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Author Topic: Lightroom development  (Read 6485 times)

larkis

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Lightroom development
« on: September 12, 2018, 12:55:21 pm »

I'm sure this has been touched upon at some point on this site, but what is happening with lightroom classic at the moment ? I have used the application since version 1 and have hundreds of thousands of images in my catalog. Yesterday I downloaded a demo of capture one 11 and was saddened when I realized that in comparison lightroom feels like antique software in terms of performance both on my mac book pro retina and my new 28 core 58 thread windows 10 machine. Everything from adjustment interactivity viewed simultaneously on my 4k cintiq 24 and 27" eizo display to the way the masking tool painting responds on the tablet just feels the way it should given the hardware. This is not even going into the adjustment tools and layers that are not available in lightroom.


Is anyone from adobe aware of this ? Or has the marketing department been engulfed by the cloud and is no longer interested in making software for professionals ? It seems that it's not even supported properly on a 4k display on windows 10. I would switch to Capture one but unfortunately I use a medium format camera not made by phase so that complicates matters for any raw that does not come from my a7rIII. I hope anyone close to adobe can chime in and at least drop a hint that there is some work being done internally to improve the products or if people that have huge libraries need to start thinking about retooling their whole workflow.

john beardsworth

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #1 on: September 12, 2018, 03:08:32 pm »

Define "professionals". Those with medium format gear and brand new high-end systems, sure, but that's only one group that makes a living from photography and there's plenty of stuff listed on this recent features page that is relevant to this broad range of demanding users. The use of embedded previews or the new Auto setting are just two. There has been an ongoing drive to remove performance problems, which is mentioned on that page and elsewhere.

Rather than extrapolate from your specific performance differences between the two apps to some LR vs C1 thing, you might be better off seeing if there is some configuration issue. GPU is as often the culprit as it is the solution, but your specs indicate it should be enabled. It could be that adjusting its settings might be beneficial too.

And maybe ask if people are even able to have huge libraries in C1....
« Last Edit: September 12, 2018, 03:25:35 pm by john beardsworth »
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larkis

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #2 on: September 12, 2018, 03:49:46 pm »

Define "professionals".

Maybe I should have said power users, or people who expect the software to be a well tuned tool for the task it's marketed for (I assume professionals and casual users want this to). I was also not complaining about library performance, just the develop module which seems behind in editing performance on every single machine I have tested it on so far, even after starting a new catalog to rule that variable out. Since the develop module is a big part of the functionality of the software I would hope they can catch back up with Capture One.

Core rot of adobe applications has been discussed elsewhere and it's kind of sad to see the tools a lot of us love fall behind, especially in the areas they were the king of the hill (or the hill itself) before.

john beardsworth

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #3 on: September 12, 2018, 04:47:39 pm »

The core rot stuff is just such a lazy generalisation, like "bloat", isn't it? I think many of us yawn at that term. With all leading applications there are always things one does better than the other, and P1's market demands high end performance and tethering, LR's maybe less so, but how good is C1 at managing more than a few thousand images, HDR which is big in real estate work, or stitching, and so on? I'd still focus on the configuration issues, but in general I am less confident of LR driving large screens and I think there have been too many reports of slowdowns on high end laptops. Solving that isn't a case of a single solution, but a range of them, and since 7.0 that seems to be what Adobe are doing. Yet with such a big and diverse user base, they can never win.
« Last Edit: September 12, 2018, 06:13:41 pm by john beardsworth »
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faberryman

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #4 on: September 12, 2018, 05:16:55 pm »

My feeling is that if Capture One is so great, make the switch from Lightroom and use it. You don't see users of Photoshop dissing Elements.
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larkis

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #5 on: September 12, 2018, 06:24:18 pm »

I would switch to Capture one but unfortunately I use a medium format camera not made by phase so that complicates matters for any raw that does not come from my a7rIII.


Dissing ? Observing lightroom's shortcomings does not mean I have general hatred for it. Elements and photoshop don't pretend to cater to the same market so I'm not sure how that comparison is relevant. Lightroom is basically a player in the same league as Capture One which is why it's jarring to see some of those differences when they do occur.

It seems that other people on the forum are observing similar issues: https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=125429.0 and adobe has come out in 2017 admitting this is a concern of the community: https://theblog.adobe.com/on-lightroom-performance/

Mark D Segal

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #6 on: September 12, 2018, 06:40:29 pm »

As a user of both, I have a couple of salient observations.

Firstly, in respect of the O/P's basic complaint about the responsiveness of the Lr Develop Module, I don't have the same experience. Mine is pretty good. I find Lr responds to edit commands instantaneously as it always did since years ago. My computing environment is not even the most recent. I'm using a mid-2010 MacPro (desktop) with 24GB RAM, 2.66GHz clock speed and 24GB virtual RAM.

Regarding the quality of output from Lr, Martin Evening's comparison of the two applications, though a version or so predating the most recent for both applications, I think says it all, nicely laid out in a scientific, systematic manner. For those who haven't seen it, I can roughly sum it up as "6 of one, half a dozen of the other", though there are some nuances, so that rough statement doesn't do it complete justice. If you want the fine details read Martin's contribution. I've worked in both and always found that the toolsets in both applications allow one to derive approximately equivalent definition, tonality and colour, but I seldom work larger than for 13*19 inch output, so I haven't compared them for mural-sized enlargements.

There are four aspects of Capture One that don't often get picked up in these discussions:

(1) For those who own Phase One camera systems (I have an earlier one), for doing tethered capture this is the only option. Tethered capture comes in very handy in studio settings where absolute freedom from vibration is important. I'm using it for macro-photography just now and this is a clear case in point.

(2) There is a basic difference of architecture between C1 and Lr that I think is important, I have brought to Adobe's attention years ago, but it never worked its way into the Adobe way of structuring the application: when you do layered work with C1 (creating masks, etc.) you have at hand the full editing toolset. This is not the case for Lr, where any kind of masking (Adjustment brush or Graduated tool) offers only a reduced set of editing tools. I have long hoped for the day when Lr would allow one access to the full toolset when working on masked portions of the photo.

(3) When you use "Sessions" as the organizing principle for your work in C1, absolutely everything related to all the photos within that Session is self-contained within a file structure for that Session. So if you want to port the work you've done from one computer to another, all you need to do is send the Session over to C1 on the other computer and everything is identical between the two. Syncing has always been a nightmare with Lr.

(4) Finally, there are some Cultural Heritage specialty features in C1 designed for cultural heritage copy work with the latest Phase One and Digital Editions equipment that don't exist in Lr, but to access these you need the CH Edition of C1, which is terribly expensive.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Rhossydd

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #7 on: September 13, 2018, 05:41:27 am »

in respect of the O/P's basic complaint about the responsiveness of the Lr Develop Module, I don't have the same experience.
Maybe you're the lucky one or have lower expectations than everyone else.
Poor responsiveness of the develop module has been complained about time and time again, both here and in just about every other relevant forum on the net. If it really wasn't a widespread issue Adobe wouldn't be making such a fuss about trying to rectify it recently.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #8 on: September 13, 2018, 09:08:10 am »

Maybe you're the lucky one or have lower expectations than everyone else.
Poor responsiveness of the develop module has been complained about time and time again, both here and in just about every other relevant forum on the net. If it really wasn't a widespread issue Adobe wouldn't be making such a fuss about trying to rectify it recently.

Can you point us to evidence of the "fuss" Adobe has made and whether what they've been doing is "rectifying" performance from what standard to what standard, versus simply striving for faster performance as any application developer would do in the normal course of improvement and then marketing these changes?

I don't think I'm lucky and I can't conceptualize my expectations in terms of other peoples' expectations because I have no way of objectively knowing what they are relative to mine and how to measure them.

All I can do is report my own experience from years and years of using this application. My most current experience relates to version 7.1. If the responsiveness of the editing tools has declined between that version and the most recent, I wouldn't have had that experience so I can't report on it. All I can tell readers is that using 7.1 I don't experience adjustment lags between the time I trigger an edit and the time it takes effect. If there were noticeable delays I would be concerned. So that is as close a "scientific" statement about my expectations that I can make.

There is one aspect of responsiveness that I do find somewhat concerning, but it is specific to one function and unclear what the cause may be: calling-up large TIFF files in the Develop module, and here I am talking about files of film scans that are roughly 450 MB large, being 27 x 18 inch linear dimensions at 360 PPI. When I open these photos in Develop, I can be  staring at the "loading" advisory for perhaps 20 to 30 seconds - I haven't timed it exactly. Now is that because of Lightroom, or because the data is being fetched from an eight year old 7200 RPM hard drive? How much faster would it be if I were to replace the hard drive with an SSD? Could be night and day. But 24 MP raw files from my Sony a6300 load-up very rapidly.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Rhossydd

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #9 on: September 13, 2018, 09:26:01 am »

Can you point us to evidence .............
Mark, you've been on this forum for years, you're not stupid, you know very well how much criticism has been leveled at Adobe on this issue and the amount of puff they've expended on surveying users for issues and promoting any tiny improvement they've tried to screw out of LR.
Don't expect me to waste time itemising it all, there's just so much.

Just be honest and accept that performance in the develop module has been one LR's weak points for years for a lot of users.
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john beardsworth

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #10 on: September 13, 2018, 09:34:10 am »

Can you point us to evidence of the "fuss" Adobe has made and whether what they've been doing is "rectifying" performance from what standard to what standard, versus simply striving for faster performance as any application developer would do in the normal course of improvement and then marketing these changes?

From around the time they introduced Classic, Mark, a series of releases specifically included performance improvements and targeted a variety of areas of the program. Unfortunately Adobe have rejigged their blogs from the old LR journal and it's a pain tracking down migrated posts, but I did come across this helpful
list of new features and would point you to the 7.0 and 7.2 posts. Using the embedded previews is one action which isn't a standard code optimisation.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #11 on: September 13, 2018, 09:41:47 am »

Mark, you've been on this forum for years, you're not stupid, you know very well how much criticism has been leveled at Adobe on this issue and the amount of puff they've expended on surveying users for issues and promoting any tiny improvement they've tried to screw out of LR.
Don't expect me to waste time itemising it all, there's just so much.

Just be honest and accept that performance in the develop module has been one LR's weak points for years for a lot of users.

Don't have the temerity to read into my mind what I know or don't know. And don't think for a moment that your interpretation of what Adobe has been doing is necessarily gospel and my interpretation anything less than my honest perception of what they are doing. The glass can be half-full, half-empty, different people have different perspectives and may even disagree on perceived "facts".

The most honest thing I can do is report my own experience and that's what I've done.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #12 on: September 13, 2018, 09:47:49 am »

From around the time they introduced Classic, Mark, a series of releases specifically included performance improvements and targeted a variety of areas of the program. Unfortunately Adobe have rejigged their blogs from the old LR journal and it's a pain tracking down migrated posts, but I did come across this helpful
list of new features and would point you to the 7.0 and 7.2 posts. Using the embedded previews is one action which isn't a standard code optimisation.

Useful link, thanks.

I don't understand what is inferred in your last sentence. Grateful if you could clarify it.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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john beardsworth

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #13 on: September 13, 2018, 11:00:08 am »

I was pointing out that the feature wasn't simply "simply striving for faster performance as any application developer would do in the normal course of improvement and then marketing these changes?" As well as fine tuning existing code and marketing the changes, this was a new feature to improve performance.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #14 on: September 13, 2018, 12:07:52 pm »

As well as fine tuning existing code and marketing the changes, this was a new feature to improve performance.

Ah - that's an important clarification, because one could have mistakenly interpreted it to mean that it was something wrong-headed (...isn't standard optimization). Thanks for clarifying.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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faberryman

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #15 on: September 13, 2018, 12:34:46 pm »

Maybe you're the lucky one or have lower expectations than everyone else.
Poor responsiveness of the develop module has been complained about time and time again, both here and in just about every other relevant forum on the net. If it really wasn't a widespread issue Adobe wouldn't be making such a fuss about trying to rectify it recently.
Most people want stuff to go faster. Most software developers strive to speed things up as a matter of course. I’d like LR to respond faster too, but it actually works fine. Responsiveness is largely determined by how much you want to spend on your CPU/GPU, and whether you are running an SSD.
« Last Edit: September 13, 2018, 12:38:34 pm by faberryman »
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ButchM

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #16 on: September 13, 2018, 01:24:28 pm »

Responsiveness is largely determined by how much you want to spend on your CPU/GPU, and whether you are running an SSD.

This is not universally true. As with most endeavors ... it's not a one-size-fits-all situation.

If you research discussions here, on the Adobe U2U forums and elsewhere, you will see where some savvy, experienced users with some very capable top of the line hardware are suffering from excruciatingly slow performance. The situation doesn't seem to have a singular universal quick fix answer that can be pinpointed reliably to either software and/or hardware.

My own experience working mostly on moderate to above average hardware configurations, I have had very good responsiveness when working with my normal 20-24MP (D750 and D500) images but do see significant slowness when throwing a large basket full of 50MP (D850) images which is understandable as there is much more data involved. Sometimes it's a matter of perspective along with the size and quantity of the image files we most commonly work with.
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Wayne Fox

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #17 on: September 13, 2018, 03:45:17 pm »

Maybe you're the lucky one or have lower expectations than everyone else.
Poor responsiveness of the develop module has been complained about time and time again, both here and in just about every other relevant forum on the net. If it really wasn't a widespread issue Adobe wouldn't be making such a fuss about trying to rectify it recently.
I’m using LR to work on IQ3 100 files all the time, using a 2013 MacPro and now exclusively on a 2018 MacBook Pro with an eGPU when at home.  I see no real issues with LR performance unless I try some intensive work with the spot tool (over 100 spots) or maybe having a large number of adjustment layers (more than 10 or so), both scenarios something I just don’t find myself doing.

I use C1 Pro as well but to be honest the workflow from import to printing with LR is something I’ve done so long, and I get great results.  I also find the LR auto mask function (something I rely heavily on) works far better in LR and is pretty weak in C1.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #18 on: September 13, 2018, 04:05:03 pm »


I use C1 Pro as well but to be honest the workflow from import to printing with LR is something I’ve done so long, and I get great results.  I also find the LR auto mask function (something I rely heavily on) works far better in LR and is pretty weak in C1.

I agree - and the Print module in Lr is better developed.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Schewe

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Re: Lightroom development
« Reply #19 on: September 13, 2018, 06:29:52 pm »

I see no real issues with LR performance unless I try some intensive work with the spot tool (over 100 spots) or maybe having a large number of adjustment layers (more than 10 or so), both scenarios something I just don’t find myself doing.

I find that one of the biggest slowdowns for LR is local adjustments done with the Adjustment Brush while using Auto Mask. This is a known issue because the auto-mask adjustments need a degree of precision that is simply not best done with parametric adjustments. Soft brushes and gradients don't suffer the same slowdowns. The mention of spot healing is also a potential slow down because again, parametric adjustments tax ACR/LR's processing. Add to that a large high resolution display and you have the makings of very slow ACR/LR performance...

I'm really amazed at how far people try to push parametric adjustments...localized adjustments and retouching is best done in Photoshop where the pixels are being edited and not in ACR/LR where the parameters are beinging edited. I kinda see an anti-Photoshop bias by a lot of photographers who try to everything in raw.

Don't get me wrong...I'm really good at working in ACR/LR. Heck, I even write books about editing in those apps. But I'm also pretty good in Photoshop and have no problem pulling the trigger and drawing the line at parametric editing and pop an image into Photoshop for further editing...often I'll split the difference and open an image from LR as a Smart Object in Photoshop so I can easily combine parametric editing with pixel editing.

ACR/LR weren't designed as final image editing applications. ACR was designed to open raw images into Photoshop for further editing and LR was designed to deal with masses of raw images photographers find themselves shooting.

If LR is running real slow for you, ya gotta ask why...are you trying to do too much in LR that really should be done in Photoshop?

BTW, I really only have slow performance on a regular basis on DNG panos and processed panos in .tif–that and large film scans. But then I'm not doing editing of those images in ACR/LR, I just store them in LR.
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