# LR5 is great !



## CeesFoto (Apr 16, 2013)

As usual, with each new release I'm surprised about the new possibilities. This time its the Upright feature, its a miracle to see how my wide angle pictures with heavy distortions are handled. But the most I'm very pleased with the rendering speed. I did render 1:1 preview on a folder with 50 dng's (from my Canon 5D III) and clocked 120 seconds. If I do the same in LR4.4 its around 400 seconds. No I did not forget to discard them first. I notice a much better cpu utilization in LR5. Great Job, can't wait for the official release.


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## Bryan Conner (Apr 16, 2013)

I agree.  The upright feature is a welcome addition.  I also like the smart previews.  I have a lot of dvd's of stored images that I will be able to work with offline.  I also have two older hard drives that will soon go offline and smart previews will make the future a bit easier concerning these images.  The ability to use the spot healing tool as a brush is also pretty neat.  But, I have not decided whether or not I will use it or still make a trip to Photoshop for such work.  I have not been using the book module, the slideshow module etc, but there are some cool improvements there too.  Seems a bit snappy on my machine too.


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## Victoria Bampton (Apr 16, 2013)

Wow, that's a better speed increase than I was expecting.  That's great to hear!


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## Gary Gray (Apr 16, 2013)

Personally, I'm unimpressed with the beta.  It crashes every time I try to run it (Windows version.)  I uninstalled it within 10 minutes of loading it.  I'm not even going to bother loading it on the Mac Pro.


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## Bryan Conner (Apr 16, 2013)

Gary Gray said:


> Personally, I'm unimpressed with the beta.  It crashes every time I try to run it (Windows version.)  I uninstalled it within 10 minutes of loading it.  I'm not even going to bother loading it on the Mac Pro.



It has worked perfectly so far on my machine.  No crashes at all after I corrected the problem with the crash upon opening.    See here for info:  it is an easy fix...  http://www.lightroomqueen.com/2013/04/16/lightroom-5-0-beta-start-you/


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## Victoria Bampton (Apr 16, 2013)

Mac version doesn't crash Gary, honestly!  Windows version fix (Bryan linked to it) works very easily too


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## yorkiemom (Apr 16, 2013)

When I first loaded it, it came up asking which catalog I wanted to use. I didn't want to use one of my catalogs (just some pics on the desktop to play around with). Closed the program and when I next opened it, "Windows said the program wasn't running because it wasn't downloaded correctly...or something to that effect. Now it is fine. And faster!


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## CeesFoto (Apr 16, 2013)

With the healing brush I just removed an annoying lamppost that was standing in front of a building. Some friends of mine were watching this action and I could not convince them that this was a feature of LR5. They claim I'm pulling their leg. I feel like a magician. I'm thinking of buying a magician hat. Adobe software, the best there is...


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 16, 2013)

CeesFoto said:


> As usual, with each new release I'm surprised about the new possibilities. This time its the Upright feature, its a miracle to see how my wide angle pictures with heavy distortions are handled. But the most I'm very pleased with the rendering speed. I did render 1:1 preview on a folder with 50 dng's (from my Canon 5D III) and clocked 120 seconds. If I do the same in LR4.4 its around 400 seconds. No I did not forget to discard them first. I notice a much better cpu utilization in LR5. Great Job, can't wait for the official release.



I'm afraid my testing is not nearly so optimistic as yours. I note you said that you discarded the existing 1:1 previews first, but that may take a long time to take effect....whenever I do these comparison tests on preview rendering I always setup dedicated test catalogs with the same files imported into them. I also delete any existing previews folders before starting the rendering, and I also ensure I re-boot between each test to ensure that they are cleared out of the system cache. My own results, based on 100 raw files from a Canon 5DII, are as follows:

1. Lightroom 4 (actually the 4.3 version): 410 seconds
2. Lightroom 5 beta: 387 seconds.

Only a small improvement, but at least it's an improvement and certainly bucks the trend of each major release being a tad slower than the previous one.

Exporting the same files, however, reveals some major problems in the LR5 beta. For a start, there seems to be a massive memory leak (see this post from the Adobe beta forum), and the time taken was as follows:

LR4.3: 410 seconds
LR5 beta: 561 seconds

Hopefully the engineers will sort this export issue before general release. 

General impression of working in Develop is very positive, basic panel sliders seem a touch more responsive and it's good to see that NR/Clarity no longer cause a drag when using other tools.


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## donoreo (Apr 16, 2013)

I have only tested on Windows so far.  I did not have the start up problem.  So far it works with plugins like Nik.  I did find it faster overall.


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## fangsunflower (Apr 17, 2013)

wow~~really? i think i should study more


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## gregDT (Apr 17, 2013)

So far so good. I applied the preferences hack as I was also getting a crash on start-up and so far I'm loving LR5. I've not timed it but the beta certainly feels a lot more snappier than LR4, maybe that's down to the much smaller catalogue. 

The 'upright tool' is the absolute killer feature for me though. I shoot a lot of architectural and real estate photography, so having a one click solution to straightening verticals is wonderful. I'm liking it so much that I'm actually using LR5 for commercial work. Yes I'm exporting the jpegs for the clients as I go (in case of a critical failure of the catalog) but my workflow time has halved. Software features are a very subjective thing but even if this was the only new feature in LR5 I'd buy it in a heartbeat. 

Aside from the perspective tools I'm really liking the spot..... err spotting feature. I was also using the sharpening mask tool to quickly locate dust spots etc so this is a welcome addition. So LR5 is looking very nice right now


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## CeesFoto (Apr 17, 2013)

Oops, I have to admit that my previous benchmark results were not correct. I clocked 416 sec for rendering 50 dng's with LR4 and 120 sec for the same serie with LR5. These figures were doubted by Jim Wilde and was right. On the LR4 system the dng's contained a lot of editing and that takes time as well, on the LR5 system they were not. I repeated the experiment today correctly, twice on a serie of un-edited dng's and this time the results were : 120 sec for the LR5 and 145 sec for the LR4 . Still not bad, but much lower. Sorry for the confusion.


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 17, 2013)

No worries, and thanks for updating your tests.

Could I ask, though, what DNG conversion options you use when creating your DNGs, and also what type of system processor you use? Reason for asking is that if you scale up your 50xDNG test to compare with my 100xCR2 test, there's still a significant difference (240 seconds to my 387 seconds), so it would be useful to try to work out the cause of that difference. Certainly might influence my future buying decisions!!!


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## sizzlingbadger (Apr 17, 2013)

To be honest I'm not too worried about how fast LR imports/exports, its the interaction during the development process and the swapping of modules that has always been the performance issue for me. LR5 does seem to be snappier so is an improvement.

I like the new spot removal tool (probably needs a new name now) and the radial filter. The upright tool looks interesting but the implementation is confusing and quite unpredictable so I'm hoping that it will fine tuned somewhat before release. An example: I hit the 'Vertical' button on an image of a church with a slight keystone distortion and the result cropped the entire image about halfway up. I then activated the lens profile by checking the box and the 'Vertical' button seemed to work fine despite there being no lens profile my lens in LR anyway.

I am slightly underwhelmed by LR5 as was hoping (and have been for a long time) that the overall interface and esp. the Library module were improved to avoid all the confusion we see from the beginners. So much could be done in this area to make the program more user friendly.


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## CeesFoto (Apr 18, 2013)

TNG said:


> No worries, and thanks for updating your tests.
> 
> Could I ask, though, what DNG conversion options you use when creating your DNGs, and also what type of system processor you use? Reason for asking is that if you scale up your 50xDNG test to compare with my 100xCR2 test, there's still a significant difference (240 seconds to my 387 seconds), so it would be useful to try to work out the cause of that difference. Certainly might influence my future buying decisions!!!



Hi Jim,
The dng’s Iuse are just the plain ones generated by LR during import.
The dng’sare raws from my Canon 5D Mark III and I have set the option Embed Fast Load Datain the preferences. 
I think thebig difference comes from the systems we use.  For a long time I was struggling with the factthat during the rendering process it was not possible to get a high cpu load. Itried everything, overclocking, ssd for all my LR data, more memory etc.Nothing seemed to help significantly. But then I read an article about the hugedata transfer between memory and cpu cache.
I believethat this the constraint we are dealing with. Eight cores must be fed with data and instructions and this all has tofit in the relative small cpu cache. This in mind I build a new pc, this timewith an I7 3820 socket 2011. This new machine  now has a quad memory bus. On my “old” pc I usedan overclocked Intel 2600K (4.6 GHz) socket 1155 and has a dual memory bus.
On bothmachine I measured the memory bandwidth (SiSoftware Sandra) and the resultswere convincing.
Old PC :2600K running at 4.6 GHz the bandwidth was 21 GB/sec
New PC : 3820running at 3.6 Ghz and with XMP (extreme memory profile) resulted in 35 GB/sec
So it isnot a surprise that this new machine scores better with LR.
Back to theLR4 versus LR5 comparison.
Today Iimported 100 dng’s from my “old” canond 5D mark II into both LR4 and LR5catalogs.
LR4 took275 seconds to render the and LR5 resulted in 220 seconds. In LR5 they managedto get a more efficient  multithreadingprocess. This also shows up as a higher cpu utilization.
Forgot to mention that I’m running windows 8 64 bit, that runs a bit faster in general,but does not really help in elevating the memory bandwidth.


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 18, 2013)

Thanks for that detail, very helpful. Do you also have SSD(s) on your new system, and if so how are you using it/them?


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## russellsnr (Apr 18, 2013)

Hi, I have played with L/R 5 for a couple days and first impressions are it is faster especially from Lib to Dev.
What I am actually disappointed in is the upright feature, many are saying it is a welcome addition and maybe I am missing something but I would like to have been able as in the new spot removal tool to click on one end of an horizontal or diagonal part of an image (say a window frame) and just adjust that part of the image by then holding Shift and clicking on the other end as can be done with the Adaptive Wide Angle tool in P/S 6.
Has anyone tried to correct a photograph of a room taken with say a fish eye lens? I do not have a fish eye lens so any input would be useful.  
Many Thanks
Russ


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## CeesFoto (Apr 18, 2013)

TNG said:


> Thanks for that detail, very helpful. Do you also have SSD(s) on your new system, and if so how are you using it/them?



I have 4 disks in my system.
C: 256 GB SSD Sata 6 containing windows and installed software.
D: 128 GB SSD Sata 6 containing the LR catalog, cache and previews
E: 512 GB SSD Sata 6 containing the pictures
F: 2TB drive called Bulky for internal backup of all the other drives plus various data
I’m using Folder clone pro for quick syncing  data parts of C: D: and E: with F:
The SSD’s are the result of an earlier experiment to speed up LR, actually they don’t contribute as much as one would expect. The bottleneck is the memory bandwidth.
I know this is a dream machine and I’m enjoying it every day when I play with LR and Photoshop.
It’s an adult toy.
Regards Cees Flooren


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 18, 2013)

Yes, I can see that! I have a similar setup on my 3-year old i7 system, 4 internal drives to achieve maximum separation of Lightroom assets, but all standard spinning disks. Currently considering if a couple of SSDs (for system disk and catalogs) would give me another couple of years out of my system, or if I should save the money and go for a new system a bit earlier. No rush, LR has always run well on my system and the new LR5 changes make working in Develop much smoother.


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