefer nvidia cards and don't like on board cards that come with the main boards.

yep, video cards nowadays 'outpower' CPUs by several magnitudes, so if the software can use it you will see great improvements. If you buy something like an nvidia titan/fermi, you basicaly have a smaller supercomputer inside your computer.

mtkang · « **Reply #18 on:** December 25, 2013, 06:45 »

I notice hard disk space is critical too, as when u edit, all temporary files which can be a few g or more?

Goofy · « **Reply #19 on:** December 25, 2013, 09:56 »

Only use hard drive as last resort. First GPU which is your graphics card than system memory and than hard drive. Also use a ssd drive which is solid state drive instead of the traditional platter disk drives.

SLStudios · « **Reply #20 on:** April 04, 2014, 12:24 »

This is not a new complaint when the subject of Lightroom comes up. I have been using it since 1.0 was released and it has slowed as they have added features but it seems to be more of a problem on PC's running Windows 7 or above. I am going to Mac in a few weeks and am hoping that Lightroom will run better on it (I am told it will be much better). Some days mine gets so bad that I have to shut down the computer and restart to clear out all the memory that is clogged with LR functions.

It is what it is I guess. Great software that runs slow or okay software that runs faster. Ah the choices.....

Goofy · « **Reply #21 on:** April 04, 2014, 13:16 »

Quote from: SLStudios on April 04, 2014, 12:24

This is not a new complaint when the subject of Lightroom comes up. I have been using it since 1.0 was released and it has slowed as they have added features but it seems to be more of a problem on PC's running Windows 7 or above. I am going to Mac in a few weeks and am hoping that Lightroom will run better on it (I am told it will be much better). Some days mine gets so bad that I have to shut down the computer and restart to clear out all the memory that is clogged with LR functions.

It is what it is I guess. Great software that runs slow or okay software that runs faster. Ah the choices.....

All is moot point now since you will be getting an Apple soon

SLStudios · « **Reply #22 on:** April 04, 2014, 21:58 »

Quote from: Goofy on April 04, 2014, 13:16

All is moot point now since you will be getting an Apple soon

A valid point indeed.

Hobostocker · « **Reply #23 on:** April 05, 2014, 04:39 »

the problem is systemic and not limited to LR4/5.

today's mainstream trends on software engineering are all pushing towards virtualization, OS-agnostic apps, and meta-compiled languages like Java or C#.

result : it's all good and well but the performance sucks big time compared to C/C++.

as far as i know all Adobe products are coded in C++ and Objective C and yet they can be slow as a dog in some situations where horsepower is needed, there's no real solution at the moment apart adding more ram and/or using 4 cpus, after all these algorithms were designed years ago when 12 megapixel images were considered "big".

it can only get worse as C++ is more and more seen as a thing of the past by the many computer scientists.

and the irony is that performance has nothing to do with languages, it's the compiler that makes or break the final binary application but surprisingly i'm reading crazy things about compilers recently as if they were a relic of the past century and some fools are even predicting the future is all about Javascript running in some exotic virtual machine.

wordplanet · « **Reply #24 on:** April 05, 2014, 05:01 »

I'm running LR 5 on a two year old iMac with 8 GB RAM a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 and a AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1024 MB Graphic card - I usually have firefox and safari open, plus photoshop and sometimes other programs and can use the brush tool and all the Nik filters in LR and it is fast. I think the SSD makes all the difference here. I have all my apps on the built in SSD and some photos on my built in 1 Terabyte hard drive, but have lately been running it with most of the images I'm processing on a 4 TB LaCie drive with thunderbolt. I was going to add more RAM but I found that if I keep the hard drives with at least 25% free space the system is superfast. I maybe close it down once a week and reboot, more often if it seems to be slowing down.

I hadn't upgraded since LR2 - didn't love the program - but now I do so much of my processing right in LR5 and I love it - I have over 30,000 photos in the main catalog which is on a LaCie 4TB drive with a thunderbolt connection, and I'm gradually organizing it so all of my photos will be on the one drive, with backups elsewhere of course. I read all the info about how to set up the catalog - what to put on which disk, etc, when I got my latest iMac and have to say the solid state drive was well worth the price. It is a joy to work with.

I was concerned about having the photos on an external drive as I work on them, but the thunderbolt connection is superfast and I see no difference between those photos and the ones on a smaller catalog on the built in 1 TB drive.

Since I have digital photos going back as far as 2006, I got the 4 TB drive so I could eventually have everything in one large catalog, since the 1 TB built in drive got filled up very quickly. I back it up to a RAID system and also back up different portions to various portable hard drives and to my Photoshelter site, where I have 1 TB of cloud storage. Of course, with LR you can have the catalog spread across various drives and it will locate them, but I like keeping my catalog and photos all together so I know that drive has the most recent copies of everything.

Right now I'm organizing photos for a calendar company that has hundreds of titles, so having all my photos accessible in one place makes it much easier to review and pull out potential submissions and put them into a temporary collection.

Anyway, read up on what you should have where in terms of apps, photos, scratch disks, etc, and be sure to keep enough free space on your hard drives, and you shouldn't have a problem. Good luck!

DF_Studios · « **Reply #25 on:** April 05, 2014, 08:39 »

I have a new screamer of a machine. 32 ram, SSD drives, gamer video card. The slow point for me is having my photos on a USB drive that goes to sleep all the time.

wordplanet · « **Reply #26 on:** April 07, 2014, 13:44 »

Quote from: DF_Studios on April 05, 2014, 08:39

I have a new screamer of a machine. 32 ram, SSD drives, gamer video card. The slow point for me is having my photos on a USB drive that goes to sleep all the time.

You need to put them on a faster drive - I only work on files on hard drives connected by firewire and thunderbolt and use my USB and other drives as static backup. I think you've solved your problem. If you are on or are switching to a MAC, thunderbolt blows firewire away for speed. I don't even feel like I'm using an external drive. And I have 8 GB RAM.

shotupdave · « **Reply #27 on:** April 07, 2014, 20:09 »

Quote from: DF_Studios on April 05, 2014, 08:39

I have a new screamer of a machine. 32 ram, SSD drives, gamer video card. The slow point for me is having my photos on a USB drive that goes to sleep all the time.

Can I ask what VC did you go with?

DF_Studios · « **Reply #28 on:** April 07, 2014, 21:41 »

video card came with the HP Envy.

I don't find LR to be slow. I have version 4.4. Only a small delay if I let the USB hard drive go to sleep. My teenager pushed us to upgrade because he does is always messing around the Blender doing 3D graphics.

wordplanet · « **Reply #29 on:** April 08, 2014, 01:13 »

Quote from: DF_Studios on April 07, 2014, 21:41

video card came with the HP Envy.

I don't find LR to be slow. I have version 4.4. Only a small delay if I let the USB hard drive go to sleep. My teenager pushed us to upgrade because he does is always messing around the Blender doing 3D graphics.

Sorry - thought you were the OP $:-\$

Johnroyal · « **Reply #30 on:** February 24, 2016, 06:16 »

If you’ve upgraded from Lightroom 4 to Lightroom 5 or even Lightroom CC, you might have noticed things suddenly getting slow at times. Happens to me all the time and under different circumstances. It’s inconsistent. I’ve hit the forums and Google and have decided to compile a list of every solution I’ve found related to this issue as well as solutions that have been emailed to me by readers.

kinjo · « **Reply #31 on:** January 16, 2017, 07:27 »

i'm looking for a new 4TB HDD,
can anyone help me to find the best one?

kinjo · « **Reply #32 on:** January 17, 2017, 04:11 »

i found this article on google
newbielink:http://www.deskdecode.com/top-best-4tb-hard-disk-drive-monthly-updated/ [nonactive]
and they suggest me to buy Seagate Barracuda.
how about that?

qunamax · « **Reply #33 on:** January 17, 2017, 06:13 »

I have i7 870, 8GB ram, Catalog on SSD and photos on old Samsung f3 and Seagate Barracuda and it's working just fine with 16mpx raws. I had a problem when I upgraded from 6mpx camera, then I doubled the amount of ram and everything was fine again.

tätarätä · « **Reply #34 on:** January 19, 2017, 15:30 »

Working with an older iMac (mid2011) and having LR4.4 installed, and LR CC.
I don't use LR CC,because its to slow. Just use LR4.4 and Photoshop CC.

stockVid · « **Reply #35 on:** January 19, 2017, 18:52 »

Quote from: kinjo on January 17, 2017, 04:11

i found this article on google
http://www.deskdecode.com/top-best-4tb-hard-disk-drive-monthly-updated/
and they suggest me to buy Seagate Barracuda.
how about that?

From my experience over many, many years Seagate Barracuda are the most unreliable drives on the planet. I have had far more success with a good quality Western Digital.

YadaYadaYada · « **Reply #36 on:** January 19, 2017, 20:48 »

Solid state drives are very fast if that's the bottleneck.

Seagate, WD and Toshiba drives are all about the same. They are all good and reliable. Sometimes things fail. I've had a Sandisk card fail and they are tested and most reliable.

Check out the new solid state drives claimed to be 5-6 times faster than conventional drives. No parts that move.