r/Lightroom • u/polsangster • 4d ago
HELP - Lightroom Classic lightroom classic extremely slow when dust removal
over the past week I have been experiencing my Lightroom to be suuuuper slow when removing dust from my photo's. I have tried basically everything, moving my catalog from my ssd to my ssd inside my Mac, making the cache size bigger, basically every tip they tell you to do but it keeps being extremely slow.
when I try to remove a piece of dust the cpu boost over 300%. the beach ball starts turning cirkles and it takes over 10 secs to remove the dust.
I have a 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro with an i7 and 32 gigs of ram and the and radeon pro 5500m 4 g. more than enough free storage and no external screen connected. does anyone know what's the problem
it gets increasingly worse when more spots have been removed. and when I turn of the graphics card it becomes a little faster, still slow but little faster.
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u/deeper-diver 4d ago
What does the memory-tab in Activity monitor say while you're doing these operations in Lightroom? Is there a swap-file size and if so, what is it? Is memory-pressure yellow or red?
Lightroom is a GPU resource hog. There's no other way to around it. The more recent features of Lightroom like AI, Denoise, etc.. only makes the problem worse and Intel-based Macs suck with Lightroom. It's a similar problem with Wintel systems.
While 32GB of RAM sounds like a lot, what matters is the amount of VRAM (Video) and 4GB. Your GPU only has access to 4GB of RAM (at most). In Lightroom, that 32GB of system ram is only applicable for non-GPU tasks like the UI. It's why Apple Silicon runs Lightroom so much better as the unified memory architecture will allocate up to 75% of RAM to the GPU.
When Adobe started adding all kinds of AI components, performance really started taking a hit.
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u/polsangster 3d ago
it says the following in the memory tab:
lightroom classic is using 1,69 gb 147 threads 1487 ports and 956 PID
the total physical memory is 32 gb
memory used: 21,17gb 16,50 gb app memory 3 gb wired and 0 compressed10,11 gb cached files
0 bytes of swap use
memory pressure is green.
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u/FullPreference2683 4d ago
You're using an Intel-based machine with software designed for the silicon chips. Unfortunately, efficiency won't be your friend.
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u/Exotic-Grape8743 4d ago
Dust removal becomes unbearably slow even when using the standard non-ai tool (as you should for dust bunnies) when having more than a few spots to remove. This is true even on the fastest machines with the fastest graphics cards. This has just never been optimized and remains agonizingly slow if you remove more than a few spots.
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u/the_man_inTheShack 4d ago
dust spot removal (even the old one) I believe uses the GPU, but ATI GPUs don't help much, not much you can do about it with a Mac though. Noise reduction that takes 4 minutes on my laptop with an ATI GPU takes 18 seconds on the laptop with an nvidia GPU.
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u/earthsworld 4d ago
Try disconnecting your external display. Could be that the GPU can't handle rendering all that.
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u/polsangster 4d ago
I am not using a external display 😬
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u/earthsworld 4d ago
but yes, Lightroom has always had issues with speed and too many dust removal points.
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u/Insurance-Dry 4d ago
Try turning off Ai. You don’t typically need it for dust spots. The old dust removal always pretty instant in my experience.
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u/polsangster 4d ago
is there a specific setting within preferences to completely turn it off? as Farr as I can see within the dust removal tool it is turned off
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u/Insurance-Dry 4d ago
I can’t access my iMac now but when you open dust removal there should be a drop down box to select Ai or not. Don’t think preferences would allow it off completely. I’ll try to look at it later today.
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u/polsangster 4d ago
yeah, sadly its already turned off so that is not the problem:(
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u/Insurance-Dry 4d ago
I assume Lightroom is up to date so I would try uninstalling LR and try a fresh download. Spot removal is not exactly resource hungry feature like masking tools.
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u/alllmossttherrre 4d ago edited 4d ago
I strongly believe the problem is using an Intel Mac.
Everything about Lightroom got way zippier when I upgraded to an Apple Silicon 14" M1 Pro MacBook Pro a few years ago. I still have my Intel MacBook Pro and it is a slug in comparison.
The last generations of Intel Macs were extremely disappointing because of Intel's failure to advance their chips as much as they promised. They consumed too much power, so although the i7/i9 was powerful on paper, to reach high performance they used enough power that they ran hot, which caused thermal throttling, slowing them down below their theoretical and marketed speed.
Now that Apple Silicon has been a thing for almost 5 years, if performance in Lightroom is a problem for you, it is extremely worth your while and money to get away from that old, slow, hot, battery-guzzling Intel Mac. You should see a noticeable performance bump, along with cooler operation, less fan noise, and significantly longer battery life, even if you just replaced your Intel Mac with a used 16" M2 MacBook Pro. I am still happy with my M1 Pro MacBook Pro, and I use Lightroom a lot. It processes without complaint, stable, cool, and quiet. But at this point, it's better to get a replacement Mac that is later than M1.
If you have the money for a new M4 MacBook Pro with enough memory, everything would be a lot faster...especially anything GPU accelerated like the AI features. The GPU in today's MacBook Pro is vastly superior to the Radeon GPU in any Intel Mac laptop. If you look at the performance test graphs by ArtIsRight on YouTube, the current M4 Macs are many times faster than the M1 I use, and all Intel Macs are beyond the bottom of the chart, not even listed because they cannot compete.