A while back Adobe announced that they will release a Lightroom update which focuses on speed. That announcement was met with deep disbelief (see the comments here), and even when Adobe released it’s latest Lightroom CC 7.2, responses were lukewarm. But a real-life test done by Nasim Mansurov of photography life shows that Adobe is finally starting to listen to their customer base. I am not surprised as more and more alternatives are trying to fill the gap in Lightroom user’s hearts.
Nasim ran two batteries of tests one on an i7 MacBook Pro and one on an i7-6700K Skylake PC.
Interestingly, on both tests Lightroom CC 7.2 performed better than the previous 7.1 version, you can see the full test description on the PhotographyLife post.
Lightroom CC 7.1 vs 7.2 Performance on Apple MacBook Pro via photographylife
Lightroom CC 7.2 vs 7.2 Performance on Desktop PC via photographylife
It looks like import, export, and preview generation got a major overhaul, probably using more threads and cores, working on images in parallel. Panorama stitching is faster on PC, and slower on MAC. Some utilities got more than twice as fast on PC, like preview generation, and exporting, those features also got a minor boost on the Mac.
My guess is that Adobe is introducing a new multi-thread engine into the code, and converting functionalities one-by-one, and separately on mac and on PC. If this is the case, we will see more Lightroom functions getting faster with each release. If you had the patience to wait for the next release that it…
[via photographylife, illustration based on commons.wikimedia]
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