Tips for Getting Maximum Performance Out of Adobe Lightroom

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Is your Adobe Lightroom running slowly on your computer? Adobe regularly receives questions through social media regarding sluggish photo editing, and recently decided to start compiling the non-traditional solutions that work onto a single helpful page. In the Lightroom Help section of the Adobe website, there’s now a page titled “Performance hints“.

Here’s a sampling of some of the tips and tricks on the page:

If you use Photoshop with Lightroom, check Photoshop’s RAM setting

See the Max Out on RAM and Memory Usage sections in this TechNote to determine the best RAM settings for your computer. To change your memory settings in Photoshop, choose Apple > Preferences > Performance (Mac OS) or Edit > Preferences > Performance (Windows).

High-resolution displays

Drawing to the screen can be slow when Lightroom is using the entire screen of a high-resolution display. A high-resolution display has a native resolution near 2560 x 1600, and is found on 30-inch monitors and Retina MacBooks. To increase performance on such displays, reduce the size of the Lightroom window, or use the 1:2 or 1:3 views in the Navigator panel.

Order of Develop operations
The best order of Develop operations to increase performance is as follows:

  1. Spot healing.
  2. Geometry corrections, such as Lens Correction profiles and Manual corrections, including keystone corrections using the Vertical slider.
  3. Global non-detail corrections, such as Exposure and White Balance. These corrections can also be done first if desired.
  4. Local corrections, such as Gradient Filter and Adjustment Brush strokes.
  5. Detail corrections, such as Noise Reduction and Sharpening.

Avoid corrections that you don’t need

This suggestion applies especially to local corrections. Each slider you’ve changed when applying local corrections or the gradient filter is applied to that entire correction. And, each option uses resources and can affect performance.

When applying local corrections and gradients, make sure that you need all the corrections you’ve selected.

If you do not need a brush stroke or gradient to perform a certain type of correction, set its slider to zero.

Also avoid using unnecessary global corrections, especially options that use resources, such as Noise Reduction, Sharpening, and Lens Corrections.

Some sliders default to a value that turns them on by default. For the more resource-intensive options, zero does disable the slider.

Zoom options

If the Fit and Fill zoom options are slow, try using the 1:2, 1:3, or 1:4 options in the Navigator panel.

The page states that solutions will be added to the guide as new ones are found or as old ones become outdated. For more “traditional” tips and tricks on optimizing the performance of Lightroom, check out this page.

Lightroom Help: Performance hints [Adobe via John Nack]


Image credit: Speed by amalakar

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