finally giving up on Lr...best alternative?

[pwp]

I've been an advocate for Adobe since Photoshop v3 and a rusted on Lr user since Lr was in public beta. It's used on high volume projects on a daily basis. The Great Lr Slowdown seemed to start with Lr5 and has been erratic from a performance viewpoint ever since.

Despite running Lr 2015.10.1 on a powerful 8 core 32Gb 3.6Ghz Win10 PC, Lr drags in the Develop Module to the point of being unusable, sometime with a delay of five seconds from a slider move to catch up in the preview. This varies from day to day. It's just weird. I've done everything in the Adobe Universe to find a fix, but to no avail. I've had it.

So I'm after the best alternative to Lr that has a comparable workflow standard and feature set.
I'm not after freeware, just the best there is. ACR? C1Pro? Something I may not be aware of?

-pw

 

[IglooEater]

I've been an advocate for Adobe since Photoshop v3 and a rusted on Lr user since Lr was in public beta. It's used on high volume projects on a daily basis. The Great Lr Slowdown seemed to start with Lr5 and has been erratic from a performance viewpoint ever since.

Despite running Lr 2015.10.1 on a powerful 8 core 32Gb 3.6Ghz Win10 PC, Lr drags in the Develop Module to the point of being unusable, sometime with a delay of five seconds from a slider move to catch up in the preview. This varies from day to day. It's just weird. I've done everything in the Adobe Universe to find a fix, but to no avail. I've had it.

So I'm after the best alternative to Lr that has a comparable workflow standard and feature set. I
I'm not after freeware, just the best there is. ACR? C1Pro? Something I may not be aware of?

-pw

I don't mean to be insulting, but I assume you have OpenGL activated? I found LR snappy enough on my base model 2009 laptop with OpenGL. Until that is, Adobe cut support for my old GPU. :'(

Otherwise, I've been taking a very hard look at C1Pro, and if I leave, that's where I'm going.

 

[pwp]

I don't mean to be insulting, but I assume you have OpenGL activated? I found LR snappy enough on my base model 2009 laptop with OpenGL. Until that is, Adobe cut support for my old GPU. :'(
Otherwise, I've been taking a very hard look at C1Pro, and if I leave, that's where I'm going.

Thanks, yes checked that one...and a million other tips and suggestions from threads in the Lr Forums, Lightroom Queen, Luminous Landscape and so on. I'm not alone, there are a lot of Lr users who also have baffling, utterly inexplicable, unsolvable performance issues. The weirdest thing is that one day it will snap along as expected then the brakes just get slammed on.

-pw

 

[CSD]

I prefer C1 over Lr, it's just faster and more colour accurate especially for portrait work. Downside you lose access to all the presets you get for Lr and creating profiles is harder as it doesn't support DNG profiles.

 

[candc]

I think dxo optics pro does the best straight up conversions and has the best noise reduction. It has "lens modules" that auto load and work like lens profiles but better.

It does not however have any local adjustment tools or any import functionality.

I haven't had the type of slowdowns with lr that you describe and I use it on an older win 7 laptop and a surface pro 3 without issue.

 

[YuengLinger]

Do you get the sluggish sliders before or after applying local adjustments?

I'm running Win 10 on a 2010 built i7 950, 24GB RAM, GeForce GTX 960 (2GB), and a Samsung SSD.

I keep my LR catalogs, system page, and Photoshop scratch files all on the SSD, along with my OS.

I only have occasional slider issues, even when adding more edits to 2GB Tiffs coming back from PS CC. I'm sure if I had a machine dedicated to just editing, I'd be doing even better, but as it is, I've got a fair amount of bloat which I do try to minimize by getting rid of any unnecessary startup stuff.

When was the last time you just did a clean install of Windows 10? (That was the path I chose for the initial upgrade from Windows 7.)

I know your question was about alternatives, but over time I've seen plug-ins (OnOne, AlienSkin) also have occasional crazy slowdowns that get resolved after updates. I'm just suggesting that it would be a shame to invest your time and money into something new and find more performance issues down the line.

 

[Keith_Reeder]

I think dxo optics pro does the best straight up conversions and has the best noise reduction.

Naaah - utterly abysmal highlight handling (only beaten in the "worst highlight recovery" stakes by AfterShot Pro), and Photo Ninja kicks it into the weeds for noise reduction (PN's default NR is better than Optics Pro's PRIME - and as quick as its normal NR).

And I speak as an erstwhile Optics Pro beta tester.

I'd also mention that Optics Pro has no DAM capabilities, which appear to be a priority for the OP if his "similar workflow" ask is anything to go by.

 

[Ladislav]

Do you just want to start fresh in the new tool or migrate your existing catalog to the new tool as well? For the latter case, I don't think there is any alternative at all unless you migrate just processed tiffs.

Btw. I also find LR S___ty in terms of performance - it even gets worse if I let it run for a while. If I want to spend a day working in LR, it is better to do couple restarts during the day to let it release all the resources it leaked. It is ridiculous. I also noticed that any local adjustments decrease performance significantly.

My setup:
- Old i7 920 with 12 GB Ram, AMD 6970, Win 10 and catalog on first SSD, 1:1 previews on second SSD and RAW files on regular HDD

Since my case for moving from one tool to another tool is the first one, I'm stuck with it.

 

[zim]

I use C1 and DxO pro depending on subject matter. If I had to choose only one C1 would will hands down for DAM, speed and flexability. DxO is a one trick pony with a heck of a good trick ie PRIME. C1 is no slouch in that dept. either though!

 

[Keith_Reeder]

In terms of all round effectiveness it's hard to get past Capture One, it must be said - other Lightroom-alikes (AfterShot Pro, ACDSee) can't compete.

 

[tomscott]

I have a 2010 mac pro with the firmware upgraded to the 2012 model so I could put a 3.46 6 core Xeon, 48gb ram (triple channel), 2x 250gb 850 Samsung evos running on PCIe cards in raid 0 with an old ATI 5770.

The thing is lightroom is single core power hungry and using 6-8-10-12 core machines tends to be slower than using a more powerful quad with a higher clock speed.

I have to say I have had similar problems but I'm on a really old machine albeit with half decent specs. My GPU is pretty rubbish by today standards so have the GPU option turned off, its only PCIe2 so not sure if I would benefit from a newer PCIe3 card. But I render at 1:1 and never get rid of the cache its always on and is stored with the LR catalogue.

It runs surprisingly well. The only time I seem to get slow downs is if I zoom to 100% (takes a couple of seconds to render) use the perspective correction and if I use sharpen/noise reduction.

So tend to do sharpening/noise last.

I tend to keep my catalogues light, have one per year and if the event is a big one I make a new catalogue specifically for that to keep my main catalogue fresh.

The main big performance increase I saw was using the PCIe SSDs running roughly 800mb read/write and increasing the cash and it rendering 1:1 previews seemed to make the process much better. But overall using new catalogues and not overloading with too many images maybe 3-4k each then make a new catalogue.

I bought a bog standard 2016 MacBook as a consumption machine with the slow M3 and 8gbs of ram and it absolutely flies through lightroom much better at rendering than my mac pro. Amazing how much more efficient at task these newer CPUs are infact on a single core the base MacBook with no fans and the logic board the size of an iPhone is faster than my 2008 8 core 2.8ghz mac pro... obviously get beasted in multicore tasks but unless your rendering footage or 3D modelling not many applications are written to take advantage of multicore CPUs the 2008 was so slow with lightroom I swapped it out for the 2010 and put the 6 core in, roughly 3x the performance for £1000 and got to stay in the mac ecosystem.

Couldn't see myself using anything else tbh... the other software has drawback too.

 

[Orangutan]

I've done everything in the Adobe Universe to find a fix, but to no avail. I've had it.

Even though you're giving up, it might help others to know what you've tried. Could you please post a list of all the tweaks you've made to LR?

For example, I was able to get substantially improved performance by pre-generating all my 100% previews before I even start my sorting process. It reduces the subjective time and frustration, though I'm sure it doesn't reduce actual processing time.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Your issue sounds unusual, particularly if it varies from day to day. I do use smart previews which make response virtually instant, but viewing at 1:1 takes 1/10 sec, and editing like NR, brush, etc is real time, no discernible delay.

I just have a plain refurbished Dell I7 XPS 8900 with a inexpensive video card and a older SSD and 32GB of memory. I see nothing like you describe, LR is much faster than I am. The PC cost under $600 and is nothing like a 8 core model as far as speed goes.

I'd certainly be suspecting a hardware issue or a Software conflict (more likely). There are relatively few who have issues like this, but it can be frustrating to deal with and find the issue. Sometimes, Victoria Brampton posts suggestions to the LR forums for those with issues. I've found her advice to be very sound. My First Photoshop edition was 3.5 a long time ago, but I did not use LR until ver 2, I tried the original, but did not like it.

I stopped building my own PC's after I found I could buy a Dell cheaper, and find it often ran faster due to the components working better together than the expensive souped up models I built myself. I was advised to do that by a relative who is a Microsoft Manager, and he was right, at least for me.

I still have a few of the PC's I built myself, I keep one With windows XP, with floppy drive, PS2 ports, serial ports, parallel ports, SCSI ports, and firewire ports, even usb ports so I can run older hardware if I need it. I fired it up the other day. It uses the older IDE drive, but I have adapters to run SATA or SCSI drives if I want. I keep a even older one running DOS with ISA card slots as well as PCI slots which rarely gets used for a vintage piece of equipment that required DOS and a ISA card.

I remember building my first PC in the 1980's, back then, it was monochrome with separate cards for everything, Hercules graphics card, floppy dive, a Western Digital RLL Hard drive and card, and the 5.25 floppies. Its long gone. Those original power supplies with the transformer rather than switching power supply were monsters as were the full height Hard Drives.

 

[alvarow]

I think Affinity Photo is worth a look ... I really like it, great features. It is however more like Photoshop...not a strong as a catalog as LR.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

 

[IglooEater]

creating profiles is harder as it doesn't support DNG profiles.

So how do you do it, can one use x-rite stuff to make profiles at all? (Other than white card white balance)

 

[peterzuehlke]

capture one pro (i don't really use it for image management, but for conversion, definately my fav.)

 

[Ladislav]

I tend to keep my catalogues light, have one per year and if the event is a big one I make a new catalogue specifically for that to keep my main catalogue fresh.

If this is how LR is supposed to be used, then it is huge disappointment. One reason why I like LR is to have good organization tool which sits on top of folder structure. I just want to open LR and find any photo I took within few queries from single catalog - not going through several catalogues and trying again. I also like the fact that editing and catalog are in single tool.

I now have about 20k pictures in Lightroom. I assume LR is using SQLite underneath to work with database and 20k records should be piece of cake. Once you move to develop mode, you are working with single image anyway.

Based on my observation of LR performance, I think it works like this:
The part which takes time is to render in develop mode - 1:1 preview is useless once you make a single change and don't regenerate it - I'm not sure if smart previews are answer to that. It looks like LR is reprocessing the whole image after every single change - you use a spot healing to clear small dust -> whole image rendered again. You do a stroke with selective brush -> whole image is rendered again before it even shows you overlay of your new stroke. More modifications you do to the image, more processing needs to be done every time you add a new change.

But it seems like a good advice to do some processing like sharpening and denoising at the very end of the workflow because those will be among most complex ones and you just don't want to do run them after each change. It could be one of my problems because I have a basic sharpening in my import preset and I was even trying to figure out how to do basic denoising per ISO level during import.

 

[Keith_Reeder]

I think Affinity Photo is worth a look ... I really like it, great features. It is however more like Photoshop...not a strong as a catalog as LR.

No cataloguing at all, to be accurate. Serif has a standalone DAM solution in development.

 

[cellomaster27]

I think Affinity Photo is worth a look ... I really like it, great features. It is however more like Photoshop...not a strong as a catalog as LR.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

I have affinity photo.. my MacBook Pro with LR5.7 decided to crash and take everything with it. I need something with the workflow that LR has. I don't really understand affinity photo well enough but I don't think it does batch editing..

 

[zim]

I think Affinity Photo is worth a look ... I really like it, great features. It is however more like Photoshop...not a strong as a catalog as LR.

No cataloguing at all, to be accurate. Serif has a standalone DAM solution in development.

+1 not a LR replacement, never designed to be. In the future though with a good DAM solution who knows. For now C1 and AP as a finishing tool is a superb combo imho.