As a photographer, there’s no Adobe product that I interact with more than Lightroom and its desktop counterpart, Lightroom Classic. If I’m not using it to edit photos from the racetrack, I use it to doctor pictures for us here at Pocket-Lint. However, I recently encountered one of the most annoying issues that Lightroom has ever put me through.
When denoising my photos at high ISO, I found that my time to completion kept increasing with each image. It was like each file kept dragging my equipment down further and further. Keep in mind, I have a newly minted Mac Mini with an M4 chip and 32 GB of memory. That shouldn’t be happening. These were my exact thoughts as I delved into the Reddit pages in search of a solution.
What even is denoising
A nighttime photographer’s best friend
Whether you’re a sports shooter or you like street photography, the chances are you’ve had to take your fair share of photos at night. Personally, I refuse to let my old dinosaur Nikon D750 die, and while it has great low light performance, less noise is always better, especially if you can be tasteful with your editing. This isn’t just a DSLR issue, either. While mirrorless cameras perform better in low light, they can still produce grainy photos.
Generative AI denoising in Lightroom uses your computer’s GPU and other hardware to remove small amounts of noise introduced by high ISO settings in the photo. It takes a while to work depending on your hardware, but if you have time to edit an album, it can make for a much happier client. I typically cull my photos as soon as I get home from a shoot, denoise them, and come back later to make my final edits.
Clearing the RAW Cache fixed my problem
A simple menu scroll and click handled my issue
One helpful Facebook commentator actually recommended this idea to me — clearing my RAW cache. Lightroom can only handle so many RAW files at once, and when it fills up, it can tie up your GPU and RAM with other tasks. To clear your own RAW cache, your process depends on your OS (shocker, I know).
For Mac users, open Lightroom, then go to Performance > Camera Raw Cache Settings > Purge Cache. After that, your cache should be cleared, and your hardware should be free to denoise photos at will.
For Windows users, you have one extra step. That extra step lies in one more menu. Go to Edit > Performance > Camera Raw Cache Settings > Purge Cache.
Other ways to keep Lightroom running fast
There are infinite settings to change
We always want our software to run as smoothly as possible, and there are plenty of ways to ensure Lightroom runs as fast as it can. The obvious answer here is to keep your software up to date — nothing drags around like tech that’s a few updates behind. However, there are a few minor adjustments, such as increasing your RAW cache capacity, that can speed up your workflow.
Something as simple as decreasing the size of your Lightroom window can actually help speed up performance and free up graphics processing, or you can change the type of image previews that are generated within Lightroom. Even limiting the use of your spot removal tool, which isn’t meant to be used repeatedly in Lightroom, can help ensure your workflow runs as smoothly as possible.
