camera raw

When working inside Camera Raw, moving to other pictures can be sped up if the current edit state of the images is already rendered in the Camera Raw cache, so one strategy is to make sure the Camera Raw cache is on your fastest volume and is large enough to hold the image cache for a typical session. You can adjust the size and location of the Camera Raw cache in Camera Raw preferences (click the gear icon near the top right corner). It defaults to your system volume, which on on macOS is inside the standard ~/Library folder.

Also, it can depend on which Mac you are using. If the Performance panel below says “Your system automatically supports full acceleration,” that’s good because it means Camera Raw is already taking advantage of GPU acceleration in Mac hardware. If it says something else like “Your system automatically supports limited acceleration,” that might be part of the cause of Camera Raw feeling slow. In that case you might mention what model Mac you’re using; for example, if it’s an older Intel Mac with a weak GPU.

There is no proxy workflow in Camera Raw. In video editors, low-resolution proxies are valuable when you want to make playback more responsive for temporal edits (cuts based on timing), when you don’t need to look closely at sharpness and color. In still image editors, it’s the opposite: There are no temporal edits, instead you are spending most of your time looking at the quality of tone and color, and at the sharpness of detail, so proxy workflows are not useful in still image editors because they lower quality and resolution too much.

Even in video editing, the type of video edits I do in Premiere Pro are now sufficiently accelerated by the GPU and video hardware in my current Mac that I stopped creating proxies; it’s now fast enough without them.

And when exporting, of course, export from original file so it doesn't lose quality?

By @Veljko37730442mebp

You can control this when you use Save Options to export a copy. If you click the Save icon (see picture below), in the Save Options dialog box you can choose any of the seven file formats offered, and then choose a compression type provided by that format. In the example below, TIFF was chosen because it is one of the formats that offers lossless compression (full preservation of quality). You can also choose another format such as JPEG that offers lossy compression (much smaller file sizes by not preserving all original quality).