If you don’t, Lightroom will have to do this in the background every time you work with an image, slowing performance way down.įor the best possible performance during editing tasks, create 1:1 previews. Golden rule: always create either Standard or 1:1 previews. The smaller the preview, the faster your import, but the harder Lightroom will have to work while you’re actually editing images.

Lightroom gives you four options when importing images: Minimal, Embedded & Sidecar, Standard, and 1:1. Lightroom may be generating Standard Previews that are larger than they need to be and hurting performance as a result. This is particularly relevant if you’re using a 1080p display.

Go to Catalog Settings > File Handling and make sure the Standard Preview Size matches the longest edge of your screen resolution. There’s one other setting you should check. To increase performance on such displays, reduce the size of the Lightroom window, or use the 1:2 or 1:3 views in the Navigator panel. According to Adobe’s own documentation, you can speed up performance by simply making the Lightroom window smaller:Ī high-resolution display has a native resolution near 2560 x 1600, and is found on 30-inch monitors and Retina MacBooks. We’ll talk more about previews in a second, but on some level this is a natural consequence of using a graphics application that has to literally draw more pixels when you’re using a higher-resolution display.

The 4K display on the Razer takes a bite out of overall performance and hurts import times because the laptop has to create larger Standard previews by default. Adobe confirmed this to me several months ago when I asked why the 13-inch MacBook Pro I was reviewing was importing images faster than a 2020 Razer Blade Studio. Screen ResolutionĪ lot of people don’t realize that Lightroom penalizes you for increased screen resolution. But even the latest integrated Intel graphics or the graphics built into Apple’s M1 chip can and should be used to their full potential. Obviously this will have the most impact if your computer (laptop or desktop) has a discreet GPU.

Adobe lightroom classic mac