What's the best way to speed up open as layers from Lightroom

[Tinger17]

I amd a real estate photographer. I have a 2017 27" i7 Imac with 32MB RAM and a 1TB SSD. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to speed up the process of opening multiple images as layers from lightroom. The images in question are ~30mb raw files, and I may have anywhere from 2-10 images involved in a finished blended image. Once they're in PS, everything is fast and fine. It's the image loading time I hate. Doing the math on number of images/job * number of jobs means a LOT of time waiting I'd like to get back, lol.

My workflow is to load the raw files onto the internal SSD (OS system, app software, 60-100gb free space most of the time) in LR. Process in PS, return the TIF back to LR and export as JPG. Once finished, I archive the finished files off to a traditional hard drive, so I'm not working on a spinning drive.

If I got a fast external Thunderbolt SSD, would it make a difference? Or is the image loading speed going to be gated by some internal component in the iMac? If so, what IS that component? And is the only way to make a big improvement here to upgrade to a new machine? 

Thanks. I don't want to throw money at this unless I know it's going to improve things.

[Tinger17]

Forgot - I'm on the current versions of subscription PS/LR Classic, but I think I'm on Big Sur on the imac (posting from different machine).

[D Fosse]

You're assuming that this is just an "open" operation, and that it should be as fast as opening a jpeg. It's not. There's a lot of raw processing going on before the file can be passed to Photoshop.

A raw file isn't "finished" on disk like an RGB file is. Every time you do something, the whole processing pipeline is run through from start to finish. It just takes time.

Here's CPU activity on opening as layers. Note that disk activity ceases quickly:

[Tinger17]

Thank you. So that implies the CPU itself would be the gating factor more than disk speed, bus speed, etc? Do Adobe products take full advantage of the new crop of multi-core M1 CPUs? Again, don't want to over-buy if my main needs (adobe stuff) doesn't utilize the extra CPU cores. 

[D Fosse]

Well, as you can see, it uses all 8 virtual/4 physical cores here. I assume there's a point of diminishing return somewhere. 

But there's still the two women-one baby aspect. They can't do it in 4.5 months. Multi-core is only efficient up to a point, and where that is will vary.

[Earth Oliver]

you didn't mention how long this process takes? Can you give us an average for 5 images as layers? 

[Tinger17]

Call it 5 seconds/image, plus time to open PS if it's not already open. I know, it's not long, but it can add up to ~15-18 minutes/job loading time. That's why I was curious if it was CPU-bound, or if a faster external SSD might actually help. As was pointed out above, its might be due to limitations in the CPU (5 year old tech).

[John2545607855l9]

Hi Tinger17, just wondering if you ended up upgrading anything and found better results?  I have the same issue processing real estate photography.  Takes my computer 5 sec/image as well.  Wish someone would test and make Youtube comparison video with real world results, don't want to spend for no improvement.   Thanks.

My set-up:  Intel Core i7-9700F, 32GB DDR4, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, Intel SSD660p 512GB hard drive, working files/photos on Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB and scratch disk WD-Black SN750 NVME 500GB PCIe.  Non working files stored on 5TB external drive. 

[sschaef1]

FWIW, I recently upgraded from an i7-8700 rig to a computer featuring i9-14900, GTX 4070, 64GB RAM and SSD drives for both the program operation and the scratch drive.  Low and behold.....still takes about 3 seconds per image to transfer stack from Lightroom to Photoshop.  However, saving the final TIF back to Lightroom is nearly instantaneous in most cases.  Also, aligning the stack in Photoshop is a bit quicker than on my previous computer.

[D Fosse]

@sschaef1 Read the thread again. A raw file is a very different animal from a rendered TIFF.

A raw file is not ready to go from disk like a TIFF is. It has to run through the whole demosaicing and processing pipeline, and there's a lot of processing that needs to be done. This full process runs every time you open it, and runs again every time you make an adjustment. 3 seconds is perfectly fine (depending on pixel size of course)