The reason you can pile on adjustments forever in Ps (without penalty) but not Lr:

* Ps bakes everything you do into the image data then promptly forgets what you did (not exactly true, but try and work with me here - I'm shooting for a concept to make a point).

* Lr never changes the image, so all edits are just piled into a list, and Lr has to re-render the whole (growing) mess repeatedly.

This is what Julie Kmoch was trying to explain - they are very different program designs - Ps is a pixel editor, and Lr is a non-destructive editor, each has it's strengths and weaknesses.

Summary: Lr is great for initial raw conversion and light editing. Ps is required for heavy editing (or you can export to bake changes in for continued editing in Lightroom, thus clearing the growing edit list which bogs it down).

Rob

I'm with Wagner on spending all day troubleshooting. It would be great to have a standard photo file to compare our system to, a RAW file with edits/masks applied, one could attempt some other edits and then compare times to apply those edits. I don't see it being my Mac as Photoshop, FCP, After Effects all work well. And it's not background processing, I have given ample time.

I think we all agree, if you need to make a good deal of geographic edits/masks, LR was not designed for this. If you want to slightly change the hue of your background, you need to mask it. This was my case with 30 headshots. I applied a mask and hue change, some minor lens corrections and then sharpen details. I forwarded these edits/masks to each following photo and then would edit the mask. LR said no thanks. That means round trip it to Photoshop or do all of your edits on Photoshop. I choose to do everything in Photoshop. I agree....if it hurts don't do it, my exact sentiments.

Logical fallacy: It's not my machine since Photoshop and others work fine.

To make a long story short: Lr is different..

(and when one says "your machine" it includes "the data files on your machine", since problems are often due to wonked data which is tripping up Lr).

That said, there is a large set of users who never want to mess with Lightroom - they use Bridge for management and ACR/Photoshop for editing. That way, they don't have to bounce back and forth. Just note: ACR has essentially the same constraints as Lightroom, development-wise, so in many ways it's the same thing: at what point do you break away from ACR's non-destructive editing and venture into the pixel-editing domain.

Whatever works I say..

R

Ok, ok, so it must be my machine and my data. Sounds like a delicate piece of software, how much time does one spend trying to determine if it's the machine or the non-destructive editing?

It's absolutely the non-destructive editing! I'm actually agreeing with you, don't use Lightroom for heavy edits, it is not worth it. With Photoshop I always start with ACR and perform edits without lots of masking. I do the masking in Photoshop along with touch ups. I can always get back into ACR from there.

It's clear now........

I get your aggravation, and I'm not trying to suggest any course of action - merely trying to inform..

If it were me, and I couldn't get it to work well, I'd buy a new machine (if I hadn't recently), or try a different software.

Not sure what to say, that I haven't said already.

Good luck, and if it's any consolation, you have my empathy and sympathy..

R

Empathy and Sympathy accepted. For me, I do what I have to and I get the job done. It's what I do for a living. However, for many LR users, who either don't have Photoshop or find Photoshop a great mystery, LR is it for them. So it seems that, for the moment, no one at Adobe is interested in solving this challenge. From where I stand, Lightroom could be a remarkable program, if it weren't for that one issue holding it back.

Thanks Rob. There is a good deal of frustration, but we find ways to muddle through. And its actually not that bad, Photoshop does it for me. I will try a few more tests to see if it is my machine, did you list out your machine specs already? I'd like to compare.

great way to explain the differences Rob; I can see myself quoting that some day.

Personally zooskifilms; I feel LR would do that so easy; or should do that so easy. I feel the  frustrates; especially those using LR for work. That is the beauty of lightroom; it's easy to add the same edits to the following image or to lots of files with 'auto sync'. I still don't understand why I had lots of drama like you and now don't have so many. To those 200 files I mentioned earlier I auto synced lens correcting/sharpening and noise reduce plus some basic editing without any dramas. But I do wonder if I could have done that when I was having similar dramas to you.

Just did an experiment: took a file and basically destroyed it by moving every slider and using every tool available several times>>added those edits to 56 lumix raw files with sync>>took several minutes>>selected one of the files and removed those edits and re-edited the file in a way it would be destroyed  if done in PS and all with no  real slowing down.

Went back and returned all files to how they were. Had to do that manually as I could not find an auto way (??) but still had no dramas

Not much joy for you having dramas; but I have been where you are now. So why? Why sometime? (for me anyway) There has to be a common denominator.

If we and others (please others) keep posting our dramas the penny might drop at Adobe. 

You're welcome zooskifilms.

zooskifilms wrote:

 

did you list out your machine specs already? I'd like to compare.

Well, unfortunately, specs don't mean much, unless your machine is just underpowered, but most recently built/purchased computers have enough oomph that the other bottle-necks (and bugs) start to kick in. Unfortunately, I don't have a good feel for what those other bottle-necks are, except in the cases when something is just interfereing somehow or another - I've seen monitor profiles cause severe slow-downs, and USB phones, and wonky data in prefs file.. - stuff that make you go hmm if ever you discover.. Another culprit is caused by or evidenced by excessive memory consumption, but it's still a mystery why the same things can over-consume memory on one system but not another. Very complicated stuff it is..

FWIW - I'm running an AMD quad-core (Phenom II/965), 3.4GHz, 8GB ram. I get good performance (no severe problems, except when memory gets over-consumed), although I think some people get better.

PS - I think the root cause of most (severe) Lr performance problems (I mean, beyond what is expected based on design/implementation) is good ol' fashioned bugs in Lightroom. But most bugs can be gotten around with enough finessing, still I agree with all who say Adobe could stand to fix more bugs (and optimize implementation etc) to improve performance.

Rob

it's hard to understand; been going well until today. lappy/lr just doesn't want to cooperate or talk to each other. Not new files; not doing much to any files, or a better way to say it, I'm doing less today than in the past week or so. No keywording which I have found a drama at times

yep; hard to follow so who could possible understand it.

Come on Adobe; time to get on top of it. It's sooooooo frustrating

And Rob: I totally agree with your last paragraph

just of interest win/mac. I copied a small cat to the macAir after having  drams in the ASUS and it wasn't long before the Mac slowed to a crawl

Now the ??. Did I just copy the drama to the mac or was the drama already in the Mac? I haven't used the mac much. 

Totally agree. LR 5.6 is dreadfully slow and gets painfully more and more choked up as session progresses. Have latest processor, RAM etc etc and  did all the suggested optimization. Methinks bugs too. It would be nice if Adobe just said that they acknowledge the issues and they are working on fixing instead of leaving us feeling hapless and mystified.

Specs don't mean much - that's true. I just upgraded my old Macbook Pro (2.4GHz i5, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD) to a new 13" Retina-model MBP (2.6GHz i5, 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD) and started off with a new catalog. After a few images (less than 20) the crop tool started giving me the beach ball again which I thought might be a catalog-specific issue but I was wrong. I've applied only a standard setting (noise reduction, curve, lens profile correction) to the images, no cloning or anything that would make sense. I think this started with LR 5.4 and still remains as a problem. I might have to adjust my workflow to PS-specific for a while.

This thread helped me, thanks folks. I'm on a 2011 MBP, LR 5.6, OS X 10.9.5. 1TB SSD, 16gb memory.

LR was maddeningly slow, even though I had been optimizing it. I read through this thread and tried several things--unfortunately I didn't do them one at a time so I'm not sure which things helped the most, but here's what I did:

• unchecked "automatic graphic switching" (I have a hunch this made a big difference, but not sure)
• I had my standard preview size (in LR catalog prefs) set below my screen size. I found a link on this thread to the Adobe page with suggestions on optimizing performance, where it says standard previews should be as big as your display but no bigger (I was thinking smaller would be better for performance, but that makes sense that they need to be the size of my display)
• unchecked "automatically write changes to xmp" (in LR metadata prefs). Another hunch that this might have made a big difference.
• changed preview quality from standard to low (LR prefs)
• purged my video and raw caches (LR prefs)
• increased video cache to 9gb (not sure where it was before, probably whatever the default is because I don't remember ever changing that)

So, after doing all those things, is Lr:

Slightly faster?

Much faster?

All things, or only some things..

??

Rob Cole wrote:

 

So, after doing all those things, is Lr:

Slightly faster?

Much faster?

All things, or only some things..

??

A lot faster, with all things I think. Certainly with browsing images, zooming in, using the develop module.

Thanks jimtron.

I can't help but wonder whether the improvement is reversible - if you change all those things back, would it go slow again? - if you don't want to jinx it now, I wouldn't blame you , but if you could identify causation it would help Adobe fix it (and maybe other users..).

Rob

I'll see what I can do...do you know what the default video cache setting is (in LR prefs)?

I think it's 3GB.

You can double-check by closing Lightroom, renaming preferences file, then re-opening Lightroom.

Dear deepsoul13,

It's nice to fight for Julie (BTW. where is Julie on-self?), but nature of the History in Ps used to say me, nothing is permanent today
Next, some other applications use the same method of woking and have no problem like Lightroom!

So why I decide, also because this problem is not solved yet (many, many days since your post), all you wrote to me and all Julie wrote to all of us is nothing than excuses (exactly as you wrote).

Dear Iszunia,

I am still having problems with Lr myself. In your last post you questioned why Ps was faster than Lr - I simply explained the difference to you. The nature of each program means Ps will always be faster than Lr. At the same time, the explanations offered by Julie and myself were just that, explanations of the current known problems. The suggestions we offered were to limit the problems until a fix is released. A fix cannot be released until the programmers at Adobe find the problems in their code. It's a time-consuming process, but productive discussions like this thread can only help. I don't need to defend Julie or anyone else at Adobe.

You are looking for a solution to your problem in this thread; unfortunately that's not the purpose here. The explanations and suggestions offered by myself and others in this thread are just that. They are attempts to find a solution, and suggestions to limit problems until an official solution is released by Adobe. Please do not accuse me or others of trying to "excuse" away the issues you're having, and for not being able to solve your problems on the spot. Everyone in this thread is having problems and we're hoping it will be fixed soon.

I am just as frustrated as you with the ongoing issue. In fact, I've experienced the exact same problems as you with the black boxes and artifacts visible for 30+ seconds while an image is rendering, memory buffer filling up, and the program crashing. Obviously, this isn't normal behavior for a program. But by experimenting with suggestions made by Julie and other users, I've been able to limit those occurrences from happening during every picture, to maybe 1 time per hour. The problem is not solved, but it makes working actually possible while I wait. That's the point of this thread. Make suggestions, give feedback, try to find the core of the problem, and find a workaround until it's fixed.  I feel it's productive to try and help myself and everyone else deal with the issue by offering suggestions to limit the problem as best as possible until a patch/solution is released by Adobe.

In attempt to keep this post on track with the rest of the thread, may I ask you what your hardware specifications are? Computer model, processor, storage drive, memory, etc...? Furthermore, what is your exact workflow that leads up to problems first starting? The more information we put into this thread, the more Adobe has to gather information from to solve the issue.

Go to Preference...General...Catalog Settings.  Then Go to File Handling.  Set preview quality to LOW and Size to 1024 pixels.  That should speed up browsing of photos in 5.6.

As far as performance in develop is concerned, I find the biggest single hit is if Lens Corrections - Profile Corrections & Chromatic Aberration are turned on. As adjustment brush settings move with the Lens Corrections I turn these off before a serious edit session, and back on at the end just to check all is well. These 2 settings also put a significant hit on slower machines if applied during import, but why oh why can't lightroom do preview creation in parallel during import?

my dramas are still a bit of an off and on love affair and the daughter's Mac that I use is no better. Seem to be going well until I dug up an old file from 2011 and that killed LR. (????) So I spat the dummy and opened up the never used Nik efex Vivexa..........have just added Elements 12 (run out special AU$114.) to the lappy so I have a spot removal tool and PS is better than LR when using the Nik collection. I still have CS5 on the mac but not sure I will need it. Once understood, Vivexa has some interesting/useful features but not sure how the  fast working Pros would appreciate the Nik Collection as bits are spread across different programs.  But LR is still #1 approach for me. 

I will look into  'Lens Corrections - Profile Corrections & Chromatic Aberration' and see if makes a difference; thanks for that tip.

( and I bet PSE12 is a lot cheaper elsewhere. The Government here just dragged Adobe [and others] over the coals about the much higher prices in Aust than many places in the world; even for downloaded programs.

It seems now it is my turn ... what worked perfectly before is now consuming time and more time ...running 5.6 on a catalogue of 700 images and after editing about 200 of them, Lightroom has slowed up on every image, Like Deepsoul13 it hits me most when I try and crop, and then the program just hangs and  hangs and crashes and I also have two bezel programs in task manager which accompany Lightroom.

I  am not making masses of adjustments, just darkening sky, applying lens adjustments, a little tweaking, and then I crop and bam...meltdown.

So I have restored version 5.5 and it is working perfectly again... no issues.

I'm running the 64bit version on Win7 64bit, i5-650 3.2GHZ processor and 16GB RAM

Very glad to see I am not alone......

On my old pc it runs fine. But on the new one with  8 core.....terrible!! I tried a lot but nothing helps to speed it up like on my old machine.

Adobe...make an effort and solve this!!!!