Adobe Lightroom Classic users have been pining for a serious performance update for ages—even Adobe admitted that Lightroom performance was lackluster, and improving it was 'top priority. ' Well, it looks like 'top priority' is going to pay off very soon.
Late last week, Adobe told DPReview that it has a significant Lightroom Classic performance update in the works. The update—which is "coming soon"—is supposed to improve performance across the board for anybody using a multi-core machine with at least 12GB of RAM. Or, in Adobe's own words:
In this upcoming Lightroom Classic 7. 2 release, we were able to make significant strides with our partners at Intel on addressing key performance issues. We have optimized CPU and memory usage so that performance will scale better across multiple cores on computers with at least 12 GB of RAM.
Adobe claims the update will result in:
Faster import and preview generation
Faster walking of images in the Loupe View
Faster rendering of adjustments in Develop
Faster batch merge operations of HDR/Panos
Faster export
The company's own benchmarks back up this claim in a big way. Adobe shared these results with DPReview, revealing substantially improved export times between the current v7. 1 and the upcoming v7. 2.
Adobe Export Test
Adobe tested the new build on three machines:
A 10-core iMac Pro with 32GB of 2666MHz DDR4 RAM, a 3GHz Intel Xeon W processor, AMD Radeon Pro Vega 64 graphics card with 16GB of RAM.
An 8-core Windows 10 PC with 64GB of 2400MHz DDR4 RAM, a 3. 2GHz Intel Xeon E5-1660 processor, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card with 8GB of RAM.
A 10-core Windows 10 PC with 64GB of 2400MHz DDR4 RAM, a 2. 9GHz Intel Core i9 7960X processor, and an Nvidia Quodro P2000 graphics card
Each of the three showed significant speed improvements when exporting 100 heavily edited Raw files as either full-resolution JPEGs or full-resolution DNGs:
The 10-core iMac Pro exported JPEGs 29. 5% faster and DNGs 43. 7% faster
The 8-core Windows 10 PC exported JPEGs 32. 5% faster and DNGs 32. 4% faster
The 10-core Windows 10 PC exported JPEGs 48. 3% faster and DNGs 64. 7% faster
Additionally, while subsequent tests of the current version got slower and slower on the Windows, version 7. 2 fixes this problem. In other words: Lightroom Classic will no longer slow down over the course of a long editing session on Windows machines.
Our own tests also showed a noticeable speed boost when it came to exporting files. Adobe gave us early access to the new build, and we tested it alongside the current version of Lightroom Classic CC on a MacBook Pro 13-inch 2016 with 16GB Ram and a 3. 3GHz dual-core i7 processor running macOS 10. 12. 6.
DPReview Export Test
When exporting 63 Raw conversions from the Panasonic G9, with a lot of edits, saved as full-res JPEGS on the highest quality setting, here's what we got:
LR 7. 1 – 11:51 (711 seconds)
LR 7. 2 – 10:31 (631 seconds)
That's an improvement of 11. 3%—not quite the boost reported in Adobe's own benchmarks, but we were testing it on a dual-core machine. We'd expect to see further performance improvements with multiple cores, since the update is specifically meant to "scale better across multiple cores. "
DPReview Import Test
We also did an Import Test, which showed no improvement. However, after speaking with Adobe, the company's engineers suggested that user error might have been to blame, so we will share those results once we've re-done the test following Adobe's instructions.
Stay tuned for an update later today.
Adobe was adamant that this update is just the beginning. The company is "pleased with these performance improvements" and believes Lightroom Classic users will be please as well, but Adobe also told us it is "far from done. " The company promises continued performance optimizations and improvements in future releases of Lightroom Classic CC.
For now, we're just happy to see the first fruits of that "top priority" promise Adobe made last year.
. dpreview.com2018-1-29 19:46