Because of that, at this time I’ll generally render 1:1 previews while stepping away for coffee, so that navigating between shots is snappier. This is the point where Lightroom performance will begin to lag…navigating between images takes a moment for the develop settings to render and display. Those develop settings will then get pasted to groups of similar images, adjusting individual shots to taste.

Once I’ve trimmed down the stack of photos to something manageable, only then I will begin customizing Develop settings. This means that selects can be made with almost no lag. As long as you don’t apply any adjustments to the images and are reviewing them in Library view, Lightroom will show you the low-res sidecar preview that imports with each RAF raw file. My raw photo processing workflow generally looks something like this first I import images, making first-pass selects while rating shots and marking bad shots for deletion. RAF images in a retouch session, so I was keen to speed up that workflow with this new 16″ Apple laptop. Exporting large numbers of photos can take a very long time. Lightroom is particularly laggy when navigating between photos in Develop view, and can also be a bit of dog when brushing or spot-healing. I have always found Lightroom Classic on my 2017 Macbook Pro to be painfully slow while working with Fuji X-T3 raw files. Here’s my results with Lightroom performance on the 16-inch Macbook Pro.Īnd if you’re more of a video user, check out my companion writeup with video export performance tests for the 16″ MBP in FCPx and Premiere Pro. After upgrading to the new MBP, I was keen to see how it improved Lightroom performance.

Lightroom for macbook pro