Lightroom 6 cuts that time to a much more manageable less-than-17 minutes. Waiting for 1000 images to load for three seconds each adds up to 50 minutes of waiting in Lightroom 5. Culling times, for one, are so much better. In the end, all of these improvements save time. But they sure are faster to implement (Adobe confirmed to me that the algorithms should do the same job as they did in Lightroom 5, but that they were tweaked slightly on occasion for performance gains). I can’t say those features are more powerful or give more while taking less from the quality of the image because of improved algorithms. The same goes for noise reduction and just about every other section of adjustments that I would skip when I didn’t feel like waiting an extra couple seconds. These new speed enhancements helped me rediscover sharpening within Lightroom, which is perfectly suitable for most uses. Until that feeling wears out, I’ll likely be wasting some time sliding back and forth on every adjustment just to watch the colors change. But Lightroom 6 certainly is that instant editor that makes editing so smooth and instant that it’s as fun as I remember the program being in its prime. In any case, Lightroom 5 was getting excessively slow and choppy with its sliders (several support tickets that I started on the matter each eventually went unanswered back in the last year or so). delivering graphics in full 1080p high-definition glory…until an old friend pulled it out one time to prove me oh so wrong). This memory could be somewhat inaccurate and simply relative to what was available back then (the same way that I once remembered Nintendo 64’s Super Smash Bros.
I have this lovely memory of the original Lightroom being instant with every edit. In the Develop module, very seldom did it take even close to a full second to be ready to edit the image. Changing from one file to another in the Library module takes about two seconds until the newly selected image is loaded. Each of those times easily went down by two thirds. These times are quite general and change from time to time, but the feeling and time savings is very real, much in part to Adobe as it finally began tapping into that video card to help processing. Naturally, this made culling extremely difficult in either module. And then waiting for a photo to be ready to edit took another three seconds, minimum, after selecting it. Switching to the develop module always took several seconds as well. Despite my fairly speedy SSD, dedicated video card, and 16GB of RAM, waiting for an image to finish “Loading,” as Lightroom likes to call it, took about 5 seconds in the Library module (after running for a few minutes, that is…since it was always fairly fast for a minute or two right after starting up). Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Evernote, Creative Cloud – nothing was turned off. I had Safari and Chrome open with over 30 tabs, Mail was open with several in-progress emails minimized, iTunes was playing music, CrashPlan was backing up in the background, etc., etc. But that’s all a moot point, now – and thank God (I mean…thank some engineers at Adobe, I guess).įor those interested, all of these times are based on a very real-world environment on my 15” i7 fully-loaded Retina MacBook Pro (pre-Thunderbolt 2). It likely would have been an equally dark and murky experience in the depressingly small world of slow-performing photo editors that also help catalog, tag, and share your work in every way imaginable. What greener pastures existed for me beyond Lightroom are quite unclear. Today, with the introduction of Lightroom 6 come speed enhancements that will keep me around at least until Lightroom 7. Yesterday, Lightroom was a brilliant all-in-one library catalog manager and color/tone editor that I didn’t want to live without, but that I was still considering leaving for something else. the traditional sharp-cornered square logo. The Lightroom CC logo (left) differs just slightly from the standalone Lightroom 6 logo (right) with rounded edges (reminiscent of the style of an iOS application icon) vs.