RAW Import with Adobe Lightroom 3

Must-read for Photographers!

Lightroom 3 was set to for high quality 1:1 previews. Files were added without moving (not copied).

The results are shockingly good in favor of the 2011 MacBook Pro, and thus rather disappointing for the 3.33 GHz Mac Pro, which ought to be running 50% faster or so. This affirms the MacBook Pro quad-core as an outstanding platform for photographers— and note that it easily beats the 2.8 GHz Mac Pro.

Note also that Lightroom does a lousy job on a 12-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro, running no faster than on a 6-core.

I don’t like surprises unless I can verify them, so I did. The results are as shown— amazing. And consistent with all the other tests.

But the big story for Lightroom 3 users is that this speed increase makes the 2011 MacBook Pro quad-core a no-brainer upgrade, even if one already has last year’s fastest model.

Test machines used my preferred SSDs, see the test configuration. Hard drive users will see slightly degraded results over those shown here.

Time in seconds, lower is better