A question for Lightroom 3 users

[Yellowbelly]

I currently run Elements 9 which for editing, does almost everything I need. However the organizer section is utterly useless in that it soooooo slooooow that I have long ago lost patience with it and no longer use it. The problem is well documented by others all over the internet and Adobe seem to be unwilling to produce a fix.

Therefore I am considering purchasing Lightroom 3, especially as LR4 is soon due out there may be a few good deal on the way. The thing is I am not prepared to even trial it without seeking the observations of you fine lads and lasses.

My set up is an i7 processor with 4gb RAM with an HD5700 video card running W7 64bit.

Has anyone out there experience of using LR3 on a similar set up?

 

[mrgas]

I use Elements 9 and LR3 on a lesser set up than yourself (T7300 2.00GHz and 2GB of RAM) and it copes fine

 

[Alan Sandham]

I use Elements 9 and LR3 on a lesser set up than yourself (T7300 2.00GHz and 2GB of RAM) and it copes fine

I agree, your system should easily be able to cope with both.
Perhaps you could try uninstalling and then a disk cleanup before reinstalling - it might speed things up!

 

[happy haggis]

I really like using LR and use Photoshop far less now. I added an extra 4Gb RAM (8Gb total) and it flies.
I'm sure you won't regret buying it. I'd suggest running the trial until V4 is officially announced as historically, Adobe have offered a free upgrade to people who have bought the previous version. This only worked for purchases AFTER the announcement. Rumour has it that V4 is only running a short beta, so it could be announced as early as the end of this month. I'd also recommend trialling V3 (currently 3.6) rather than V4 as there are bugs in 4 that need ironing out and I wouldn't want to trust my precious originals to it. Anything you do in V3 will be OK if you later buy V4.

 

[EOS_JD]

No brainer - Lr all the your system is probably more powerful than many using it. Get the trial and watch some videos on Adboe or YouTube and learn what it does. I hardly use Ps these days.

 

[mikeleslie]

I currently run Elements 9 which for editing, does almost everything I need. However the organizer section is utterly useless in that it soooooo slooooow that I have long ago lost patience with it and no longer use it.

This could in part be to do with your workflow. For instance I know one photographer who takes his raw images, upscales them to A2 300dpi and stores them as 16bit TIFF files which produces files in excess of 200MB each.

I use Lightroom 3 and 95% of my files are DNG files, on an i3 Imac it runs fine. I do however try to keep my Lightroom catalog reasonable small, only keeping the last 12 months images in the active catalog and archiving anything older, I originally found that with one big catalog and 50,000+ images it did slow Lightroom down a little bit.

 

[Yellowbelly]

Many thanks to all who have responded. I am currently trialling LR3 and so far I am very impressed. The organiser is performing like a racehorse, and with the built-in editing facilities I reckon I could process 90% of my shots to completion.

 

[EOS_JD]

This could in part be to do with your workflow. For instance I know one photographer who takes his raw images, upscales them to A2 300dpi and stores them as 16bit TIFF files which produces files in excess of 200MB each.

I use Lightroom 3 and 95% of my files are DNG files, on an i3 Imac it runs fine. I do however try to keep my Lightroom catalog reasonable small, only keeping the last 12 months images in the active catalog and archiving anything older, I originally found that with one big catalog and 50,000+ images it did slow Lightroom down a little bit.

I have my catalogue on an SSD with nearing 100k images and not slow at all.