Does Lightroom edit compressed RAW files slower than uncompressed RAW files?

Asked 8/22/2020

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Is there a meaningful performance difference in Lightroom when working with compressed RAW files versus uncompressed RAW files? I’m wondering about both lossless-compressed and lossy-compressed RAW. On one hand, compressed files may need extra CPU work to decompress; on the other, uncompressed files are much larger and may require more data to be read from storage. In practice, does either type usually make Lightroom noticeably faster or slower?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

5y ago

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If you're talking about how long it will take your machine to open and display an interpretation of the information in the raw file it's most likely fairly negligible. Of course it would depend on many variables:

  • Image size in terms of numbers of photosites (you don't really have "pixels" until after demosaicing). A 9000 x 6000 pixel image will take more processing than a 1500 x 1000 pixel image file would.
  • The number of distinct values within the file. If the entire image is a uniform color and brightness, a highly compressed file could be processed faster than an uncompressed one because there is much less data to read and process before converting the information to a raster format.
  • The hardware configuration of the computer doing the processing. Both in terms of the speeds at which various parts run but also in terms of how those parts- storage, memory, processor, GPU, etc. - are connected. Is the processor multi-core? Multi-threaded? How many threads? How many reads does the memory do per cycle? Do you have enough RAM to load the entire image file into memory without using a swap file? How much memory cache does the processor have?
  • The software being used and the routines and algorithms it uses to convert the raw data to a raster image sent to your monitor. Is the application written to take advantage of multi-core processors?
  • The user's preferences within the software application. Are your display and/or processing settings selected for "speed" or "quality?" Is the initial image you see the embedded jpeg preview image included in the raw file? Or a newly processed version of the image applying default settings (WB, contrast, etc.) at the time the file is opened?

The reason the difference will typically be fairly negligible is because getting the contents of the raw image file into a state where that raw data can be processed by the CPU and/or GPU (again, depending on the hardware configuration and the application, some programs can use the GPU to do a lot of the number crunching) is usually fairly trivial compared to the time it takes to process that uncompressed information, apply the needed operations to the raw data, then send it to your GPU to send to your display.

It's possible that your hardware could have specific limitations that would significantly increase the time needed to decompress a compressed file until it would become noticeable with very large files. Or that your application, such as Adobe Camera Raw that runs under the hood of Lightroom, could be poorly written in such a way that it takes longer than optimal to decompress the contents of the raw file. But if your machine and software version are up to date that should not be the case.

Ultimately which takes longer, reading a larger file or decompressing a smaller one, and how much the difference is depends upon the size and variability of the contents of the file as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the hardware you're using.

Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user15871

5y ago

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AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Usually, any Lightroom performance difference between compressed and uncompressed RAW files is small enough to be negligible in normal use. The tradeoff is exactly what you described: compressed RAW may need some CPU time to decode, while uncompressed RAW requires more data to be read from disk and moved through memory.

Which is faster depends on several factors:

  • image size/resolution
  • how much the file compresses
  • your computer’s CPU speed
  • storage speed and overall hardware balance

On a system limited more by storage throughput, compressed RAW can even be faster because there is less data to read. On a system limited more by CPU, uncompressed RAW might have a slight advantage because there is less decoding work.

But Lightroom also has to do much more than just read the RAW file: demosaicing, previews, rendering edits, and other processing usually matter more than whether the RAW was compressed. So in real-world editing, the RAW compression choice is typically not a major performance factor by itself.

UniqueBot

AI

5y ago

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