Lightroom, To Upgrade or Not
- The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC Book for Digital Photographers
- The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC / Lightroom 6 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC (2015 release) / Lightroom 6 Classroom in a Book
It’s always big news when Adobe makes updates to its apps, especially for those of us who earn our bread and butter editing with them. But not all news is good news and some photographers who use the updated version of Lightroom complain a lot about the changes and wish they could go back to the older versions.
So what seems to be bothering a lot of users? One of the biggest changes that came with the new Lightroom version is the ability to use your computer’s GPU. The GPU (graphics processing unit) is basically your computer’s video card. If you enable this option, Lightroom will move the photos from your CPU to your GPU, thus creating a back and forward connection between the two. Many users have complained that enabling this setting actually makes Lightroom slower than the previous versions. This can be true for a lot of computers. If you’re using an older model or you don’t have a high resolution display and a powerful GPU, Lightroom will indeed be a lot slower than it should. The simple and effective solution is to turn off this option and have your computer working only with the main processor.
Another less than popular modification is the new Import window. Long time Lightroom users in particular find this update annoying. The older import window was shared by all previous Lightroom versions, with minor modifications of course. Well, the good news is this new interface is actually designed to be easier to use so if you give it a little time, it will eventually grow on you. The bad news is it’s not going away so you are going to have to get used to it whether you like it or not.
Here is more on the changes in the latest Lightroom version with Mark Wallace for Adorama TV.