Slow when using a mask in LRC 13

Report · May 10, 2024

Desktop PC. I9-12900, 64GB memory, GPU is an Nvidia 4060TI. All the storage is on M.2 NVMe with images on an 8 TB SSD.

Images are nothing special – I see the same behavior whether it’s a 20 megapixel image or a 50 megapixel one.

I looked through several of the topics in here (some from older versions, some from LRC13) from other people having performance issues with Lightroom 13.X. Hopefully, I’ve missed something simple, but I didn’t see much to resolve the problems.

I have to add myself to the people having problems with slow, laggy, hanging operations in Lightroom 13.

I upgraded from the AMD GPU that worked OK with LRC 12 to the 4060 TI was because once I started using LRC 13, performance deteriorated. I thought throwing a more capable GPU at the problem would cure it. Didn’t work.

It’s not a problem as near as I can tell when doing normal, “adjust sliders in Develop” or “select a keyword” sort of adjustments. But when doing things like masks, particularly brush masks, the cursor just stops and hangs for up to several seconds, then resumes. It makes getting accurate selections more difficult because the cursor isn’t smooth. Zooming to 100% to make more accurate selections makes it worse.

Similar behavior can happen when using the Lens Blur – the cursor hangs when doing Blur or Focus and when making adjustments in Visualize Depth. I also see it occasionally when doing content-aware remove, but I only use that very rarely in Lightroom.

I was also hoping for faster exports, faster 1:1 previews, and so on. Not much happened there either, but I can live with that if I can get rid of the hanging and lag.

I don’t see this behavior with any of the tools in Photoshop.

I don’t see the behavior in Topaz Photo AI, which runs perceptibly faster with the 4060 than with the old GPU.

I’ve done the “standard” things I believe. Tried no graphics acceleration – just made everything slower. And the partial acceleration. And full acceleration. The lag, hang and such is always there.

I disabled the onboard GPU.

I opened the Nvidia control panel and added both Lightroom and Photoshop in there.

I've made sure it' susing the durrent drivers. I've tried both the studio and game-ready drivers.

Are there settings for the GPU in the Nvidia control panel that can be configured to make Lightroom (and Photoshop, but mostly Lightroom) perform significantly better?

Are there other things I should try that are likely to address the problem? System configuration? Something in Lightroom configuration?

Has Adobe said anything about being aware of the problem and trying to correct it?

Report · Jul 28, 2024

@RG631971

What do mean by "started some more complex masking tasks as recommended in a different thread."

Please provide examples of what you mean or better stil export a problematic image with masks as a DNG file, upload to Dropbox or similar, then post a link to same here on forum.

Report · Jul 27, 2024

Unfortunately, NO. Lightroom still runs poorly (the grammar police were offended) most of the time. Doesn't happen with Photoshop, or Topaz Photo AI or anything else on the box, but Lightroom has very frequent stutters.

The graphics driver has been updated MULTIPLE times, and I've used both the game-ready and studio drivers. So far, I haven't seen any difference.

In theory, it MAY be marginally less laggy, and not hang for as long immediately after shutting down and restarting Lightroom, but 90+ percent of the time, Lightroom, particularly when doing something with a mask, will have very frequent stutters when working on masks. Moving the mouse it'll track for a second or two, then hang for anywhere from 1 - 5 seconds, then resume. Over and over. Intermittently and randomly. Never happened with LR V12, don't RECALL it happening with the very early versions of V13 (though it may have). Definitely hasn't gotten ANY better with newer versions. If anything, it's gotten worse.

In THEORY, it started doing this about the time I replaced the AMD 5700XT with Nvidia 4600TI, but that seems unlikely. Other than updates to Lightroom that's the ONLY thing that's changed in the box and there are a LOT of other systems using Nvidis 4XXX GPUs.

Unfortunately, it's not consistent, and is seemingly random, so with nothing to demonstrate a consistent, reproducable problem, it's difficult to point to anything more specific.

I know I DON'T have the same problem when using the far less capable Dell Precision 7740 laptop rather than the desktop, so as near as I can tell, it's something on the desktop.

[abuse removed by moderator]

Report · Jul 27, 2024

"In THEORY, it started doing this about the time I replaced the AMD 5700XT with Nvidia 4600TI,"

Perhaps you meant 4060 Ti?

Open up your desktop computer and inspect that GPU

Is it firmly in the slot
Is it in the correct slot
Is any (likely) power cable connected (shown in image below)
Is that power cable loose
Any dust bunnies around GPU cooling fan
Is the monitor cable loose either at GPU or Monitor.

LrC is a resource hog, and some issue that do not come up while using other apps can show up when using LrC, including hardware issues.

Report · Jul 27, 2024

can you post in a reply a screenshot of LrC /Preferences/Performance/

Report · Jul 27, 2024

Thanks for your effort. As mentioned earlier I have the same problem as DavePinMinn. I deleted all "erasures" and masks to see if I could recreate or identify where the slow behavior started. Did one mask and everything was working great in terms of brush and sliders speed. Duplicated and inverted that mask. Adjustment sliders on either mask became functionally useless with brush problems again beginning to reoccur. If I continue to editing, I get sporadic "not responding" messages but they are short lived. It seems that the system processing is getting bogged down with the addition of a single mask but that seems odd based on the resources available and the level of editing is not that complex. System info listed below. Thanks for any ideas you may have on how to address the problems.

Lightroom Classic version: 13.4 [ 202406181129-60d181b7 ]
License: Creative Cloud
Language setting: en
Operating system: Windows 10 - Business Edition
Version: 10.0.19045
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Logical processor count: 8
Processor speed: 3.5GHz
SqLite Version: 3.36.0
CPU Utilisation: 2.0%
Power Source: Plugged In, 255%
Built-in memory: 32719.1 MB
Dedicated GPU memory used by Lightroom: 3544.6MB / 16109.0MB (22%)
Real memory available to Lightroom: 32719.1 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 2331.2 MB (7.1%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 6537.2 MB
GDI objects count: 727
USER objects count: 1889
Process handles count: 2416
Memory cache size: 802.6MB
Internal Camera Raw version: 16.4 [ 1897 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 5
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2
Camera Raw virtual memory: 1017MB / 16359MB (6%)
Camera Raw real memory: 1088MB / 32719MB (3%)

Cache1:
Preview1- RAM:21.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4310.NEF
Preview2- RAM:21.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4317.NEF
Final3- RAM:190.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4312.NEF
Final4- RAM:190.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4314.NEF
Preview5- RAM:21.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4318.NEF
Preview6- RAM:21.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4309.NEF
Final7- RAM:459.0MB, VRAM:2598.0MB, _RPG4313.NEF
Preview8- RAM:21.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4308.NEF
Preview9- RAM:21.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4315.NEF
Preview10- RAM:21.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4316.NEF
Preview11- RAM:21.0MB, VRAM:0.0MB, _RPG4311.NEF
NT- RAM:1007.0MB, VRAM:2598.0MB, Combined:3605.0MB

Cache2:
m:802.6MB, n:739.4MB

U-main: 111.0MB

System DPI setting: 96 DPI
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
Standard Preview Size: 1920 pixels
Displays: 1) 1920x1080, 2) 1920x1080, 3) 1920x1080
Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: Yes, External touch: No, External pen: Yes, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info:
DirectX: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (32.0.15.6070)
Init State: GPU for Export supported by default
User Preference: Auto

Report · Jul 27, 2024

You System Info indicates that you have 3 displays.

What happens to performance if you switch 2 of the displays off? The reason that I ask/suggest is is that only the primary display makes use of the GPU. Everything that is done on the secondary displays is CPU only and may lag compared to the primary display.

Report · Jul 28, 2024

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately, eliminating two of the monitors did not help. However, in continuing to work to understand the problem I have developed a hypothesis. Maybe someone with a better knowledge of the details of how Lightroom is working can offer some more insight. The mask I created was for a military helicopter (attached). A lot of detail that had to be done with a brush since the auto features did not isolate it accurately. I went to a different image and made rough a mask for an individual with a brush and did the same for the background. Did not result in any problems. Went back to the chopper picture and did the same thing basically using the mouse to create a mask within the general framework and then did the same thing for the background. Also tried copying and inverting the original mask as done previously. Neither approach produced problems, everything was functional. Could it be that creating a highly detailed mask consisting of many brush strokes be creating so many “tasks” for the associated algorithm that it simply overwhelms the processing capacity? I have noticed a little “wheel” in the lower right-hand corner below the image (LRC) that turned incessantly in my original efforts. Might there be a difference in how input is handled between a mouse and a Wacom pen? (I have a really old version of a tablet which could also be an issue.) If I (we) could develop an understanding of what the problems ultimately are, could hypothetically adjust workflow (PS/LRC) accordingly. Per other discussions on Adobe forums, using LRC seemed to be most effective for the tasks I currently have but if there is an inherent limitation represented by photos that for whatever reasons do not lend themselves to the auto detection algorithms need to plan accordingly.

Report · Jul 28, 2024

LR can slow down considerably if you have a very large number of brush strokes. If you share the original photo, we can see if others observe noticeable slowdowns, in which case that is the likely culprit.

Select the photo and do the menu command Metadata > Save MetaData To File. If the original photo is a JPEG, attach it here. If it is raw, upload it and its .xmp sidecar to Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar and post the public sharing link here.

Report · Jul 28, 2024

Again, thanks, a jpg of the photo was attached to my previous comment. My guess is this is the case. I do not know the specifics of how selections are handled but have read PS and LRC do approach masking differently. Sounds as if I am going to find a workflow for images with more amorphous content. I hope this might provide potential help and insight for others that have the same type experience with LRC.

Report · Jul 28, 2024

Again, thanks, a jpg of the photo was attached to my previous comment.

By @RG631971

The file you attached in your previous reply looks to be a screenshot, not the actual image. Can you place the actual image in a cloud share such as DropBox, so that members can investigate it. See the reply by Johnrellis as to specifics. If your actual original image is a JPEG you might be able to attach it.. If it is a RAW, that is problematic (and best shared via a cloud share)

In your previous reply you stated "A lot of detail that had to be done with a brush ". That brings up a possible issue involving mask/brush complexity, especially if their are many many brushes (Add/Subtract, etc)

Report · Jul 28, 2024

Just to be sure things are current, I updated the Nvidia drivers to the latest studio drivers AGAIN. Doesn’t seem to make any difference. I’m using the Studio Drivers at the moment, but in the past, using the game drivers didn’t seem to matter.

Restarted Windows 11. Only thing running is Lightroom. No Photoshop, no nothing else like Outlook, Word, nothing. Rebooted, opened Lightroom, tried an image.

It MAY have been marginally better when doing a mask, but that could also be confirmation bias since I want it to be better.

Just out of curiosity – do other people see quite jerky, irregular movements, and glitches when using the Lightroom Remove, specifically the generative fill? On my desktop it’s VERY apparent when I use that, but since it’s an early release I don’t know if it’s expected to function poorly. It’s worse than doing masking, so it’s an easy area for me to see the inconsistent performance with that tool.

I’m going into the box this morning to make sure things are plugged in correctly and reseat the GPU. I’d love for that to be all that’s needed, but I’m going to feel really dumb if it is!

Here’s what my performance settings are. I’ve had them in auto and custom settings, and it doesn’t seem to matter.

Report · Aug 13, 2024

I do not think it is your GPU.
I do not think it is your GPU driver.
And, I assume that by now you have inspected your GPU in the slot and made sure it was not loose or the power cords not connected.
As this particular GPU does not draw much Power (as say compared to a 4090) I do not suspect it is a PSU issue (you might want to calculate that just in case) (REF 1)

Moving on

It may be the shear number of brushes in your masking. But to nail that down a full copy of your image AND your edits would be desirable. (See reply/request by johnrellis)
I see that your limit on CACHE is not the pathetic Adobe default of 5 GB, That you have increased up to and a bit passed the Adobe (and others) recommendation to in your case 25 GB. And I see that it is not on your C drive (a recommendation for Windows computers as to avoid competing with the Windows paging file). All good. Perhaps test out with that set to say 50 GB.
What is your Windows Power Settings? Is it set for Best Performance? (recommend)
An NVIDIA GPU, have you considered entering the NVIDIA Control app and changing some defaults for LrC? See (REF 2) and (REF 3).

(REF 1) PC Power Supply Calculator (New Egg)

(REF 2) Panning lags at 100% (1:1) zoom level | Windows (ADOBE)

(REF 3) Nvidia Control Panel Best SETTINGS For Adobe Lightroom Clasic ( FLIXITY)

Report · Aug 12, 2024

Reading through all this nonsense is just ridiculous. LrC is just crazy slow when using masks on big files. It's not the users fault, it's Lightroom. Use previews for editing, there's not much else to do right now. Adobe needs to optimize Lightroom. It worked fine before all the AI improvements to masks. Since then, it's slow.

Report · Aug 13, 2024

I don't doubt that there's a lot that's less than optimal in Lightroom, but if a 4060TI can't perform adequately for a couple basic masks, I think there would be a LOT more screaming from users.

Report · Aug 13, 2024

I have the exact same issue with masks and performance and I almost didn't say anything. I just switched to "use smart previews for editing" thing and the performance is adequate for now. I have 2080Ti and i9-10900K @ 5Ghz and all the other software runs just fine. Lightroom also worked very fast until the AI masking features were introduced. I'd be more than happy to do whatever on my computer to solve the issue but reading through all those posts I don't think we can actually do anything - we didn't change our computers, Adobe changed the software.

Report · Aug 14, 2024

I suspect there isn't sufficient volume of screaming with an easily identified problem to get much attention. I don't recall any of these significant performance problems (significant to me) with the previous version of Lightroom, even with my previous AMD 5700 XT gpu. And the jerky, glitchy, non-smooth performance with masks was not sigificantly improved even after switching to an Nvidia 4060TI.

It must not be affecting very many users...

Report · Aug 15, 2024

Let me know when any of the suggested solutions work.

Report · Aug 19, 2024

This is PURELY my NON-PRECISE experience yesterday while I was just going stuff and NOT TRYING TO GET "ACCURATE" RESULTS. It's from my recollection... Its anecdotal.

Yesterday I was reviewing and culling and cleaning up. Created 1:1 previews for 7 - 800 images. Walked through them, marking some for deletion using the "X" to reject. Took some images and processed them through basic editing, fewer through color correction, some into Photoshop to make adjustments. A few dozen were run through Topaz Photo AI. And so on - ordinary day of making decisions about good, bad, what to reject, what to keep, adjust to see how they looked... Very ordinary, basic day.

In not too much time things started to get laggy and movements were jagged. Ignored it and keep on doing normal things. As time went on, the lag got worse, movements more jagged.

Photoshop shows NO abnormal symptoms, and as near as I can tell, neither did Photo AI or anything else on the system. On the rare quick look at the task manager, NOTHING was working hard or doing more than normal loafing along with available memory and horsepower.

It made NO difference whether Photoshop was running or not - things lagged or didn't lag, hung, got jagged, and the mouse cursor jumped around seemingly randomly. It CERTAINLY showed up in masks, but that WASN'T the only area where thing were jagged. It also worked poorly with the Healing tool and the Remove tool.

At some point, I got tired of the performance this morning (it sat overnight as it usually does, often staying open for several hours when not busy), and shut down Lightroom.

Let the system sit while writing some of this, then restarted Lightroom - didn't do anything. No menu to select the catalog. After 60 seconds or so, went into task manager and killed Adobe Lightroom Classic and restarted it. It started and displayed the start menu, but went no further. Hung. Forced Lightroom Classic to close again, and after several (minimum 10-20) seconds it closed again. Started it a third time, and this time it opened the catalog.

After restarting Lightroom I went into the Windows logs and got these two entries:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Event 1001, Windows Error Reporting

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">

- <System>

<Channel>Application</Channel>

</System>

- <EventData>

<Data Name="EventName">AppHangB1</Data>

<Data Name="Response">Not available</Data>

<Data Name="P1">Lightroom.exe</Data>

<Data Name="AttachedFiles">\\?\C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\Temp\WER.42afb6ce-f130-414f-b6e7-28175e61e7af.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml \\?\C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\Temp\WER.61a0fc87-7ab8-40ae-9d27-42889fea6c70.tmp.csv \\?\C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\Temp\WER.05662a90-3f00-4cdb-ad82-2bd2eef64e5e.tmp.txt \\?\C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\Temp\WER.6d553a84-c61e-4103-9766-66281ded4a2b.tmp.xml</Data>

<Data Name="StorePath">\\?\C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive\AppHang_Lightroom.exe_aae38dd595538ba45a8072ea3aafbb136e3d6da_ccfbed8f_db4e6b04-b50b-4d1a-87d8-8943e0ee89dd</Data>

</EventData>

</Event>

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The second entry was Event 1002, Windows Error report

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">

- <System>

<Channel>Application</Channel>

</System>

- <EventData>

<Data Name="AppName">Lightroom.exe</Data>

<Data Name="ExeFileName">C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom Classic\Lightroom.exe</Data>

<Data Name="HangType">Unknown</Data>

</EventData>

</Event>

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not sure if any of this will be illuminating, but continuing to use the system make it increasingly slow/jaggy/jerky and problematic. Normally I shutdown Lightroom every couple hours, either because I go off to do something else or because performance gets so bad it annoys me. But, this time it was more than masks. Other things also showed performance issues.

Report · Aug 19, 2024

Hi

My issue with LR improved when l moved to Windows 11. However. I still get
lagging but not as bad. Problem is that LR is built on an old platform so
will continue to have issues with AI type functions as it was not built to
handle these type of applications. Adobe are using work arounds to include
these functions but they are Bolt on apps, not integrated functions.

Try some if the newer image editors like ON1 which are built on modern
technology.

Report · Aug 27, 2024

At this point, I'm out of ideas. When LRC is running it gets slower and slower. Starts out bad in masks, and gradually gets to the point where just being in Develop and going to the next image takes multiple seconds. Mouse response in everything deteriorates - jerky, inconsistent, laggy - and eventually, everything in LRC gets so bad I have to shut down LRC and restart it.

Lately, when I do that after it's gotten unusable, just shutting down Lightroom takes multiple MINUTES. And when I start it again, it ALSO takes minutes. This is with the catalog on an NVMe SSD and the catalog on an 8TB SSD.

Once I have it started I do an Optimize catalog, which also takes multiple minutes. Once that's done and I shut down LRC again, which again takes a long time, and restart LRC, it FINALLLY opens normally and goes back to working OK for a little while. Then it starts deteriorating again.

I've tried watching the task manager during all this, and usually it just doesn't respond while all the opening up and shutting down is going on. Just sits there. There's nothing interesting in the Windows logs.

I even took the 8TB SSD and ran a chkdsk for problems. Crystal Disk shows no problems with anybody.

It's getting bad enough I'm considering the nuclear option - get a fairly current Windows 11 Pro image disk, blow away the whole system, and reinstall everything from scratch. This will take at least a week to get everything back on the system, and is the worst option, but I'm not finding any answers for this problem. I don't see any point in going back to LRC V12 'cause I can't use the catalog with the current data, so even if it didn't suck it'd be useless.

Does anybody else have any ideas for determining why this thing is working so poorly, and how to fix it?

Report · Sep 08, 2024

I am in the same boat. 5900 X processor runing overcklocked, 64 GB of RAM, MSI Geforce RTX 3060. Whenever I enable GPU acceleration LRC is useless. It is lagging and GPU is at 100 of usage. If I disable GPU acceleration everything is smooth as butter. What the hell Adobe? Maybe it's time to consider alternatives..

Report · Sep 08, 2024

Btw I did not even use any masks, just tied doing basic editing.

Report · Sep 08, 2024

Do you use the latest driver?
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/230592/

--- Got your issue resolved? Please label the response as 'Correct Answer' to help your fellow community members find a solution to similar problems. ---

Report · Sep 08, 2024

I honestly have tried everything there is on the internet. Also, latest drivers from Nvidia tried gaming and studio one. Always runing 100 percent. This is driving me nuts.. 🙂

Report · Sep 08, 2024

I think Adobe has washed their hands of this one... It looks like just customers struggling to find a fix at this point. I HAVE determined that it only takes ONE mask to change the whole way Lightroom works. I can work for an hour, doing normal stuff, and everything is fine. Then, the FIRST TIME I touch a mask - doesn't appear to matter which mask as near as I can tell, from then on, no matter whether it's the SAME image or another one, things deteriorate from there. Kill Lightroom, restart, and it goes back to normal for another while as long as I don't try to use Lightroom for more than a couple hours - it NEVER lasts more than a day running decent before Lightroom just starts to degrade - but if I touch a mask during any of that, performance quickly degrades.

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Slow when using a mask in LRC 13