Yesterday saw the latest update from Adobe for Lightroom 2. Among other enhancements, this update promised an improved performance with the adjustment brush, which was certainly an issue I’ve had often in the past. I was stoked to get faster response times in Lightroom so I quickly downloaded and installed the update. Unfortunately, afterwords I actually noticed a signifigant drop in speed overall in comparison to the previous update.
Ok, I’ll admit it: Of all of my equipment used in some capacity within my photography business, the most obsolete piece of equipment I have is my lousy laptop. With 757MHz and about 1GB of RAM, my poor computer slows to a crawl with all but the most menial of tasks. In Lightroom, I always had to wait for the full-sized preview images to load before I could work with them in the Develop window. I always had to excercise patience when exporting any number of images beyond five or six. Hell, I always had to start a full days worth of shooting before dinner to ensure it was complete by the time I wanted to start editing. But now? Well…
In the middle of using the adjustment brush to bring color back into details in an image I had globally desaturated, my image disappeared. Totally. I clicked it to zoom back out to full view and got a flicker of the image as it resized, but then the same background-colored gray box took the place of my photograph. I tried to select another image in the filmstrip to see if the problem was that image or the program in general and it locked up. Yes, Lightroom froze on me and I had to force it closed from the Task Manager. Another attempt at launching the program and continuing gave the same frustrating results.
After the second time, I optimized my catalog and was then able to avoid the “gray photo of death” but saw no marked inprovement in speed. In fact, loading the preview image when you select a new photo was almost twice as sluggish as before the update. Editing became tedious and extremely frustrating. If I had a deadline, I think I would have pulled my hair out.
I still love Lightroom for all of it’s well thought out features and ease of use and would recommend it in a heartbeat, but the glitter has certainly been rubbed off with version 2.2 of an otherwise excellent piece of software.
Anyone else out there experiencing the same performance issues with this update of Lightroom? Let me know in the comments.
Edit: Adobe has published another update back in March that, among other things, fixes the memory leak in the local adjustments. I have applied this update and it seems to have done the trick for me. How about you?
Hello,
I am running a desktop with a 2.75 Pentium Processor and 2 gb of ram. The same happens to me. I do not have a solution.
Mike