Lightroom 6 is slowing down my workflow!

Hi everyone. I just updated to lightroom 6/CC as my old Lightroom 4.4 would not read my 5d4 files

I am finding lightroom 6 is considerably slower on my PC. The photos take a couple of seconds to load and even the sliders lag and are not smooth. It is slowing down my workflow by a huge margin

Are there any settings that you know of that I could change to speed up the process?

Thank you

What computer are you running on? As with other programs, Lightroom has added functionality but at a cost to basic performance.

Lightroom 6/CC uses the graphics processor to (help) speed up workflow. Here is some basic information on its use: LINK If your graphic card processor is not supported, LR will not be running as fast as it could.

Gart

I'm still on LR 5, but the following has helped me and may help you.

Store as few original files on your hard drive as possible. All others get stored on an external drive.
The first time going through a new shoot should be dedicated to culling. Make as few edits as possible to make the decision to Keep or Delete.
Use the "Sync" command as much as possible to make edits to similar images all at once. Just enough to decide if it's a keeper.
Once you've been through them, delete the black flagged ones.
Make Smart Previews of your keepers.
Move the originals to the external drive.
Make final edits to the Smart Previews. This is the part that has drastically improved the speed.

There's an thread about Optimizing your computer for LR, which I assumed you read or will.

I'm working with a late 2008 Macbook Pro. Specs are listed below. Note how little storage I've used for 10K smart previews, which are all of my photos. It's not the fastest computer on the block, but it works.

You are also loading 5D IV files which are probably substantially larger than your previous cameras' files.

kirk

LucasCK wrote in post #18239225
Hi everyone. I just updated to lightroom 6/CC as my old Lightroom 4.4 would not read my 5d4 files

I am finding lightroom 6 is considerably slower on my PC.

Thank you

Are you running the most recent version of Lightroom? I am on my Mac laptop and it has a few bugs and is running slower than recent past versions. I'm hoping that they will fix it in a soon-to-come update.

LR 4.4 was definitely snappier than LR6. LR6 feels boggy and more resource hungry.

If your computer uses a mechanical drive your even going to complain even more when you upgrade to LR6.

Only problem is you have no choice but to upgrade the software if you do not want to mess with file conversion to use LR4.4.

There are a bunch of optimisation tips in this article https://helpx.adobe.co​m …erformance-lightroom.html

Unless you have a really small hard drive which is filling up (and thus causing your computer to slow down) Lightroom performance wont be affected by the number of images on your HD. LR only accesses the images you are working on so the fact that a file is sitting on your HD (but not being loaded/accessed) makes no difference. Working with smart previews on an underpowered system may be useful as they take up less system resources. Your computer's memory/gfx card may be better able to work with them.

I have found that most of my LR problems over the years have actually been down to corrupt/missing/outdat​ed drivers on my system. On two occasions I have found LR starting to display significant lag during processing. This was on my newer/more powerful laptop. Any use of zoom or brushes would result in significant lag to a frustrating degree. After reinstalling LR, checking all my hardware and then going through all the tips in the article above the problem was unchanged. In the end, I did an OS reinstall and everything went back to working fine.

Even on fast computers LR6 is slow. The best advice I can give is to save adjustments like sharpening and noise reduction as well as blemish removal and adjustment brush changes until the end of your workflow. The seem to slow things down the most in that order according to my experiences with it.

Building a faster computer doesn't really help either. I have a 6 core i7-6850K overclocked to 4.4gz with 32gb DDR4 3200mhz ram, crossfire 290X video cards with lightroom and my catalog installed on a 500gb m.2 SSD and my lightroom cache is 60GB on its own SSD.

Interesting ! I have the same problem on my iMac 5k with max out performance. I thought because the Canon 5DsR files are huge make Lightroom slow. And no problem when using Photoshop CC at all !

Jimmer411 wrote in post #18251505
Even on fast computers LR6 is slow. The best advice I can give is to save adjustments like sharpening and noise reduction as well as blemish removal and adjustment brush changes until the end of your workflow. The seem to slow things down the most in that order according to my experiences with it.

I read a blog post from Adobe (that I can't find any more) that stated the real problem was lens correction. The brushes are processor intensive anyway but, if you enable lens correction, the real time nature of LR means that every brush change now has to recalculate lens correction changes and then brush changes... making the brushes much slower. So the key is to turn off lens correction and apply that at the end.

I think you should disable the Graphics Processor acceleration. I had a graphic card failure and had to replace it. Checked with Adobe to be sure to get a graphic cars supported by Lightroom, but the program got very slow. After a while I disabled the acceleration, and now Lightroom is working just fine. A bit disappointed since I thought that the program would get faster with the new graphic card...

I'm tempted to do that Roy, LR6 has been awful for me.

I can try to use the spot/blemish removal and it won't even register that I released the click so if I click on another spot too soon, or move my mouse at all, it may drag a whole area before releasing and try to remove that.

Considering my files are on a WD black, my catalog is on an SSD, I have 32GB of RAM and an i7-3770k, the performance I'm getting out of LR really makes no sense and I've only just started to trying to figure out why.

thought I would update this thread (as I did for another thread) regarding Lightroom Brush tool slowdowns

"On the weekend I decided to again carefully compare Lightroom and PS ACR regarding bad brush lag/slowdown but this time I used the export as a smart object/File option in Lightroom export.

In previous tests I had either converted the Lightroom RAW with brush edits to a TIFF and then further edited in PS ACR or alternatively exported an unedited Lightroom RAW to PS and recreated the brush tool edits in PS ACR from scratch similar to how I had done this in Lightroom ACR . On both of these tests PS showed very little brush tool lag or spinning ball behaviour which pointed back to Lightroom being the culprit.

Anyway this new Lightroom resource Test i decided to try had me exporting the Lightroom RAW files( with multiple brush tools that lagged badly) as a smart object/ file to PS. Then ffter importing to PS I opened file as a smart file in PS ACR. Opening as a smart object/file meant that the brushes and edits created in Lightroom also appeared in PS RAW. ANd this is where the similarity finished. The difference of performance was like light and day. PS ACR had absolutely minimum lag with all brushes operating perfectly ....not only this but there was no regular spinning beach ball or hanging till changes initiated caught up with themselves on the subsequent screen render . In addition to this whilst I was running PS I had lightroom still open and various other apps so it appeared RAM and GPU and app optimization/prioritiz​ation were all working as they should.

Ive passed this on to Adobe engineering today ( That PS ACR handles exactly same RAW file /edit config perfectly ) and hopefully they can now focus on getting some patches done ASAP rgds

***UPDATE ****

Just got below email back a few Mins ago from Adobe Level 2 Tech support guy who is handling my case. Looks like there are other subscribers also dealing with engineering over this tool Brush lagging mess "


Hi Kevin

Thank you so much for your Observation on the same. We have already sent your request to Engineering and they might add you in Pre-Release for upcoming versions of Lightroom. We are very much aware about the issue and has received quite a few request from other subscribers as well. I apologize for the inconvenience caused, Hopefully it will be resolved in forth coming version of Lightroom.

Thanks,

XXXXXXXXXX| Sr. Technical Support Consultant | Customer & Employee Experience | Adobe Systems, Inc. |

Dan Marchant wrote in post #18251964
I read a blog post from Adobe (that I can't find any more) that stated the real problem was lens correction. The brushes are processor intensive anyway but, if you enable lens correction, the real time nature of LR means that every brush change now has to recalculate lens correction changes and then brush changes... making the brushes much slower. So the key is to turn off lens correction and apply that at the end.

Interesting, this is always the very first thing I do since it might as well be done to every photo regardless of subject, lighting, etc. I'll have to try saving it to the end of the work flow and see if LR6 feels any faster.

clipper_from_oz wrote in post #18306594
thought I would update this thread (as I did for another thread) regarding Lightroom Brush tool slowdowns

"On the weekend I decided to again carefully compare Lightroom and PS ACR regarding bad brush lag/slowdown but this time I used the export as a smart object/File option in Lightroom export.

In previous tests I had either converted the Lightroom RAW with brush edits to a TIFF and then further edited in PS ACR or alternatively exported an unedited Lightroom RAW to PS and recreated the brush tool edits in PS ACR from scratch similar to how I had done this in Lightroom ACR . On both of these tests PS showed very little brush tool lag or spinning ball behaviour which pointed back to Lightroom being the culprit.

Anyway this new Lightroom resource Test i decided to try had me exporting the Lightroom RAW files( with multiple brush tools that lagged badly) as a smart object/ file to PS. Then ffter importing to PS I opened file as a smart file in PS ACR. Opening as a smart object/file meant that the brushes and edits created in Lightroom also appeared in PS RAW. ANd this is where the similarity finished. The difference of performance was like light and day. PS ACR had absolutely minimum lag with all brushes operating perfectly ....not only this but there was no regular spinning beach ball or hanging till changes initiated caught up with themselves on the subsequent screen render . In addition to this whilst I was running PS I had lightroom still open and various other apps so it appeared RAM and GPU and app optimization/prioritiz​ation were all working as they should.

Ive passed this on to Adobe engineering today ( That PS ACR handles exactly same RAW file /edit config perfectly ) and hopefully they can now focus on getting some patches done ASAP rgds

***UPDATE ****

Just got below email back a few Mins ago from Adobe Level 2 Tech support guy who is handling my case. Looks like there are other subscribers also dealing with engineering over this tool Brush lagging mess "


Hi Kevin

Thank you so much for your Observation on the same. We have already sent your request to Engineering and they might add you in Pre-Release for upcoming versions of Lightroom. We are very much aware about the issue and has received quite a few request from other subscribers as well. I apologize for the inconvenience caused, Hopefully it will be resolved in forth coming version of Lightroom.

Thanks,

XXXXXXXXXX| Sr. Technical Support Consultant | Customer & Employee Experience | Adobe Systems, Inc. |

Clipper the simplest way to open an image in ACR, complete with your LR editing would be to write the Metadata to file. This can be found under the Metadata menu option, or using Ctrl/Cmd+S. This will write the edits of the selected image(s) to a .XMP file. If you then go to Bridge you will see the edits applied to that image in the browser, and when you open it in ACR you can't tell that it was previously edited in LR.

If you do edit in ACR, when it writes the data to the .xmp file and you go back to LR, LR will see that it was edited in another program and flag the image. If you click the flag it will ask you if you want to read from the .xmp and update the image in LR, or write the original data that is in the LR catalogue back to the .xmp.

This could be a useful workaround for those occasions where you need to do lots and lots of work with local brushes, if ACR is not suffering from slowdowns.

Alan