Skip to main content

Hardware for Lightroom

Lesson 5 from: Tour of the Library Module in Adobe Lightroom Classic

Jared Platt

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

5. Hardware for Lightroom

Lesson Info

Hardware for Lightroom

now, um, one thing that you should know, Um and that is that light room is a ram and a graphics Ah, card and a processor hog. So light room classic uses all three of those things. So if you find that the process of building smart previews building previews, exporting images Ah, that kind of activity is really difficult for your computer because it's slowing it down. There are three places you need to look. First, you need to look at your ram. Do you have enough RAM? 32 gigabytes around 64 gigabytes around. None of those are, uh, overkill. So if you could get 64 gets 64. If you can get 28 128 the more ram you have, the better off you'll be. So that's the first thing. Second thing speed of a hard drive, wherever your catalog is, should be a fast, hard drive, so make sure that you are working on the fastest possible hard drive. So we're going to have lots of RAM fast, hard drive. So a, uh, SSD drive is better than a spinning drive, so catalogues should not be on spinning drives So put yo...

ur catalogue on the internal drive. The fastest possible connection to a solid state drive is where you want your catalog to be. So that's the second thing is that you need a really fast, hard drive. So lots of ram fast, hard drive. The next thing is a good graphics processor, so you want an actual dedicated graphics processors something that is really good. So, for instance, this laptop is fairly good at running light room because it has two graphics processors in it. One of them is specific to allow the program to use, and the other one is doing the monitor stuff and all that. So there's two graphics processors, and if you get a laptop that only has one in it and it's just kind of a general graphics processor, you're probably gonna have issues with slowness in light room because you don't have a dedicated graphics processor that's actually doing work. Four Light room. It's just trying your graphics processors too busy working the monitor. So that's another thing that will help you. And then, of course, this the speed of your computer itself on. And for those of you who are knowledgeable about computers. There are two things now in these days with computers. There's how many cores are in your system, and then the clock speed of the system and light room cares more about the clock speed. Not all that much about the course. So if you're choosing a computer right now and you're like, what computer should I get to one run light room? You're really options. Should be. Get a high clock speed. Don't worry about the course. Yeah, you know, get as many quarters you like or whatever, but half those course aren't gonna be used by light room. So don't worry about getting all of these cores. That's not gonna help you if you're doing other stuff, maybe, but light room? No. So what you want is doesn't matter about the course. You want a high clock speed, you want lots of ram, You want fast, solid state hard drive, and you want to make sure that you have a good graphics processor that is dedicated toe work on on programs rather than just running the monitor on DSO. In this case, it's a pretty good system. This is This is a fairly new Mac book pro, but I have something else that helps me. And that is this unit right over here on the right hand side of me. Um, is a e g p you. It's an external graph graphics processor. And so, if you notice that your light room is a little too slow for your tastes, then get yourself an E GPU. They're not super expensive. They just simply plug into your computer and they actually take away some of the of the graphics heavy stuff and they pull some of that off. But if you're gonna do it, let me show you really quickly. You need to go into your hard drive and into the applications and inside of your applications. If this is on Mac, I don't know exactly how you do this on Windows, but I'm sure you'll figure it out. If you're a Windows person, um, you simply click on the actual, uh, icon for the program and click command I to get info and you'll find an option right here. Once you have a GPU installed. Any GPU, it says, prefer external GPU. I have just told light room that whenever you're working, you should send your workload off to the IGP you, the external graphics processor, so that I'm not hogging up all my space here inside of the computer. So my computer can be working on what it needs to be working on, and it can send tasks out to an external graphics processor. So if you have an older computer and you're like, oh, light room slowing down, I needed to be faster. You could do that. You can get light room to speed up, and you don't have to necessarily buy a new computer. Just get yourself any GPU. Plug it in. It's a lot less expensive than buying a new computer, and you'll find that you it relieves some of the tension on the internal processing in your computer. So that's just some good tips on speed on, and you'll notice the speed differences a lot when you're exporting and importing files. And that's why I tell you now, because importing is quite a hog on your computers processors, both graphics processors and your internal processor

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workflow in Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom Mobile Cloud
Adobe Lightroom Image Pipeline System
Black & White Preset Collection
Color Art Pro Profiles
;