

The new Lightroom is faster, but it still crawls here and there

Importing a large batch of images into your Lightroom catalog is also faster, but it still takes long enough that you might want to use the time to walk away from your computer or check Twitter. The biggest improvements are found in the rendering speed of the "exposure" and "distort" tools - changes made with these appeared much faster in the preview build of Lightroom 6 I used. Even if you're using a MacBook Pro from four years ago, you'll still see an improvement in the overall performance and the speed of individual tools. Lightroom 6's performance is based heavily on your computer's GPU and processing power, but Adobe is promising speed increases on most modern machines. The biggest change in this version of Lightroom is speed. It's been almost two years since Lightroom 5 was released, which at the time was a major update to the photo editing program's look and performance. But the excitement should be tempered, because the new version is really more of an update than a revolution. It's available as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription - where it's called "Lightroom CC" - and as standalone software. Photographers and photo editors are about to hear some long-awaited news: Lightroom 6 is now available.
