lightroom/photoshop - getting to the point where i feel i need a gaming PC to run it quickly/efficiently

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A_S

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Andrew
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Bought a new laptop in Oct 2020 (dedicated GPU, 16gb RAM) 500gb SSD specifically to try and get lightroom running better....

I then went and bought an EOS R5 in April the following year.

Even shooting CRAW (25mb files) using lightroom and/or photoshop still just seems to leak memory and ends up using 90% or more of my RAM after 20-30 minutes use. Its slow and cumbersome. The files take upto a minute to load a high res, non soft version when zoomed in (so i can check for clarity and sharpness before deciding to bin or keep) and after a visit to an event (motorsport) having taken 2.5k photos its taking days let alone hours to review photos and house keep before I can even edit.

Then when editing because of the above memory leak i'm restarting each application after half an hour or so just to clear my RAM.

I am a bit annoyed because really once they have you (I've got 20 years of photos in my lightroom catelogue) its hard to change system, but the performance is just not acceptable.

Thoughts?

edit: I have my main catelogue on my gaming pc.... the laptop catelogue is just 3 or 4 of my latest shoots before I transfer to the main catelogue.

This was without lightroom running, 20 minutes into creating a 3 shot panorama
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I feel your pain. I got very frustrated with LR a few years ago and switched to Capture One. That turned out to be quite memory hungry too and video work increased a lot too that needs even more resources. I’ve ended up adding RAM to get to 64Gb and have a RAID running at SSD speeds. Occasionally I open up old LR catalogs with the new kit and it’s a bit better.
 
A_S said:
Bought a new laptop in Oct 2020 (dedicated GPU, 16gb RAM) 500gb SSD specifically to try and get lightroom running better....

I then went and bought an EOS R5 in April the following year.

Even shooting CRAW (25mb files) using lightroom and/or photoshop still just seems to leak memory and ends up using 90% or more of my RAM after 20-30 minutes use. Its slow and cumbersome. The files take upto a minute to load a high res, non soft version when zoomed in (so i can check for clarity and sharpness before deciding to bin or keep) and after a visit to an event (motorsport) having taken 2.5k photos its taking days let alone hours to review photos and house keep before I can even edit.

Then when editing because of the above memory leak i'm restarting each application after half an hour or so just to clear my RAM.

I am a bit annoyed because really once they have you (I've got 20 years of photos in my lightroom catelogue) its hard to change system, but the performance is just not acceptable.

Thoughts?

edit: I have my main catelogue on my gaming pc.... the laptop catelogue is just 3 or 4 of my latest shoots before I transfer to the main catelogue.

This was without lightroom running, 20 minutes into creating a 3 shot panorama
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I'm having similar thoughts..... Out of interest what was your laptop model and did it have a dedicated graphics card...? I'm looking at Dell xps laptops.. Prefer 13 inch for editing on the move but you need to go 15 inch for the decent graphic card version....
 
Lightroom and Photoshop hardly use a graphics card. For best performance you need fast single and multi-threaded processing plus a big bucket of ram and quick disk access. Don't use a laptop unless you have to, although it sounds like the new M1 Mac's manage better than pcs right now.
 
I assume you're talking about LR Classic here? The newer LR (the cloud based one) is much, much faster on a PC.

I can run LR on my 2018 iPad, processing Raw files with absolutely no problems, slow downs or stuttering. The iPad doesn't even get hot. It really is time Adobe put the bloated mess that is LR Classic out to pasture.
 
RichardC27 said:
The newer LR (the cloud based one) is much, much faster on a PC.
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Probably because it can't do anything useful.
If it does not interpret raw files, but only shows the embedded preview, it is of course much faster.

It is quite simple that when photos have to be processed, every single pixel with all its additional information has to be in the main memory. And it makes a huge difference whether the photo has 20 MP or 54 MP.

And in terms of my experience with Lightroom classic, it also makes quite a difference whether it's an uncompressed 24 MP Canon file or a compressed 26 MP Fuji file, both in raw format.
 
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Have you considered changing to a Macbook. The M1 macs are pretty good. Not cheap though and lots prefer windows operating system
 
I've used a lap top for years and currently have one from PC Specialist which I've had for a few months now. i5, 8GB ram and 1TB drive, and that doesn't seem too high end these day. I use Adobe CS5 and find that I can load and batch process 100+ pictures without running into problems other than finger trouble and can process panoramas of 10+ pictures in just a couple/few minutes. So, I'm a bit baffled. I'd have thought maybe new hardware might not be needed but if not what's the issue?
 
lemo said:
Probably because it can't do anything useful.
If it does not interpret raw files, but only shows the embedded preview, it is of course much faster.

It is quite simple that when photos have to be processed, every single pixel with all its additional information has to be in the main memory. And it makes a huge difference whether the photo has 20 MP or 54 MP.

And in terms of my experience with Lightroom classic, it also makes quite a difference whether it's an uncompressed 24 MP Canon file or a compressed 26 MP Fuji file, both in raw format.
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It shows the full Raw file just fine, you just have to zoom into it 100% first if it has to download the image from the cloud. If you've imported locally then you have access to the full Raw straight away. Same on the iPad, it shows you the full Raw file and runs rings around LR Classic. I just can't use Classic anymore, it's so slow and the UI looks like something from the last century
 
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Canon brook said:
I'm having similar thoughts..... Out of interest what was your laptop model and did it have a dedicated graphics card...? I'm looking at Dell xps laptops.. Prefer 13 inch for editing on the move but you need to go 15 inch for the decent graphic card version....
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My Laptop is a Dell Inspron 7501. Specs on the net seem to vary but mine has

Core I7-10750H (2.6ghz)
16GB Ram
Nvidia 1650 (I think with 4GB RAM)
500tb SSD


The limiting factor is the RAM. I fail to see how lightroom needs to eat 10gb of ram when I'm only editing one photo. In theory when I open it if it uses 2gb of ram to edit 1 photo, it should use 2gb of ram to edit the 50th,100th photo etc.

The issue seems to be the software not my specs - in my opinion


R.E which lightroom I'm using, yes its classic - the "other" lightroom is cloud based and you only have a finite amount of cloud based storage so really its useless for a library with 20 years of photos..... I tried it for a while a couple of years ago, but the 2 versions didn't really sync well and trying to use them together made the whole process even more difficult.

R.E Mac - I'm not paying double the price for the same specs I could get on a windows machine, i'm not daft. If i were realistically able, I'd build my own laptop, but its not very practical or possible like with a desktop machine.
 
A_S said:
My Laptop is a Dell Inspron 7501. Specs on the net seem to vary but mine has

Core I7-10750H (2.6ghz)
16GB Ram
Nvidia 1650 (I think with 4GB RAM)
500tb SSD


The limiting factor is the RAM. I fail to see how lightroom needs to eat 10gb of ram when I'm only editing one photo. In theory when I open it if it uses 2gb of ram to edit 1 photo, it should use 2gb of ram to edit the 50th,100th photo etc.

The issue seems to be the software not my specs - in my opinion
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Yup. I'd be surprised if a pc with that spec is struggling because of a lack of spec.

I hope you get it sorted.
 
A few observations:

Using all of the ram is kind of a good thing. It means the apps are doing as much as possible to cache stuff in memory.
Conversely - if you're actually running out then that's not so good. You can see that by looking at the page faults delta in task manager

Fwiw I'd expect compressed raw files to be slower than uncompressed ones.

Why do you have 4 instances of photoshop running? That looks a bit odd.

All that said: Lightroom is a dog. I use FastRawViewer to rate & filter photos before importing into lightroom, and once there I build 1-1 previews before starting any work.
 
RichardC27 said:
I just can't use Classic anymore, it's so slow and the UI looks like something from the last century
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Classic has many features that are not supported by the Cloud app, so I can't use it. What a user interface looks like is not important, it just has to work ;)

And there are some user interfaces that look modern, but where usability and functionality have been sacrificed for modern looks.
 
RichardC27 said:
It shows the full Raw file just fine, you just have to zoom into it 100%
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What else came to my mind:

Most raw files contain a full-size JPEG conversion of the image, which is used to preview the file on the camera's LCD display.

So the fact that you can zoom in to 100% is no indication that the raw file must also be converted for this.

But all this has nothing to do with the real problem. The fact that the raw files are compressed (CRAW) speeds up the loading from the memory card to the computer, but has no speed advantages in further consequence.

I'm no expert in image processing, but in order for the photo to be loaded for processing, it has to be converted to something like an uncompressed TIFF format, whether it's in JPEG or raw format. And if you look at the size of such files, you know what kind of data volumes are involved here.

What I also observe is that a notebook is always a little slower than a PC, but only a little. (And may depend on how the speed stepping is configured).

I have both. Both with i7 processors and 32 GB RAM and SSD disks, as well as Nvidia graphics cards.

I don't have a Canon R5, the resolution of my raw files is 22, 24 and 26 MP and I have no problems speed wise. Only that 26 MP files from the Fuji X100V take longer to preview in LR-Classic when importing. If the stuff is on the computer, everything goes smoothly, even in the developer module.
 
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lemo said:
Most raw files contain a full-size JPEG conversion of the image, which is used to preview the file on the camera's LCD display.

So the fact that you can zoom in to 100% is no indication that the raw file must also be converted for this.
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No but if you pull up the Info pane, you can watch the Local Copy indicator change from Smart Preview to Original (RAW) as it downloads the original Raw from the cloud if you're on a device that doesn't have that file. LR knows if you're pixel peeping at 100% you probably want the original file. It also downloads the original file at the point of export, if it doesn't already exist on the device you're working on, so the files you export are the best quality they can be.

I know a lot of people don't like the cloud model but for me and the work I do it's absolutely brilliant, and I couldn't go back now.

Someone above mentioned creating 1:1 previews on Import to LR Classic. This will make your import take ages, although this is obviously hardware dependent. However it massively speeds up the editing process in LR Classic.

There are lots of ways to make LR Classic and the cloud play nicely as well. If you only upload smart previews from Classic they don't count towards your cloud storage. I used to be on the 20Gb plan with well over 35K images available in the cloud, as I only had the smart previews uploaded not the originals so I wasn't using any cloud storage at all. Any edits I made on my phone or iPad would sync back to the original file when I opened LR Classic on my PC. I use an iPad Pro as my main editing device now so I've gone to the 1Tb plan, but it is entirely possible to have your entire photo library synced to the cloud on the 20Gb plan, no matter how big it is.
 
I get your point.
I’ve been running a decent HP computer since November 2018 for image editing in LR and PS but recently it’s been struggling.

I’ve restored to running a long HDMI lead from my sons £3k gaming rig into the monitor in my office. Obviously I can only edit images at a decent speed when he isn’t using it, but that is most times as usually he’s gaming on the PS5 :banana:.

Will probably check out Mac M1‘s at the end of the year.
 
LR does cache images in your library, keeping (in memory) the last couple of images and potentially the next couple as well. This makes it faster to go back and forth between recently accessed images and does mean that it will use more memory after you have looked at/edited a few photos.

A couple of things to try:

1) Increase the Lightroom cache to 20Gb from the standard 1Gb if you haven't already.
2) Consider splitting your catalogue into a number of smaller ones. Try creating a new catalogue and copy/export say just 2000 of your most recent images to it from your existing catalogue. Try opening the new smaller catalogue and see if general navigation speed improves, along with time to open an image.
3) On the smaller catalogue, build 1:1 previews for all the photos - this may take 30 minutes or more for several thousand large raw files, but it then makes subsequent navigation and zooming so much faster. You can build 1:1 previews on import, but also in an existing catalogue.
4) Stop any infrequently used apps from starting automatically with windows. Norton is one that springs to mind, but Dell laptops can sometimes come with a lot of background bloatware. You don't need to delete them, just stop them from starting when windows does, and if/when you need them you can start them manually.

I bought a new laptop last year to use with LR (8 core AMD processor), but after a few weeks I upgraded to memory to 32Gb, and it made a difference with everything running more smoothly with less hesitation when moving between images.
 
Thanks for the suggestions, on No2 I already have a seperate catelog with 1 or 2 shoots so that wont help but I will try the 1 and 3!
 
lemo said:
They say: Click the Metadata tab, deselect Automatically Write Changes Into XMP.

But I would never do that. If your catalog is unrepairable damaged, you lose all your edits, at least since the last catalog backup. With XMP data, you can simply restore them with "Import". Only collections would be lost.
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Don’t shoot the messenger..

It obviously slows down performance so turning it off should speed things up. I’ve never written xmp files, have a weekly catalog backup through LR but have a constant backup through Apple timemachine so not really an issue.
 
Also switched from LR to Photoworks a few years ago, LR not working right on my laptop was one of the reasons. Switched to Mac M1 since then, so will probably be trying using Lightroom again.
 
This is an interesting question, i have noticed over the years LR is very CPU and RAM hungry and I have to close chrome ( which is also RAM hungry ) and other applications just to get rendering done in LR !
I have a new rig because of LR and my suggestion for people is get a CPU i7 with high cache and peak boost of atvleast 4.4mhz, at least 16GB DDR4 RAM, though 32GB would be best.

SSD FOR C DRIVE aox 500GB and load all progr on to another SSD, 500GB to 1TB
Use spinning sisks to store photos, RAW files and video.
A gaming PC will have a top video card / Graphics any thing from Nvidia 2060 upwards. My PC is using Nvidia GTX 790 Ti and I will be upgrading to GTX 970 Ti.
This card will not help with performance to run LR !
 
Tysonator said:
This is an interesting question, i have noticed over the years LR is very CPU and RAM hungry and I have to close chrome ( which is also RAM hungry ) and other applications just to get rendering done in LR !
I have a new rig because of LR and my suggestion for people is get a CPU i7 with high cache and peak boost of atvleast 4.4mhz, at least 16GB DDR4 RAM, though 32GB would be best.

SSD FOR C DRIVE aox 500GB and load all progr on to another SSD, 500GB to 1TB
Use spinning sisks to store photos, RAW files and video.
A gaming PC will have a top video card / Graphics any thing from Nvidia 2060 upwards. My PC is using Nvidia GTX 790 Ti and I will be upgrading to GTX 970 Ti.
This card will not help with performance to run LR !
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As you say, LR needs the fastest processor you can afford along with lots of fast memory and the fastest NVME SSD you can afford to hold the images you're working on. Don't bother with a gaming card costing £300+, all you need is something that can manage the resolution you require and can allow the monitor to be calibrated.
 
TimHughes said:
I feel your pain. I got very frustrated with LR a few years ago and switched to Capture One. That turned out to be quite memory hungry too and video work increased a lot too that needs even more resources. I’ve ended up adding RAM to get to 64Gb and have a RAID running at SSD speeds. Occasionally I open up old LR catalogs with the new kit and it’s a bit better.
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What RAID setup so you have as I very much doubt it's even close to a half decent SSD.
 
robj20 said:
What RAID setup so you have as I very much doubt it's even close to a half decent SSD.
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It’s a storinator by 45drives. Black magic speed test shows read / write speed the same as my Samsung T7.
 
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TimHughes said:
It’s a storinator by 45drives. Black magic speed test shows read / write speed the same as my Samsung T7.
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That's why then T7 is on the slow side, about a 1000MB/s you'll easily get NVME drives 7 times faster. Plus Gen5 is right around the corner with even faster speeds around 13,000MB/s.

Not seen those storinators before they look cool if you need huge storage. I have a Nas myself but only 4 bay and currently just use 2 X 8tb drives in it, with a 4tb for CCTV.
 
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