# Lightroom 3.0 Spot Removal - very slow



## alex (Jun 17, 2010)

Hi.
I've just recently updated from Lightroom 2.7 to Lightroom 3.' and have real problems with spot removal tool.
First of all - for now I have only 5' photos in my catalog, so it is really tiny.
In LR 2.7, when I select spot removal, then click on dust to remove it - LR did this almost immediately, it decides from where to get those patch and heals the dust.
But with LR 3.' it becomes real pain and this tool is almost unusable for me.
When I click on spot to remove, LR just freezes for 25-3'(!!) seconds thinking from where to get pixels for patch.
And it acts the same for every spot I want to remove.
In LR 2.7 on the same hardware it took less then 1 second to perform spot heal.
I have an AMD CPU, and tried to test this on other machine with Intel CPU and only 512Mb of RAM - spot removal works as fast as it could be.
Other tools works reasonably fast, the only problem I have is spot removal.
Can it be fixed somehow?
Thanks in advance.


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## sizzlingbadger (Jun 17, 2010)

I can't really suggest anything to help but this brings some new information to the table with regards to another thread on the forum regarding AMD and performance.

http://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/index.php?topic=1'125.msg68613#msg68613


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## Jim Wilde (Jun 17, 2010)

Hi Alex, welcome to the forum.

As Nik has already mentioned there are some performance issues with LR3 which are being reported, yours may be another to add. One question though....is your system profile correct? If so, and your PC only has 1gb of RAM, you would appear to be below the minimum system specification for LR3 (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/systemreqs/)....which would possibly mean you would need to think about a RAM upgrade....


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## alex (Jun 17, 2010)

Well in fact I have a little more RAM than 1Gb but less then 2Gb, so I decided to write 1Gb into profile.
I know that more RAM is better, but it will not help in this case.
Because:
1. LR 2.7 have similar requirements and run fast enough
2. All other tools works fine
3. On Intel machine with 512Mb all works fine
4. LR 3.' consumes something near 35'-4''Mb for my working catalog.

For now, I decided to stay with LR 2.7
Maybe it will be fixed someday.


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## alex (Jun 18, 2010)

I have made more investigation about this issue.
Strange, but true.
I have installed Lightroom 3 beta 2 and you know what - spot removal works really fast, faster than LR 2.7.
While LR 3.' final release is still very slow when using this tool.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jun 18, 2010)

There are investigations going on, but it remains a mystery at the moment. Only some people are seeing this problem, and discovering the link is proving a nightmare.


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## ukbrown (Jun 20, 2010)

Have you used lens correction, if you have turn it off and then try it.


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## alex (Jun 20, 2010)

No, I didn't change anything in the lens correction panel.
It is newly imported image with only contrast and highlight recovery settings changed.


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## TK2142 (Aug 1, 2010)

I'd be happy to test any new release candidate. 

On my machine I have a number of images with which I can consistently make LR3 come to a crawl. That's using spot removal applications and/or adjustment brushes.


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## simax (Sep 18, 2010)

Hi all : great that someone else has mentioned this. I have Lightroom 3 fully updated with 4GB of Ram on Macbook Pro. Spot removal tool worked perfectly in LR2 versions, but really very slow now-- _*from time to time*_ .

I think there may therefore be other variables : I exported some images to Photoshop CS4 in 16bit and then reworked in Lightroom last night : 1:1 previews took a long time to load and once loaded, spot removal tool was virtually unuseable it was so slow. This morning : spot removal tool is working well. So: does Lightroom need time to create some sort of cache for worked files making subsequent work more streamlined (forgive my unscientific terms!) OR....... was my MAC carrying out something like an impromptu anti-virus scan last night at the same time I was trying to work on the files (I have Norton on this machine), or was some other program auto updating (though I closed just about everything but was online). 

There's no doubt that for Lightroom to create 1:1 previews for forty 75 mb files, some juice must get consumed. Can anyone help me out as to what LR is doing in the early stages of catalogue generation which may account for some tools like the spot removal tool to run so slow at certain times. I do not think this is necessaily a bug but a feature of a basically wonderful program that is continuing to add new and great features (eg lens correction tool) with each upgrade : but at a price..... i.e. delays depending on when you work on files.


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 18, 2010)

Hi simaz, welcome to the forum! If the lens correction tool was turned on for the slow ones, that would explain why the spot removal was so slow, because it's having to compute even more info.


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## ukbrown (Sep 18, 2010)

LR3.2 much faster spot removal in IMHO


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## simax (Sep 18, 2010)

Thanks very much Victoria : love this forum and your book by the way!  

I ran a lens correction adjustment on all the files first off then tried spot removal : so sounds like this was a big factor. Thanks!


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 18, 2010)

Thanks Simax, glad you like it! We've got a great team here. Try doing the spot corrections first and then the lens corrections and it might be a bit more comfortable.


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## Laura Shoe (Oct 7, 2010)

Any more ideas on this issue? Starting yesterday I have been experiencing the same thing, though many times spot removal just locks up indefinitely and I have to force quit the application.  I have trashed preferences.


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## Laura Shoe (Oct 7, 2010)

Doesn't matter whether I have Lens Corrections applied.... and I have LR 3.2, despite what my profile says.


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## ukbrown (Oct 7, 2010)

> Starting yesterday



What changed yesterday?
Your post implies that it was all OK. Something must have changed, software update, hardware, something.


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## Laura Shoe (Oct 12, 2010)

I have been using spot removal much more intensely with this job than any other, so I thought maybe that was it ... but this weekend I taught a workshop and used a practice catalog of 15' images, and spot removal froze over and over during the demo ... must be a LR 3.2 bug.


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## ukbrown (Oct 12, 2010)

How long did you wait for LR to come back. 5 minutes?

In LR3.' if you picked a spot far away from the original to clone from this used to take an age to come back, upto 5 minutes.

If you are having to reboot do you check for disk and catalog corruption afterwards


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## MarkNicholas (Oct 12, 2010)

[quote author=ukbrown link=topic=1'135.msg7436'#msg7436' date=1284797'12]
LR3.2 much faster spot removal in IMHO
[/quote]

I agree LR3.2 is much faster than LR3.'.


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 13, 2010)

The spot tool needs a bit more work in a 3.x release. There are some issues surrounding it still.


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## dingebretsen (Oct 14, 2010)

I just want to add that I have been experiencing this problem with having the spot removal tool become very slow and cause the program/computer to hang for several minutes. It seems to happen when I've got lots of spot edits (i.e., removing scratches from a scanned negative, removing telephone wires from images), and seems to especially bad if I'm selecting the area to be used (i.e., click and drag). If I wait until LR is responsive again, quit the program, and then restart it, spot editing will work a little better for a little while . . .


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## sizzlingbadger (Oct 15, 2010)

Its really not designed to be used for telephone wires and hundreds of spots from scans. You should consider using PS for that.


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## Glenn NK (Oct 17, 2010)

Yes, the process is very slow, but it works extremely well, and for this I am grateful - don't have to go to PS any more to fix spots on flower petals. The drag technique works very well for spots on flowers - for this I'm grateful that I don't have to go to PS.


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## honsbeek (Oct 19, 2010)

Hi there , just seared and found this thread , from a few months ago 

I recently upgraded myself from 2.7 to 3.' and found the spot removal annoyingly slow myself , then tried 3.2 and initially it worked pretty quick , but now yet again sluggish. Were any solutions found , I don't think this is hardware based since I have 4 gigs. . . and high end specs 


Regards 

Ralph


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## alex (Jun 17, 2010)

Hi.
I've just recently updated from Lightroom 2.7 to Lightroom 3.' and have real problems with spot removal tool.
First of all - for now I have only 5' photos in my catalog, so it is really tiny.
In LR 2.7, when I select spot removal, then click on dust to remove it - LR did this almost immediately, it decides from where to get those patch and heals the dust.
But with LR 3.' it becomes real pain and this tool is almost unusable for me.
When I click on spot to remove, LR just freezes for 25-3'(!!) seconds thinking from where to get pixels for patch.
And it acts the same for every spot I want to remove.
In LR 2.7 on the same hardware it took less then 1 second to perform spot heal.
I have an AMD CPU, and tried to test this on other machine with Intel CPU and only 512Mb of RAM - spot removal works as fast as it could be.
Other tools works reasonably fast, the only problem I have is spot removal.
Can it be fixed somehow?
Thanks in advance.


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## sizzlingbadger (Oct 19, 2010)

I don't have a problem unless I start trying to use it like a fully fledged clone tool.


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## MarkNicholas (Oct 20, 2010)

[quote author=sizzlingbadger link=topic=1'135.msg76'77#msg76'77 date=1287113'54]
Its really not designed to be used for telephone wires and hundreds of spots from scans. You should consider using PS for that.
[/quote]

I have one particular photo on which I have many edits....not just the spot removal tool but gradients etc. If I select that photo it takes a good 15 minutes to load everything !!


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## sizzlingbadger (Oct 20, 2010)

The more you pile on the edits, the longer it takes. I've been thinking quite a bit lately about the non-destructive workflow and I'm beginning to think we perhaps try to to take it too far sometimes. Heres something to think about...

A friend of mine was planning to spend a small fortune on hardware to get LR to perform well on heavily modified images. These images made up about 2% of her library. I suggested she buy PS Elements for these 2% and save a fortune. The extra disk space for the TIFFs is nothing compared to what she was going to spend.

There is a time when it makes more sense to use a real pixel pushing app.


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## MarkNicholas (Oct 20, 2010)

I would actually like to be able to write such edits back into the RAW file so that the spot removal and gradient edits become part of the original RAW file. Just a thought ! Would it help if I created a DGN file with these edits applied or would it still take forever to load.


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## ukbrown (Oct 20, 2010)

Can you update your profile with the real amount of memory that you have in your machine. IF it is 1Gb you will be having issues anyway.


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## sizzlingbadger (Oct 20, 2010)

DNG's will hold the instructions for your adjustments but the performance is the same as RAW with the instructions held in the catalog or xmp.


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## MarkNicholas (Oct 20, 2010)

[quote author=ukbrown link=topic=1'135.msg763'7#msg763'7 date=12875612'2]
Can you update your profile with the real amount of memory that you have in your machine. IF it is 1Gb you will be having issues anyway.
[/quote]

It IS updated 
I know I am under powered but unless I go mad with the edits it runs quite smoothly...most of the the time. Strangely I find LR3.2 smoother than LR2.6.


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## ukbrown (Oct 20, 2010)

Nice one!, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. 8)

Having said that, you are dual core. I extended the life of my son's PC (singe pentium 3.2) by installing windows 7 and adding 2GB of extra RAM. For 1'' pounds quite a worthwhile upgrade IMHO. His LR edits are more than twice as quick as they were before, '.4s as opposed to nearer '.9. YMMV (universal disclaimer).

As an aside I would seriously start to move off XP in the next year-18 months, especially once windows 7 SP1 is out of beta


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## MarkNicholas (Oct 21, 2010)

I have used Windows 7 and quite like it. I can only upgrade my laptop RAM to 2GB so will get a new machine ....soon.


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## bwiese (Jul 20, 2011)

*Please weigh in on "official" support request...*

I've been bit hard by this bug... even after building a new system from scratch with near-top-of-the-line specs!  I also have a catalog that when I spot remove on a JPG then LR completely locks up and needs to be killed from the Task Manager, however from a CR2 it works.

I tried to find the "official" bug report form for Lightroom/Adobe and this is the best I could find... please weigh in here:
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photo...n_using_clone_heal_brush_and_slow_performance


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## Kiwigeoff (Jul 20, 2011)

That is the correct place to report bugs now, thanks.


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## ariel777 (Dec 5, 2011)

Has this problem been corrected yet, or is there a remedy? I'm using 3.5, and LR freezes up after 2 or so spot removal passes, necessitating a shut down. Anyone? Thanx...


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## Victoria Bampton (Dec 5, 2011)

Hi Ariel

It's not a problem we're hearing very often - very rare, in fact.  Unfortunately that makes it incredibly difficult to find a solution to.  Can you tell us about your system specs - and perhaps other details about what you've done to the image (i.e are lens corrections turned on, etc.)


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## Jim Wilde (Dec 5, 2011)

Although this recent thread talks about similar issues which seem to focus the issue on multi-core systems (possibly Windows only, not sure).

Having said that I do agree that there can be a general slowdown/stickiness through the cumulative effects of lots of spot removal actions.


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