It might be more accurate to say:

It would require extensive re-design of Lightroom.

We all know that lots of stuff is possible parametrically - look at Nx2, Aperture, and Bibble.

But they were designed differently, and their design has strengths and weaknesses, as does Lightrooms.

Dont get me wrong - I think at some point Adobe will have to redesign Lightroom in order to remain competitive, and incorporate more comprehensive editing features. But, they have less incentive than Nikon, Apple, or Bibble, since they have their *other* product that fills the gap.

PS - My apologies for continuing the off-topic discussion.

R

areohbee wrote:

 

It would require extensive re-design of Lightroom.

 

I don't think so. IMHO, it would just require removing inefficiencies and adding some optimisation.

Wasn't the purpose of LR3 to re-design LR so that it becomes faster?

areohbee wrote:

 

We all know that lots of stuff is possible parametrically - look at Nx2, Aperture, and Bibble.

We "all" know? I can think of an exception...

areohbee wrote:

 

PS - My apologies for continuing the off-topic discussion.

Maybe we would have less "off-topic" discussions if we felt that the "on-topic" discussions had impact.

I am sure you will see improvements to these areas in Lightroom, as I see it LR 3 was a new rebuild, new process engine, new noise reduction/ sharpening and introduction of Lens correction profiles.

The rush to meet the introduction of PS CS5 seams to have left them short on the testing of the upgrade and they are now struggling to deal with the performance bugs introduced with LR 3.x. JMHO. Raw conversion software is still in a rapid stage of development and other software providers keep pushing the envelop, Capture 1, DxO, Bibble, Aperture and others.

TK2142 wrote:

 

areohbee wrote:

 

It would require extensive re-design of Lightroom.

 

I don't think so. IMHO, it would just require removing inefficiencies and adding some optimisation.

Wasn't the purpose of LR3 to re-design LR so that it becomes faster?

 

I really dont know. From the outside, there was very little evidence of a fundamental editor design change. My guess: it was all they could do to add the fantastic new PV2010/NR/Sharpening/Fill-Light improvements (and lens corrections) and "get it back in the box". As has been noted, the re-design for performance improvement never really amounted to much... And also, there were significant design changes in the database handling affecting plugins, and some very nice and fairly extensive enhancements to the SDK (I always want more, but it was substantially improved).

TK2142 wrote:

 

We "all" know? I can think of an exception...

 

J.S. knows it too, but he also knows more about the inherent limitations in the existing Lr design than anyone who's willing to share on this forum.

TK2142 wrote:

 

Maybe we would have less "off-topic" discussions if we felt that the "on-topic" discussions had impact.

I feel ya. I vary daily in my leanings toward hope and hopelessness, Lr-wise... - hang in there.

Lightroom: Ya gotta love it, and ya gotta hate it...

R

areohbee wrote:

 

J.S. knows it too, but he also knows more about the inherent limitations in the existing Lr design than anyone who's willing to share on this forum.

What makes you so sure that J.S. knows it too? Note that he refers to the limitations of "parametric editing" not to limitations of "particularities of LR's internal design".

I'd have to accept if Adobe chose to never make LR a 80/20 application for portrait photographers because they want to sell PS too. I wouldn't like it but I would have to accept it in an adult way.

What I don't have to accept is that someone tells me that LR cannot be changed/extended because of technical reasons. I also don't want other people to believe that there are technical limits to what you can do within the parametric editing paradigm and that resorting to a two-application scenario is unavoidable. That's why I'm posting more than I should allow myself to.

TK2142 wrote:

 

I'd have to accept if Adobe chose to never make LR a 80/20 application for portrait photographers because they want to sell PS too. I wouldn't like it but I would have to accept it in an adult way.

Then accept it because in terms of workflow, any photography involving substantial retouching (well beyond a few sensor spots) is not what Lightroom is designed for...do the tone and color corrections in LR but the serious retouching is really gonna need to go elsewhere.

areohbee wrote:

 

- Adobe would be foolish to exlude things from Lightroom soley to boost Photoshop sales.

- Adobe would be foolish to not take Photoshops capabilities into consideration when choosing features to add to Lightroom.

Both are true...if Adobe wanted to avoid competing with Photoshop at all, they wouldn't have produced Lightroom in the first place (and they almost didn't) and yes, some things that CAN be easily done in a pixel editor is factored in when they decide what to add to Lightroom.

Since the primary mandate of Lightroom is for workflow and not low level image manipulation, there are things better left to Photoshop which is the reality of the situation. ACR/LR is tasked with those things that are appropriate for parametric editing...the rest is left to Photoshop.

Jeff Schewe wrote:

 

areohbee wrote:

 

- Adobe would be foolish to exlude things from Lightroom soley to boost Photoshop sales.

- Adobe would be foolish to not take Photoshops capabilities into consideration when choosing features to add to Lightroom.

 

Both are true...if Adobe wanted to avoid competing with Photoshop at all, they wouldn't have produced Lightroom in the first place (and they almost didn't) and yes, some things that CAN be easily done in a pixel editor is factored in when they decide what to add to Lightroom.

 

Since the primary mandate of Lightroom is for workflow and not low level image manipulation, there are things better left to Photoshop which is the reality of the situation. ACR/LR is tasked with those things that are appropriate for parametric editing...the rest is left to Photoshop.

Competing with Photoshop isn't really an issue as far as I can see. PS does SO much more than what is needed and used in a photographers repertoire, so it's not really the photographer whom is the main consumer. But where competition is concerned, Adobe should be thinking about the other programs which have been mentioned here (Bibble, Aperture etc.. ) because if all we LR users are going to see in terms of newly added features are social networking gimmicks, then at some point a lot of us are going to start veering off into those other directions.

But hey, I woudln't even complain about much of anything if LR's performance was back up to par. The fact that it isn't, however, just makes all the other niggles stand out more.

Doug

areohbee wrote:

 

NX2, Aperture, & Bibble are all living proof that you can have layers in a parametric editor, and all adjustments local, and shared masks...

That doesn't stop J.S. to make claims to the contrary.

areohbee wrote:

 

I try to listen to what he means not what he says - you need a J.S. bias filter between your ears and your brain...

I'll have to go by what he says. This is what people without your "J.S. bias filter" will hear. I don't want them to hear what is wrong.

Tom Hogarty wrote:

 

However, I want to keep this discussion focused on what the Lightroom 3.4 Release Candidate did and did not fix for those who have been experiencing issues.

Wouldn't it make sense to start a new thread for this particular purpose?

As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen it already.

Tom Hogarty wrote:

 

The recent spate of speculative posts makes it difficult for the team to follow or gather relavent details.

OK, I will then stop to contribute to the "chatter". Maybe the posters that contributed to the "chatter" can be forgiven to do so because typically when they ask for participation from Adobe they are told that this is a "user to user" forum and that bug reports should be used to communicate with Adobe. It is good to know that this isn't entirely true.

Tom Hogarty wrote:

 

(My goal in participating in these forums is to find solutions not to convince you of Adobe's intention to find solutions.)

Maybe there would be a point in trying to attempt the latter as well, in order to keep the user base's faith. If even loyal Adobe fans like tgutgu start threads complaining about Adobe's bug fixing policy, then I'd do the occasional attempt to convince people that Adobe is still trying to do the right thing.

A final suggestion: It would be good if even release candidates were better tested. I'm sure you are missing out on a lot of feedback because people are not prepared to deal with new bugs and hence rather wait till the final dot release becomes available.

Hi,

So Adobe wants user feedback in order to fix these performance problems. But are they doing what is needed to achieve such a result?

In every commercial application I have ever written, I have always implemented a "debug mode" feature. When a user reported a problem that I could not reproduce in my lab, I asked him to open the application's "Preferences" dialog and to check the "Debug mode" option. With this option enabled, the application started to record every user actions, tracing entry and exit points (and exit codes) of every important routine, collecting information about the user's system, etc. Once the problem had occured again, the user had to disable the debug mode option and to send me the log file. 90% of the time I could see what happened and fix the problem (or explain to the user what he was doing wrong or what was wrong with his system) without having reproduced the problem on my own systems. And I'm not talking about small applets. I implemented this in complex applications involving a user interface, system services and device drivers. By the way, this demonstrates that the statement "not reproduced, not fixed" that we have read here too many times is not justified.

If I was able to do this for my apps as a small software shop, I'm wondering why Adobe can't do that for Lightroom. There are a lot of commercial software on the market having a similar option. Of course, such a feature is a little bit more difficult to add "after the fact". It's preferable to think about it during the software engineering phase. Also, when the application uses multithreading (like LR does), the logging system has to be protected against re-entrancy. But any seasoned programmer can deal with this.

When implemented properly, such a feature has no impact on the software performance. When the option is disabled, the debug code does nothing at all. When enabled, this code may slightly affect performances but again, if this is done properly, the impact will be very limited.

If we go back for example to the "frantic registry accesses" problem, a debug mode feature would have help determine what's going on (which code is running repeatedly) when the problem occurs.

So I'm wondering : since LR version 1.0, bugs have been reported that Adobe could not reproduce and nobody has ever considered implementing a debug mode feature or writing a specific debug version (which is another way of achieving the same result : collecting information from and tracing execution on the user's system) ?

@ tgutgu: I've been following this thread - and the one before it - for a long time now and I have much more than my own experience to go on. Indeed, my experience is far from the worst reported here. The fact is, though - as has been noted many times - that Adobe advertised Lightroom 3 as having dramatically improved performance and the best most have been able to claim is that it works more or less as well as Lightroom 2.7. While you mention improvements in local edits, many others report the program bogging down with local edits. There have been endless quibbles about how many local edits are appropriate to expect the app to handle, which is nothing but a distraction from the fact that it doesn't handle them reliably. And such bootless debates have led the discussion far off into the weeds.

My generalizations are based on the totality of what I've read here. You have your own issues with Lightroom; other people have other issues. I've described my biggest problem with 3.4 RC several times and don't feel it's necessary to repeat it every time I post. The arrow key bug made the RC unusable for me; I filed a bug report on it and left it at that. You're right, though, I do generalize, but I do so to try to reach beyond my personal experience and comprehend the meaning of the whole. None of this should be taken to suggest that I don't like the improvements in Lightroom 3, even the ones that contribute significantly to the performance slowdowns people report. It took me awhile to get used to the new import dialog, for instance, but now that I have, I like it. I very much appreciate the improved noise reduction and sharpening capabilities. Likewise, I approve of the change in focus from importing into a proprietary catalog to importing in place, which made possible improved integration with Photoshop and the heretofore unsupported ability to actually use Lightroom as a file manager - though still with a narrow focus and being no replacement for Bridge in overall resource management capability.

But the primary reason for this forum, as Tom just reiterated, is not to sing the praises of Lightroom, but to report and discuss problems. Unfortunately, when people do complain, someone else feels compelled to tell them they're using the program wrong, or some other such insult to their intelligence. As a result, a lot of the chatter here has gone off topic and become defensive in nature, everyone protecting their "turf", rather than learning, or being willing to learn, from others who have had different experiences with the program than they have. As you just did with me, insisting that because you don't experience the slowdowns others have reported that I am somehow misguided in generalizing on their experience.

Some here consistently take criticism of Lightroom as some sort of personal attack. I suggest that it is they, not the critics, who are misusing this forum. The forum was not started to defend Lightroom or Adobe; it was to take problem reports so that Adobe staff could do a better job of fixing the problems. In some cases people have offered suggestions on how to use Lightroom more efficiently. These seem to me to be, broadly speaking, within the scope of this venue as a user to user forum. But this thread was intended, as specified repeatedly by Adobe staff participating here, to help them gather information. So it is more than a user to user forum in this instance. I will presume to suggest that if people spent more effort on trying to understand the difficulties that others are having with Lightroom and less time defending the program against criticism, this forum would be far less contentious and far more on point.

Tom Hogarty wrote:

 

Apologies for not jumping in and responding sooner.

I think a little more participation on Adobe's part in these forums and/or via other mechanisms, would go a long way...

We pour our hearts & brains out in this forum, and yet often feel like its falling on deaf ears. This forum is presently serving two purposes - a "user to user forum", and (ostensibly) a primary vehicle for communication between users and Adobe. But, users often feel like they're being kept in the dark. The occasional posts by Dan Tull and others, whilst appreciated, are just not enough...

PS - Same goes for the SDK forum, where there has been zero communication from Adobe lately.

PPS - Have you considered a non-forum path for communication? I mean, I would not want to be you/Adobe on these forums - users can be petulant&selfish&whiny&unempathetic&punitive&merciless... Why not set up a site for "Prevailng Issues" where you can post status and such, and solicit input anonymously? Then maybe you could leave the forum for the animals to kill each other, oops - I meant so the users could help each other...

"Tough love",

Rob

Perfectly put Gary,

I dont know what else to say, except I hope Tom not only listens, but takes the intitiative to rectify what I consider to be a very real problem for Adobe/Lightroom & users.

R

I was with you Rob till you went postal on the rest of us. Hoping that was tongue in cheek.

It's true, though, that we feel hung out to dry here. I have no doubt that this sense of abandonment is a major cause of much of the ennui and animus you see on this forum. Telling us that our expressions of frustration are a waste of time doesn't address the underlying cause of these feelings and, if fact, only adds fuel to the fire, indicating a distinct lack of respect for the difficulties we are going through with Lightroom and our efforts to inform Adobe of our problems with the product. Effective communication is a two-way street, which this, for the most part, has not been. We have no way of knowing if our bug reports have made it onto Adobe's to-do list or into the round file. Without feedback we're likely to conclude it's the later. And, though Tom insists that they have resolved a lot of issues in the dot-updates, the last one, 3.4 RC, belies that claim, especially considering that one of their supposed fixes apparently broke more than it fixed. If Adobe wants the benefit of our detailed feedback on the problems we encounter and wants to cut down on the seemingly useless editorializing and speculation, they need to give us enough feedback to see that our efforts are taken seriously. This is not a religious experience. Faith is not enough to sustain us.

And, frankly, if even an experienced hand like Rob is feeling out of the loop, there is clearly a problem here - that only Adobe can address. How they choose to do that is, of course, up to them. But they are at least partially responsible for this forum's lack of productivity. To get more, they'll have to give more. The way they're handling it now is just not working, nor for them and not for us.

Now that's a refreshing bit of honesty, even if it confirms our most cynical suspicions that Adobe staff have been tasked with developing new features for Lightroom at the expense of solving current problems. This reflects the popular opinion about Adobe policy in respect to other well known buggy products which shall go unnamed here. And it suggests that even our most honest and straightforward efforts to report bugs and explain performance issues on this forum are, indeed, in vain. Thanks Dan for the truth, painful as it is for us to hear. I don't blame the engineers; after all, for the most part they don't get to choose the projects they work on. Those decisions are made further up the food chain in the executive suites, where the high altitude and low oxygen levels seem to have a negative impact on cognitive ability.

I hope Dan doesn't get any unpleasant blowback in-house for finally coming clean with us. Such courage and integrity are rare and precious virtues.

If Dan's revelations don't kill this forum thread, nothing will. I know, some will say that just because Dan has little or no time for troubleshoot Lightroom, that doesn't mean others aren't dedicated to the task. But he didn't say that they are, only that they were; supposing otherwise is putting words in his mouth and is self-indulgent wishful thinking - in my opinion. I would be pleased if Dan replies, telling me I'm wrong, that there are indeed people at Adobe diligently debugging Lightroom, even if he no longer has time for such work. If that's the case, however, why is it he rather than they responding to our urgent requests for enlightenment?

Addendum: The "chatter" on this thread of which Dan speaks is in large part due to the absence of the kind of honest and informative feedback that he just gave us - at long last. Now that we know he doesn't have time to work on the problems we've already reported, the distinction between chatter and "good leads on important bugs" is moot.

thewhitedog wrote:

 

Now that's a refreshing bit of honesty, even if it confirms our most cynical suspicions that Adobe staff have been tasked with developing new features for Lightroom at the expense of solving current problems. This reflects the popular opinion about Adobe policy in respect to other well known buggy products which shall go unnamed here. And it suggests that even our most honest and straightforward efforts to report bugs and explain performance issues on this forum are, indeed, in vain. Thanks Dan for the truth, painful as it is for us to hear. I don't blame the engineers; after all, for the most part they don't get to choose the projects they work on. Those decisions are made further up the food chain in the executive suites, where the high altitude and low oxygen levels seem to have a negative impact on cognitive ability.

 

I hope Dan doesn't get any unpleasant blowback in-house for finally coming clean with us. Such courage and integrity are rare and precious virtues.

 

If Dan's revelations don't kill this forum thread, nothing will. I know, some will say that just because Dan has little or no time for troubleshoot Lightroom, that doesn't mean others aren't dedicated to the task. But he didn't say that they are, only that they were; supposing otherwise is putting words in his mouth and is self-indulgent wishful thinking - in my opinion. I would be pleased if Dan replies, telling me I'm wrong, that there are indeed people at Adobe diligently debugging Lightroom, even if he no longer has time for such work. If that's the case, however, why is it he rather than they responding to our urgent requests for enlightenment?

 

Addendum: The "chatter" on this thread of which Dan speaks is in large part due to the absence of the kind of honest and informative feedback that he just gave us - at long last. Now that we know he doesn't have time to work on the problems we've already reported, the distinction between chatter and "good leads on important bugs" is moot.

Sorry, whitedog, but I would not be surprised that after your post some of the Adobe staff will be even more reluctant to post here. I am pretty sure that Dan doesn't do anything here in the forum that isn't backed. But your interpretation of his remarks isn't really appropriate. In the software business it is not unusual that you have to find the balance between development and issue fixing, sometimes both work together. Your interpretation that after Dan's notes bug reporting and discussion here in the forum is in vain, is ridiculous, because things have been done, based on information given in threads like this. He explains what he does, so that he needs less time in the future to do the things, you want him to do (finding the causes for difficult to reproduce bugs). Dan also indicated that some stuff wasn't even related to Lightroom code.

I have no idea, why you think that the Lightroom user community ("we") has in general more interest in bug fixing than in further development of the product and that devoting resources to development while some bugs are still open, is somewhat cynical. In all this thread we are talking about hard to track down, time consuming to find, difficult to reproduce issues, which some of the users have - but probably not the majority. If the LR-team would halt development until all this is fixed, the product would be doomed. Some of the performance issues might even only possible to fix with larger refactorings, which can only be done in major versions. If they work on LR 4 intensely now, that may even help that your issues are fixed. Should the development team have postponed 2010 process version, if they had known that on a small percentage of user environments some performance bottlenecks might occur? I don't think so.

You can be sure that once LR 4 is out, there will be another group of unfortunate, who has environments, where Lightroom will no meet the expectations, and where it will be too time consuming to track the last bit of issues down, instead of moving on with the product. (At the end each upgrader spends only a 100 €).

So, I have full sympathy, that LR is further developed quickly and that we get what we need as soon as it is possible. What puzzles me a bit is that Adobe does not assign more ressources to the team so that issue resolving and development can be done to a greater extent in parallel. My post about bug fixing policy was not so much about that things weren't get fixed, but to learn when they will be addressed (if at all). What can we expect still in LR 3?

Lightroom is a business endeavor and not a fun project. Revenue will only come from new customers or from upgraders. The latter you can only convince to spend money, if a new version has enough improvements to justify the purchase (unless your new camera is only supported in the new release). Do you think, that I would spend 99 € again for an upcoming LR 4, if it doesn't have soft proofing? No, I probably wouldn't.

In my opinion, the participation of Adobe staff in this forum isn't as bad as you indicate. If they don't have a solution to your issues in your environment at the moment, what should they say here? I would rather dedicate my bug fixing time to issues, which are clearly reproducible in large amount of constellations, instead of hunting after "foggy" phenomenons with unclear reasons.

I would not have added again to the "chatter" with this post, if your post would not have embarassed me so (however, we should not take this conversation personally).

Kind regards

Thomas

I'm looking for help about persistent performance issues I'm having with Lr v3.3.

I've been using Lr since v1 and have loved the program but I continually have performance issues with v3.3.

Description of the problem:

I'm editing CR2 files that have been converted to DNG. They're all large raw files from a Canon 5D mk2. Currently I'm working on a brand new 15" MBP (core i7, 8GB ram, 1GB dedicated graphics memory, etc) but have also experience the same issues on my 13" MBP - two fully capable, functioning machines. Lr v3.3 regularly freezes up while working in the Development module. Usually seems to be when I'm using the lens correction tools. Once the Lr freezes up and I see the mac pinwheel of death, it's all over. Force quit, restart, new catalog, accessing the raw files for the local drive, etc nothing works. I've uninstalled Lr and reinstalled yet the problem has popped up again.

This is crippling to my workflow. I cannot consistently edit because Lr locks up. Is anyone else experiencing a similar problem?

Please advise.

Sure.

It's very perplexing but seems to happen most regularly to manual lens corrections made to a single photo. The troubling part is that it's an intermittent problem. Some files work great, others are just trouble. All the files I'm editing are from the same 5D mk2. All files are imported after being converted to .dng.

As recently as today, I found that only one file made Lr freeze up. If I moved on to another file in the catalog, Lr would function normally. I have experienced this freezing up problem on different machines and different catalogs.

I can give you the following very general "rules" to speed-up LR and avoid "freezing".

1) Make your Cache very large - mine is set at 75 GB. Set size in Preferences > File Handling.

2) Have the Catalog and your Cache on a fast internal drive but preferably on a different drive than where LR resides. Do NOT put the Catalog or cache on an external HD - the connection is too slow, particularly with USB drives.

3) Play around with the preview size in Catalog Settings > File Handling. This is a weird one and there was some discussion on this forum. Since I set my preview size ot 2048 pixels, I experienced a better performance.

4) Defragment your HD often and leave lots of free space particularly on your drive where the Catalog and the Cache are.

6) Close all unnecessary programs that run in the background.

7) In Catalog settings > Metadata do NOT check "write Changes into XMP" - this slowed my Develop module significantly. If you want XMP files do it via Metadata > Save Metadata to File or short Ctrl?Cmd. + "S".

Hope this helps.

WW