Photography Asked on August 21, 2021
Is there a performance difference in Lightroom when editing (lossless or with losses) compressed RAW files instead of uncompressed RAW files? Even when it might not be noticeable?
I could imagine that compressed files (lossless and with losses) need to be uncompressed first which might take up some performance. On the other hand uncompressed files are a lot bigger so maybe more data needs to be put through.
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:
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.
Correct answer by Michael C on August 21, 2021
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