ightroom has been an integral part of my photography work for as long as it has been around. I was an early adopter of it when it was added to the Adobe portfolio, and I remain a daily user. I built a new computer when we were in Seattle, and it was happily zipping along when I built it whether it was working on photos or rendering video edits. However, in recent times, I found that Lightroom was getting very sluggish.

This was becoming very frustrating. The idea of building a new machine wasn’t top of my priorities right now. I didn’t want to be going through all of the migration issues again. It has got easier over the years and is now not too onerous but there are still things that need to be done that I forget until something minor doesn’t work. Before embarking on that, I did start paying attention to the performance metrics of the current machine.

As I was using Lightroom, I noted that the processor was rarely getting heavily used and I have a ton of RAM and, while that was getting quite well used, it also wasn’t getting maxed out. However, the offload to the graphics card did seem to be making that get used a lot. I took a look online at recommendations for graphics cards and decided that my first port of call would be a card upgrade.

Graphics cards are not cheap. The demand for the AI sector has put pressure on graphics chip pricing. I am also competing with the serious gamers which means even more upward pressure on the price. However, I got something that was identified as having good capabilities for Lightroom. It showed up quickly (doesn’t everything these days – how strange it feels when something is going to have a long lead time) and I went about squeezing it into the case. The previous card was considerably smaller and required a lot less power. I had to remove some of the internal elements to get this to fit. It also needed three power cables versus the one for the previous card. All of this was relatively easy although far less so than it would have been if I was putting the thing together from scratch.

I powered the system up and, after a few driver installation processes, the machine was ready to fire up Lightroom. It opened up and I immediately noticed the difference. Scrolling through the catalogue, previous rendered immediately and the log in scrolling was gone. I opened up an image and created a virtual copy to play with the masking functions. The first mask model was rapidly created and then the brush functions were tried. Absolutely no lag and great responsiveness. It was like a had a new computer.

Looking at the performance metrics, the processor and RAM were much as before but the new card was working away busily and was using a load of RAM. It was certainly doing what was hoped. This wasn’t a cheap upgrade to make but it has effectively given me a new level of performance by changing one component and leaving everything else as was. That seems like a win to me.