It is no secret that both Lightroom and Photoshop can be resources hogs that do not run particularly quickly, though in fairness, they are also pushing around and manipulating a lot of data. Between your CPU, GPU, RAM, drives, and more, there are a lot of places where an upgrade could possibly speed things up, but of course, you do not want to waste your money. So, what components should you upgrade first? This helpful video will show you some useful tests to help you figure it out.
Coming to you from Greg Benz Photography, this awesome video will show you some tests you can run to figure out where the bottleneck in your Lightroom and Photoshop performance might be. On the topic: one thing that can really help if you are using an older hard disk drive is to upgrade to a solid state disk. If you have a large photo collection, you do not need to drop a ton of money on a huge SSD. For example, I keep my current year's catalog on an SSD, then move it to a large HDD for archival purposes once the year is over. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Benz.
Don't bother watching here is what to upgrade in order of importance:
1: Storage:
You Need fast storage to load Lightroom and Photoshop faster.
I suggest you either install Windows on NVMe/M.2 SSD or buy a small one specifically for Photoshop/LR.
You DON'T need to store your photos on it. Hard Drives are fast enough to load image stacks in Photoshop almost immediately. However if you use Lightroom catalogues hard drives will slow down the preview build.
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2: RAM:
Apart from fast loading you Need fast RAM to allow the SSD to load the files into RAM fast. 2800Mhz - 3200mhz +
(Don't forget to enable XMP in BIOS otherwise your fast RAM will not run at box speed.)
You also need a lot of RAM to load Photoshop and LR. 16GB should be an absolute minimum.
Which should be easy since PCie 4.0 is enabling new monsters like 5Mhz RAM.
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3: Processing slow? Ok NOW you think about CPU and GPU.
No recommendations here. Anything you buy including i3's (That isn't a laptop) should be able to handle what you need. If you are into video or any other type of rendering application, then you need something faster.
I ran a test on my desktop and found that my HDD is like a blocked artery in an otherwise fine system. So, I just installed a 2 TB M2 NVME (the old drive is 2 TB), but haven't done the clone and change to ensure that the thing boots from the M2. I'll be doing that today. I'll report whether or not I had to take the computer to a tech to fix what I flubbed up. :-)
Well, it's done. I just finished, but haven't tried LR yet. However, the computer boots up much faster, so just that alone makes me happy.
This is a good advice. thanks for the heads up about the XMP stuff. I had no idea.
Even with a 5950x 16 core cpu, 32 gigs of ram, and NVME SSD's Lightroom is STILL nowhere near as fast as Capture One was on my 4790K from 2014. The real kick in the teeth is that we pay a monthly subscription for such a privilege. The whole thing needs to be rebuilt from scratch. It's an absolute joke.