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Sorry for the long post! Feel free to skip to the graphs... 🙂
I appreciate all the comments and feedback from everyone and glad (not the right word) to see that others are also experiencing performance problems as I am. It sounds like there is still much work for Adobe to do to address the user experience when it comes to performance, but it also sounds like they're trying, so hopefully they will continue to focus more time and resources on this issue.
I still stand by my initial comments that my first experience with Lightroom Classic CC was AWFUL compared to Lightroom CC, when my expectations were that the new app should be a noticeable improvement over the old app. I saw a level of performance degradation that just surprised the heck out of me, so was really disappointed in the Lightroom app update.
While my subjective experience was negative, I decided to step back yesterday and try to perform some objective "benchmarks" where I repeat a number of steps to try to quantify what I am seeing when I use Lightroom. I was shocked to find that when I performed these tests, I actually found Lightroom Classic CC to perform better at some tasks than Lightroom CC 2015 - when I saw "shocked," I mean that this was totally contrary to my initial experience that prompted me to start this thread. That being said, I did experience a huge performance degradation when actually doing a series of steps to emulate a common workflow that I perform, with a degradation by as much as 50% with the new Lightroom Classic CC over Lightroom CC 2015, which I can see would make using Lightroom Classic CC a huge step backwards - but, I digress...
For my test, I tried to emulate my initial experience of converting my existing catalog with Lightroom Classic CC, importing some images, and working with the images. I performed a series of steps with both a brand new empty catalog, and the same steps with my current catalog, using both Lightroom CC 2015 and Lightroom Classic CC. Each set of steps involves performing the following operations:
- importing and building previews. For this test, I used 70 images from a Nikon D500, which has 20mp images, from RAW uncompressed 14-bit files - the actual files shouldn't matter as what is important is the relative performance in each scenario, and your mileage will vary. For this action, I performed a drag/drop of the image folders into the Library module window.
- after the import is complete, I selected the first image in the Library module, set the image view to be Fit, and then stepped through the images. While normally one wouldn't just step quickly from one picture to another, measuring the amount of time to step from one picture to another is problematic as there is too much error related to reaction time, so expanding the test set provides a better measure of performance. I guess one could take the time and divide it by the number of pictures to get the per-picture time, if one was so inclined. When moving between images, I moved the next image, then waited until the UI completely finished.
- I then performed the previous step in the develop module. In this module, I closed each of the develop tabs as the contents of the open tabs are calculated/drawn/whatever each time the image is displayed, so this affects the performance of displaying an image. I also did not apply any settings changes to the images. When moving between images, I moved the next image, then waited until the UI completely finished - when in the develop module, this seems to be when the "Auto" button in the Tone section is available and not "greyed out."
- I then performed the previous step again, but this time I opened the Basic, Detail, and Lens Correction tabs (ones that I commonly use when editing), with the rest of the tabs collapsed/closed. Again, When moving between images, I moved the next image, then waited until the UI completely finished - when in the develop module, this seems to be when the "Auto" button in the Tone section is available and not "greyed out."
- Since I had seen comments from users that said exporting was supposed to possibly be faster in the new Lightroom Classic CC, I threw in an export of the set of images to JPG images. For the export, I stayed in the Develop module, selected the first image, did a Ctrl-A select all, then File->Export.
new empty catalog...
Lightroom CC 2015
import & build smart previews and 1:1 previews: 3:22
library nav: ~60 sec
develop nav: 1:43 all tabs closed
develop nav: 2:43. Basic, Detail, Lens Corrections open. rest collapsed
export to JPG: 60 sec
LR Classic CC:
import & build smart previews and 1:1 previews: 1:47
library nav: ~40 sec
develop nav: 1:03 all tabs closed
develop nav: 1:53. Basic, Detail, Lens Corrections open. rest collapsed
export to jpg: crashed. "bad_module_info has stopped working"
export to jpg: 55 sec
(All times, lower is better)
existing catalog...
LR CC 2015:
import & build smart previews and 1:1 previews: 3:38
library nav: 50 sec
develop nav: 1:28 sec all tabs closed
develop nav: 2:06 Basic, Detail, Lens Corrections open. rest collapsed
export to JPG: 1:01
LR Classic CC:
import & build smart previews and 1:1 previews: 1:47
library nav: ~55 sec
develop nav: 1:05 sec all tabs closed
develop nav: 1:58 Basic, Detail, Lens Corrections open. rest collapsed
export to jpg: 53 sec
(All times, lower is better)
Looking at the above measured times, it appears that Lightroom Classic CC IS faster (or should be faster) for tasks such as importing and navigating through images. Again, that was not my initial impression, so these results surprised me. These numbers do not directly reflect what I first experienced after installing Lightroom Classic CC, and Lightroom Classic CC did seem to perform better after exiting and restarting the app, so not sure what was up with that. Also, the performance difference between working with the empty catalog versus my existing catalog was negligible (so that didn't account for my initial awful experience with Lightroom Classic CC).
Ok, given that the above results encouraged me in expecting LR Classic CC should be faster than LR CC 2015, I decided to do real work and actually try processing my set of 70 images and see what happened...
I went ahead and performed some common edit adjustment operations on my images including tweaking these settings:
- increase exposure
- increase contrast
- lower highlights
- increase shadows
- lower black level
- increase clarity
- increase vibrance
- increase saturation
- increase the sharpen mask
- increase sharpening
- increase Luminance noise reduction
- Remove chromatic aberration
- Enable profile corrections
I did this to the first image in the develop module, then synced all the settings through the set to apply the changes to all. I then waited a short time while the settings were made.
I then went back to the first image in the set and performed the above task of stepping through the images displayed in the Develop module... and Bingo! Lightroom CC 2015 was more than twice as fast as Lightroom Classic CC! While the percentage varied from my very first experience with the new update, this was closer to the performance degradation that I initially experienced.
existing catalog...
LR CC 2015:
develop nav with settings applied: 3:01 (versus 2:06 with no settings applied)
LR Classic CC:
develop nav with settings applied: 6:22 (versus 1:58 with no settings applied)
(All times, lower is better)
I expected the times to be slower with settings applied and the develop tabs open, and this is what the measurements show. These results show that Lightroom CC 2015 is impacted by edit settings about 50% (versus when they are not applied) when it has to do the extra work with factoring in setting changes, but for some reason Lightroom Classic CC is impacted by roughly 225%! For a performance-focused release of Lightroom, this is not what I would expect. If you do the calculations here, when moving between images in the Develop module with settings applied, Lightroom CC 2015 averages roughly 2.59 seconds to move between images, and the new Lightroom Classic CC averages roughly 5.46 seconds (this is before the UI stops updating itself and LR finishes processing the image for display). I also found some pictures displayed faster than others, and also that the further I moved through my image set in the develop module with Lightroom Classic CC, the longer it seemed to take (so, degradation over time).
Granted, no one normally would step through one photo after another, BUT what this shows is that after editing an image and moving on to the next image, the workflow takes a huge performance hit while the user sits there waiting for Lightroom to finish updating the display before the user can begin the editing process. While this may be no big deal working on a few pictures, factoring this in for working with a hundred pictures or more means that the user is idle more than the computer is, which should NEVER be the case.
So, this should at least show, objectively, that Adobe has work to be done in the Develop module of Lightroom Classic CC to help improve workflow performance, and can actually represent a huge step backwards from Lightroom CC 2015...
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