Lightroom Classic CC; Preliminary Assessment—The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Often times, I stop and photograph unique small country churches.  I find them very interesting (click to enlarge)
In this particular image, I found the outward bow of the left wall along with the slant of the roof above the vent intriguing.
Evidently, this little church was not built as well as it could have been but it might have been that volunteers may
have been all the congregation could afford.  Also, the shadow pattern, two crosses on the doors and the
address sign were interesting to me.
X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 16mm; 1/340th sec. @ f/8; ISO 200
Edited in the new Lightroom Classic CC

Yesterday, after ensuring there were no major bugs in the Lightroom Classic CC upgrade, I downloaded and installed it in both my desktop and laptop PCs.  I've been a critic of Lightroom CC in the past primarily for being excruciatingly slow.  You can read what I ranted and wrote about here and here.  Is this new version faster?  Preliminarily, yes and no.  So far, I have found a mixed bag.

First, my desktop computer is my mainstay for cataloging and editing my images.  I have a year old Hewlett-Packard desktop with a 4ghz i7 Intel processor, 24gb of RAM, and am running two Samsung 850 EVO internal 2TB SSD hard drives.  I'm using the latest version of Windows 10-64 bit and my computer is equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 graphics card.  I'm sure there are faster computers but this one is much, much faster and of greater power required to run either Photoshop and Lightroom.  I should have no problem running either program at its fastest speed.  Huh!

One of the issues I ranted about in the past is how slow Lightroom was in importing my Fujifilm RAW files.  To find out if this new version is faster, I set out to test file import speed as well as the time it takes to build previews after import.  Because I primarily import RAW images but sometimes also JPEG Fine files for the film simulations, I would use my X-T2 and those two file formats for the tests.  In the past, importing Fujifilm RAW files has been really, really slow.  Will this new version of Lightroom Classic CC be faster? I set up identical tests on the old Lightroom CC 2017 and, again, on the new version once I installed it.

The results are a bit confounding and I can't explain them entirely, but in general, yes, the program is faster.  Here is what I did:

I ran two sets of identical tests.  One on the old version of Lightroom and the second on the new version.

I shot 100 RAW plus 100 Fine JPEG images with my Fujifilm X-T2.  The RAW files were losslessly compressed, as I normally have the camera set.

I opened Lightroom CC, cleared the cache and then imported the RAW + JPEG images.  I timed the import of the 200 images.  I then deleted all of the images, closed Lightroom, rebooted it, cleared the cache, then imported just the 100 RAW images.  I did the exact same thing again only this time importing just the 100 JPEG images.  Again, I did this same procedure on the old Lightroom CC version, then installed the new version, now called Lightroom Classic CC and performed the same tests.

Also, the images were on a Sandisk Extreme Pro UHS II SDXC card (300mb/sec) and placed into a USB 3.0 card reader plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the computer.  

Old Lightroom CC                 Import Time            Preview Build Time       Total Time

RAW + JPEG                             2:26                             5:43                        8:09

RAW Only                                1:30                              5:46                        7:16

JPEG Only                               0:55                              2:59                        3:54

New Lightroom Classic CC                                                                                       

RAW + JPEG                             2:40                             4:26                        7:06

RAW Only                                 2:03                             1:23                        3:26

JPEG Only                                2:12                             1:42                        3:54

I will add that I invoked the feature in the new Lightroom Classic CC to allow import and preview building to be done in parallel.  You can find that check box in the Preferences drop down menu.  By the way, the import dialog was set for Standard Previews.

The new version, in these tests, was slower to import but because of the parallel preview building, overall faster to complete both tasks.  JPEG Only took exactly the same overall time.  Why it would take more time to import the images in the new version is a mystery to me.  The only thing of which I can speculate is that simultaneously building the previews changes the import dynamics as the program is performing additional functions before importation starts.  I would think, at the very least, it should be the same time.  JPEG importation took more than twice as long, negating any speed improvement.

I preformed one more test.  I conducted the same test in an identical manner only changing the types of previews that would be used, again, in the import function.  This time I opted to import "Embedded and Sidecar" previews, in other words the JPEG previews built into the RAW file itself, instead of building a separate preview.  Here are the times:

RAW + JPEG                             2:25                              0:37                        3:02

This is even faster but the previews, again, are the JPEGs your camera manufacturer includes in the RAW files.  If you have your JPEG settings on your camera set to no or minimal sharpening (in-camera) your previews will not look sharp until standard previews are built within Lightroom.  They will also temporarily take on any other characteristics you had set, i.e., high contrast, high saturation, etc.  In the case of Fujifilm, they imbed previews that are smaller than Fine size and you cannot see your images at 100%.  One of the reasons so many of us Fujifilm users set our cameras for RAW + Fine JPEG.  We want to see our images on the camera's LCD at 100% while still in the field.  I wish Fujifilm would change that.  I know of no other camera manufacturer that forces their users to have to set RAW + Fine JPEG in order to see 100% previews.

If you are going to improve import speed and set your import selections for Embedded and Sidecar, then I would also recommend checking the box in the Preferences drop down to create standard previews when your computer is idle.

One other positive that I found is that when I looked at my images at 100%, the generation time of the 1:1 preview was shorter than in the past.  It averaged around 5 seconds which is faster than the older version of Lightroom.

As for the mixed bag, the bad and ugly?  Well, I'm not going to completely conclude at this point that Lightroom is not any better now.  I tried editing both with and without my graphics card and found that not using it still seemed better.  I want to work with that on more files from different cameras before coming to a concrete conclusion.

Scrolling down through the Library module is still not smooth on my computer.  That shouldn't be.  Also, sometimes I'm getting instant changes when moving a slider and sometimes I'm not.  I'll reserve judgment for that function's speed as well.

Finally, boot up speed seems just a little faster.  Again, I want to boot through many cycles to see if, indeed, it is faster.

As much as I am aggravated with Lightroom's speed, I will keep it for now.  There is just no good alternative (yet) in asset management through good database support as well as editing functions.  However, when something really looks interesting, I will check it out.  The danger is, and many may not think of this, if you migrate to another software program, you may lose all of your image edits for your entire Lightroom catalog.  In other words, if you leave Lightroom, make sure that whatever program you adopt, that it will keep all of the editing you've done to your thousands of images contained in the Lightroom catalog.  If it doesn't, all of your images will look like they did right out of your camera!  That is not good!

There are two new masking features in this new version of Lightroom.  They are located at the bottom of the brush, radial filter and graduated filter panels.  These two new features allow you to adjust/select your mask using a color range or a luminance range to more accurately and more easily make your selection.  I plan on playing with those as I edit my images.  They both look helpful.

Finally, I want to thank Adobe for trying.  They seem to be making an effort to improve this program based upon old code and I suspect there is only so much they can do with it unless the code is totally rewritten.  I suspect the new Lightroom CC, cloud based solution, is the first step in that process.  But, I am not a mobile user and don't have any desire to pay more to store my images in the Adobe Cloud.  I rather have my images locally, secure and safe at no additional cost.

More as I get more experience with this program.

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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