Even with a really fast laptop, Lightroom performance struggles. But one after anonther. When I recently wrote my post about the... missed opportunity from Adobe for a really cool Lightroom, I was able to have a very pleasant and enlightening conversation with him afterwards Sven Doelle, Principal Business Development Manager for Adobe in Germany. So I gave Lightroom another chance. Actually two chances: my loved one now also has a cloud subscription and is very happy with the solution. One moment she is editing her photos on her laptop, a few moments later she sees her finished edited images on her smartphone in the app. She is very excited because she now has it automatically Your photos Always there. Lightroom is made for them.
Did you know that you can read the post in English?
For me, it was clear from the many interesting comments and tweets I received on the Lightroom post, and from the conversation with Sven, that currently (2019) only Lightroom Classic comes into question. It is different from Lightroom and it will take some time before Adobe can clear up this confusion in the naming. And it certainly didn't help that Adobe has now removed the "CC" from the name. To put it simply and very briefly, Lightroom is an omni-device RAW converter in the cloud, while Lightroom Classic is the desktop version for professionals.
New experiences with Lightroom Classic
I was really open to my new approach with Lightroom Classic because I actually really like the new structure slider. I had talked to Sven about this slider in Capture One and he had already made me curious about the upcoming implementation in Lightroom. This slider works differently than in Capture One, but that's not a bad thing. It really does a great job for quick retouching in portraits. (The emphasis is on "quickly")
But I often have large amounts of photos to edit and therefore performance is often more important than particularly great features. After all, there is certainly no shortage of good RAW converters. I've been using Capture One for years and because of the Lightroom performance shown here, it stays that way.
Measurement with Lightroom and Capture One
Two very simple examples illustrate the Lightroom performance problems. To do this, I imported 181 images and measured the time it took to complete the previews. I also exported corresponding images with a specific edge length. Of course, the source, files used, destination and type of export were comparable. Here is the table with the hand-stopped results.
| Task | Lightroom Classic | Capture One |
| Import 181 images | 0:40 mins | 0:12 mins |
| Create preview | 1:40 mins | 1:05 mins |
| Export 181 images reduced in size | 3:37 mins | 1:30 mins |
For the same task, Lightroom Classic needs a total of almost 6 minutes, while Capture One takes less than 2:50 minutes. Even with only 181 images, that doubles the time I spend in front of the computer without me being able to do anything.
If you would like to do a similar test to compare my values: I used RAWs from Sony's A7RIII and Nikon z7 used. The hardware used was Apple's new Macbook Pro with i9, 8 cores and 32GB RAM. The Lightroom performance problems also occur due to the fan. It blows much longer and louder during export than during the same task through Capture One. Of course, this may also have something to do with the fact that the CPU in Lightroom Classic has to work significantly longer than in the competition.
My conclusion about Lightroom performance
Anyone who has to work with a lot of images on a regular basis is much better off with Capture One. This surprises me even more since mass editing of images used to be Lightroom's competence. Copying an editing scheme to all other images is just as easy in Capture One as it is in Lightroom. And it also works faster because the previews are rendered faster.
So if Adobe actually wants to impose new prices, you now know another suitable RAW converter. From a performance perspective, there is currently no reason to stick with Lightroom.
Well, I've definitely been using CaptureOne for years and don't miss LR.
Scenario: What do we do if Trump turns to China and heads to Europe and starts banning American clouds?
You can predict the probability of this yourself.
I also find Lightroom lame, but what you measured there may play a role for you, for me the times of import, previews and export are the most pointless, because with these things I start the process and then leave the computer until the is done.
What's important to me is how quickly I can edit an image, how quickly Lightroom reacts to controls, and how quickly it switches to the next image. And unfortunately Lightroom isn't particularly fast here either.
Apart from the fact that I can't measure processing steps very well, the reference to the duration of rendering the preview is given in the text. You also said yourself that Lightroom isn't that fast.
However, you have obviously never waited in front of your computer at four in the morning until the 500 images from the evening event have been exported, which then have to be loaded onto the customer's website...
I know, years ago I set out to measure how quickly Lightroom reacts to controls in order to find out which components have which influence. It was very instructive, but the data is now out of date.
Of course I'm familiar with such deadlines, but at the time I had a lot of computing power - exports could also be easily parallelized in Lightroom, but editing could not.