Need Update: Luminar is 27 times slower than Lightroom
Answered
This is not an exaggeration, it is a data informed fact. Details? Sure... After months of frustration with Luminar I gave Lightroom's free trial a spin. I was shocked at how quickly my RAW files were exported to JPEG. So I set up a test and exported 70 unedited RAW files in Luminar and the same 70 unedited files in Lightroom.
Luminar took 14 minutes 44 seconds. Lightroom took 33 seconds. You have to see it to believe it. My jaw hit the floor.
Your results may vary; however, on my 10 year old laptop Luminar was 14 times slower and on my wife's 5 year old iMac it was 19 times slower.
Over the past 10 days or so, I attempted to lay out my concerns in the Skylum Windows Forum. Skylum has made it clear in their response (and lack of response) that performance enhancement is not a priority.
It would be one thing if AI was a priority over performance if baseline performance was acceptable.
BUT IT'S 27 TIMES SLOWER THAN THE COMPETITION.
Never mind how long it takes to export. That, after all, is snack time or beer time. Lets talk about what we can't quantify: The time lost while switching from photo to photo while editing. Lets talk about the quality of our end product that is significantly affected by our ability to preview and sort through hundreds of photos efficiently.
If you would like to see technical details, please see my other post with system performance snapshots and references. Long story short, Luminar uses 2010 software architecture that utilizes one (maybe two) of your CPU's threads. Think of a thread as a single data stream of information or work. Modern computers have 8 or more threads. Computers built in 2019-2020 have 16, 24, or more in some extreme cases.
Dear Luminar,
1. Speak to us in technical terms.
2. Explain why you are 27 times slower than Lightroom and why you feel like this is OK.
3. Tell us when you are going to fix it.
I can not afford to lose any more pictures or waste any more of my time.
- FT
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Official comment
Hi Fleming,
Usually, the performance of the app depends on the number of photos you have in your catalog, their format (it can take a bit more time to load RAW or TIFF files), your hardware configuration, and the place where you store your photos (it works faster when the photos are located on an internal drive).
Nevertheless, we are constantly improving the speed of the app with each and every update in order to provide our artists with the best quality. In fact, it's one of our top priorities at the moment.
If you would like our team to investigate why does Luminar 4 perform so slowly on your computer, please reach out to our Support team via https://skylum.com/support
It would be helpful if you could include the following information to your request:
1. What is the version of Luminar that you are using? You can check it this way: start Luminar > click Help if you are on WIndows or Luminar 4 if you are on Mac > About Luminar).
2. How many images are there in your Library? Please send us the screenshot of your Catalog file structure as in the example: http://prntscr.com/obcij4
3. Where are they located (on an internal or external drive)?
4. Your hardware configuration:
For MacOS:
Click on Apple logo in the upper left corner of your screen, click About This Mac, and make a screenshot of the window that opens. Attach the screenshot to your request.
For Windows:
- Press the Windows logo key + R.
- Type msinfo32 in the dialog box that opens and hit Enter on your keyboard.
- In the window that opens, make sure you have System Summary highlighted on the left.
- Click File > Export.
- Type the name of the file and save it somewhere where you can easily find it and attach this text file to your requestю
Hope to hear from you soon.
Comment actions -
"This is our main priority now and we're putting all our efforts to reach that with each update." - Victoria Grace
Victoria you have been a Skylum member since December 2019... 2 months... No offense, despite your inability to conjugate subjects and verbs, I'm sure you're a nice lady.
Maybe leadership within Skylum would have something to say? Maybe a timeline to offer?
It is shocking to me that a company has zero idea when they might make progress toward their top priority.
I don't want a refund! You can't afford to give me one! Your dev team needs the money to fix this problem. Take my $80 and go pay for some overtime.
I'm starting to think your company may have deeper issues than just software development.
- FT
PS - I built a 100% brand new PC with about $2k worth of parts for my test, including a Ryzen 3900x, 32GB of DDR4 3600 (running at 3600) and a PCIE 4.0 NVME drive. I installed a fresh copy of Luminar and Lightroom and put the same 70 pictures in each library with zero other files. It's pure apples to apples in an experiment where there hardware cannot possibly be the limiting factor. The only reason for the difference in speed is your software's ability to leverage my hardware. The better the hardware, the wider the performance gap between you and the competitor.
I have a decent amount of experience with computers and editing software and a little coding experience. I put a significant amount of energy and resources into trying to help you improve your product because I want your company to compete with Adobe.
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Margaret,
Happy Valentines Day!This post has not been answered. You addressed none of my questions.
My machine is not the problem here, let's not change the subject.
I am (we are) interested in Luminar's performance in general and the improvements Skylum is making to fix performance issues.
Were talking serious architecture changes related to hardware utilization... Are they coming?
Get technical
Be specific -
Hallo Margaret,
I have the latest version of Luminar4 4.1.1 again today. also the current version of macOs Catalina on my Macbook that meets (and even exceeds) the requirements for Luminar. As a test, I only have 11 photos on my internal SSD and my catalog, which has now been created several times, is also on the internal SSD. And despite the performance improvements announced by Skylum, everything is loading very, very slowly. It takes at least 15 seconds before I can start editing after starting Luminar. If I then switch to the next photo, another 15 seconds pass. When I finish editing and want to export my RAW file, it takes at least 30 seconds. I can't imagine how that will work with my usual number of photos to be edited. Unfortunately, the pre-made standard answers don't really help me either.
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Hi Wolfgang
I actually don't know if there were any updates. Helga said a year ago that they were working on updates right? So yes, where are they? and what are they?
Victoria Grace also said "Be sure our dev team are currently focused on optimizing the CPU usage and improving the overall speed and performance of Luminar 4. This is our main priority now and we're putting all our efforts to reach that with each update."
That was a year ago. Well, Victoria Grace? What can you tell us now about progress in optimizing CPU usage? Are you still offering refunds?
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Hi there,
I am using a brand new MacBook Pro 16", with 32GB DDR4 memory and the 5.0 GHz 8core i9 processor.
In my recent Luminar 4.1.1. (5938) catalogue are 190 photos.
Exporting of 1 (one!!!!) photo (Sony arw file with about 20-25 MB) with basic adjustments takes 8-10 seconds. The CPU temperature goes up to over 70º (Celsius!!!), this never happens with any other software.
To export the same photo with the same adjustments with Affinity Photo takes less than 1 second (you can not even measure it).
I tried the same with other apps (e.g. Photoscape), it is the same.
So: this has nothing to do with setup of my machine or apples Catalina, it is solely the problem of Luminar.
I am using Luminar since L2018, then L3 and now L4 and I like the idea behind it, but I think it is time to get a proper product for my money.
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Hi Helga,
maybe 8-10 seconds for exporting one photo is the limit for Luminar, but it is not normal for a state of the art app.
btw: what is with the promised DAM (keyords etc.)?
It is frustrating if you need at least two different apps for an average workflow - one for management, one for development and maybe another one for export, printing etc. (maybe you can have a little look at Affinity Photos Export persona).
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I really loved the Macphun resp. Skylum products from the very beginning (I bought them all, from Luminar to Photolemur and Aurora), but I cannot hear it anymore: always the same problems, the same promises and the same phrases - enough is enough.
In the meantime I switched to ON1 (2021) and never looked back to Luminar. With ON1 I got really everything what I was looking for (and what was promised by) at Luminar; and it is much, much faster.
I don't regret the change and do not even think about returning to Luminar.
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I have exactly the same problem:
Exporting images into JPEG is way too slow! (>10s)!
I love Luminar and I use it for 99% of my images for improvement. But as an Apple user, I love my Photos app for sharing images, so finally, I need to export the images into JPEG and import them into Photos, and this is always time to get a cup of coffee ;-)
Interesting enough - if I use Affinity as a plugin for Photos, things seem to be much faster. BUT the problem is, if I start importing my images into Photos with RAW files, the data file of Photos gets extremely large and I cannot distinguish between RAW and JPEG later on.
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Hi Martin,
Thank you for sharing your experience with us.
Please note that our team is constantly working hard to implement improvements to the overall performance of the software in each update. We're currently preparing an update that will drop within a couple of weeks. I would recommend checking it out, as it should give a nice performance boost.
I hope it will deliver better performance that will meet your expectations.
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Hi Margret,
good news, thank you.
Do you have a thread for update requests in this community?
The other thing which urgently needs improvement ist the file algorithm. New files are only partly shown, completed after restart - if you move to another folder the filmstripe view shows whatever it likes. After trying to access USB drives (e.g. card reader) the entire program crashes...
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Vincent Mojapelo,
Please, reach us out via https://skylum.com/support so we could see what we can do for you.
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Hi all,
Sorry for the delay. Thanks for all your feedback!
Be sure our dev team are currently focused on optimizing the CPU usage and improving the overall speed and performance of Luminar 4. This is our main priority now and we're putting all our efforts to reach that with each update.
Since the system configuration, image formats, library size differ from user to user, it explain the differences in speed while working in Luminar 4.
However, I understand that this is not as excuse, and of course if you wish, you may always request a refund if it doesn't suit your workflow. In this case, please, reach us at https://skylum.com/support and we'll gladly assist you with that.
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