The former isn’t a race car (it meets the minimum OpenGL 3.3 cutoff for being able to use the GPU), but it’s better than before. Panning within large images was also an improvement.īut I also saw better performance on a 2010 MacBook Pro containing an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M GPU, as well as on a late–2013 Retina MacBook Pro with an integrated Intel GPU. For example, scrolling through the Grid (the thumbnail view) of a library containing more than 100,000 photos was a marked improvement over Lightroom 5-scrolling was fairly smooth, and there were only occasional empty thumbnails. As you might expect, the difference on the iMac with 5K Display is dramatic. Editors note: This is an updated and rated version of the. Computers with discrete GPUs see the most improvement, but machines with integrated GPUs (soldered onto the motherboard, such as many Intel processors) also see improvements. A nice, but not necessarily must-have update, Adobe Lightroom 5 remains a strong program for working with raw images. Lightroom CC now takes advantage of your computer’s GPU (graphics processing unit) for image-intensive tasks, so the main processor isn’t shouldering as much of the load. But as libraries have expanded and image sizes ballooned, even Lightroom 5 started to feel pokey in areas. Lightroom was the oddly twee alternative, its curlicue design flourishes distracting from the fact that it was working hard to be a fast and nimble photo organizer and editor. It was that sluggish behavior that pushed me toward Lightroom in the first place: Aperture 3.0 was a dog on my old Mac at the time, but upgrading to a new MacBook Pro didn’t improve the performance much. Our computers will probably never feel as fast as we’d really like, but we sure notice when they start to bog down. You get 20GB storage included with this plan (there’s a 1TB storage option that costs about £10/$10 more a month). However, you only get 20GB of online storage with this plan, although there are more expensive subscriptions available that provide additional storage too. The Photography Plan starts at £9.98/$9.99 a month if you sign up for a year. As we detailed in the section about Photoshop, these plans include Photoshop and Lightroom – as well as the more desktop-oriented Lightroom Classic. This simply includes Lightroom on its own and provides 1TB of online storage so that you can share your work across all your devices, for £9.98 per month.īut, if you mainly work on a Mac and store most of your work on the Mac’s own internal hard drive, then you might want to choose one of Adobe’s Photography Plans instead. If you tend to work on the move with both Macs and mobile devices, then you’ll probably prefer the main Lightroom Plan. Like Photoshop, Lightroom now requires a monthly subscription fee, but this is where things get a bit complicated.