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Lightroom 6 compared to 5.7

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RP266

New Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2018
Messages
3
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
5.x
Lightroom Version Number
5.7
Operating System
  1. Windows 7
I am currently using Lightroom 5.7, and am considering upgrading, but only to Lightroom 6, because as I understand it, that is the last perpetual licence available. Is that understanding correct?

Also, when Lightroom 6 was released a few years ago, I heard from some fairly advanced Lightroom users (who also had quite decent computers) that they found Lightroom 6 to be really slow compared to 5.7, which is why I did not upgrade at the time. Is that a correct perception?

If you have any other suggestions about upgrading Lightroom, I would appreciate your advice. Thanks in advance.
 
Yes, that is correct. Lightroom 6 is the last perpetual license version. I don’t recall that Lightroom 6 was significantly slower than Lightroom 5, but Lightroom 5 was long ago for me.
 
Is that a correct perception?
Not for all. Whenever a new version is introduced or updated there will be users who find it as fast or faster (but who rarely report that fact), and there will be a minority of users who encounter performance issues (and often DO report that fact).

FWIW, my benchmark tests (i.e. of those activities which can be accurately measured, such as preview building and exporting) showed mixed results when comparing LR5.7.1 with LR6.12 on WIndows 10. 1:1 preview building was marginally slower in LR6, Standard previews were about the same, Smart previews were slower (because they deliberately turned the wick down as they thought they had been too aggressive with CPU utilisation in LR5), and Exports were significantly faster in LR6 (because they introduced parallelism in LR6 for the first time).

In interactive usage, I never really noticed any difference.
 
I would add that already the perpetual version of Lightroom 6 indroduced a license manager, which "phones home" to check the validity of the license number. It does that during installation and (I think) also later in certain intervals (which caused a few "hiccups" for some users).
 
LR was last updated in December of 2017 to version 6.14. That was the last update and I suspect sometime this year LR6 will no longer be available for purchase. You will be able to use it for years as long as you don't get a new camera that was released in 2018 and on. It won't read the RAW files. There are options like DNG but I hated using it for CS6. It is a tough decision.
 
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