Workflow D850 and slow Lightroom

[superparati]

Hi,

After turning my research in all directions to understand why my computer is slow while editing pictures, it is time to share with you my experience and learn new things

I've what I think a decent MacPro (cf signature). My current Lightroom projects are on an M2 NVMe SSD offering good speed. Event if the GTX 980ti starts to have done its time, the graphic card offers good performance overall vs current AMD offer beside the Vega.

Back from holidays I've imported all the raw images I took with my delightful D850.
I've spend some time the past weekend to edit one of the cool picture I took with Lightroom. Long exposure with filter ND1000 in low iso. After few edits, Lightroom started to be very slow to response. The zoom in and out took for ever to process the rendering. With more edits, it was even worst.

When importing my pictures I built previews to 1:1, the option smart previews was active.
GPU acceleration is always active. I tried without and it is worst.
Camera raw cache is setup at 40GB.​

Because I wanted to know the difference with an AMD I bought a RX580. The card doesn't do more than my Nvidia offers. I think I'll send it back and will wait for either a Vega 56 or a Nvidia 1080.
I tried the same workload on windows with Lightroom and the Nvidia. The result was better and as expected.

So I come to the conclusion that Lightroom for macOS X is not very well optimised and secondly Lightroom might not be the best tool to edit picture.

I like the Nik software and I still think they offer a great post production solution when it comes to edit more in deeps images.
Photoshop could help I guess but I don't handle it as good as Lightroom.


Working with heavy raw files, what software and hardware are you using when some post prod are require?
There is always room for new tools and process. What should I improve software/hardware?

Thanks

 

[Cheese&Apple]

Graphics support for Lr is minimal and honesty I haven't noticed much of an advantage.

My experience editing the large D850 files using Lr on a top of the line 2017 iMac is that the more detailed edits I use (brushes, clone/healing stamp, graduated and radial filters) the slower it gets. Painfully slow at times. Global edits such as exposure, highlights, shadows, etc. don't seem to have an impact on rendering speed.

To solve this problem, I use Photoshop (I'm on the Adobe photography subscription plan) for any and all detailed pixel level edits and then use Lr for the global type of edits. This works for me as Ps runs fast and flawless and, if I'm going to change an edit later on, 99% of the time it's one of the Lr edits such as crop or exposure.

~ Peter

 

[Nathan King]

Lightroom will always be significantly slower than Photoshop since it nondestructively edits your file by creating metadata of everything and applying it all to the original file on the fly. This is why it gets slower as you add local adjustments.