The race: Lightroom vs. PM-Bridge

 

I've been using Lightroom exclusively since my D-65 workshop. My impression has been, nice interface but boy, it slows me down. I ran a test today to see if the slowness was me or the application.

I have a 3 year old MacPro, dual core, 2.66gh, 5gb memory (yeah, I know I need more). I took this morning's card, and ran it through my new, then my old workflow. 

I have Lightroom set up to apply metadata and a global develop setting on import. It's the same settings I use in my old workflow, which I perform manually. I had a card with 118 images. I inserted the card and set the stopwatch. 

Time to ingest all images: 4:25. Time to finish previews: 29:21. I edited during the preview build, deleted some images, renamed and captioned the take, and renamed the files manually. 

Then I loaded the card again, and let Photo Mechanic handle the ingest. It took 1:21. When it was done ingesting I reviewed full-screen images (the RAW jpg, unprocessed), and deleted the bad ones. Then I manually renamed the files, applied my metadata template, and captioned the take. this took another 1:23. 

Then I opened Bridge (CS5) and pointed it to the folder. I applied my two develop presets, a camera profile and my global adjustments. I waited until Bridge processed and built previews, and stopped the stopwatch. 

Total elapsed time from card to finish: 5:57. 23 minutes faster than Lightroom.

I think this workflow experiment is over. 

Comments

[Alan Schrank]

I wonder why it takes so long to generate your previews in LightRoom? I'm on Windows. I haven't timed my 1:1 preview generation, but it feels 3 or 4 times faster than you describe. I'm converting to dng as part of my import process. I also will review and some editing while the import and preview process is happening.

[JeffH]

From my experience, rendering 1:1 previews in Lightroom on a PC is really slow also. Your 29 minutes to render 118 of them from 5DMkII RAW files sounds about right. I am using XP 32 bit on a Quad core PC with 4GB RAM. While rendering, the entire machine is heavily burdened with the task. I really hope that Adobe can find a way to speed this process up.