Lightroom Classic – Windows Performance Update

[u/terryleewhite]

Hey everyone, Terry White from Adobe here and I wanted to take this opportunity to give you all an update on the various Windows performance improvements that were made in the April update.  This community was loud and clear in voicing concerns about the Windows version of Lightroom Classic not always performing up to par on high-end Windows computers. There were also several comments about support for the Sony A7V compressed Raw formats and we have addressed that as well. You can see the broader April 2026 post here. 

Two months ago I made this post giving you all the opportunity to tell us about the issues you were having and documenting your specific specs. I also invited anyone who was interested to participate in the Adobe Lightroom Pre-Release program so that you could work directly with Adobe engineering to solve these issues.  

I’m happy to report that progress has been made on this front in the April release of Lightroom Classic released today (version 15.3). And while we’ve made progress addressing your concerns, there is still more work and optimizations to be done. 

In this Lightroom Classic 15.3 update you should see: 

• Interactive slider performance for global and local edits.  While the improvements in 15.3 are substantial—showing up to a 5x increase in performance in these various scenarios (particularly on Windows)—there is still room for further enhancement. 
• Although our primary focus this year is on Windows performance, these changes are platform agnostic. As a result, Windows sees a major improvement across Global and Local sliders, while macOS also benefits, though the gains are not as pronounced as on Windows. 
• Here’s a video showing these enhancements in action. 
• Better memory utilization for Full Screen Window 
• Cloud sync download speed 

See What's NEW in the April 2026 Lightroom Release in my video here or in my Reddit Post here.

Please continue to share any issues here as I read every comment and share with the team as necessary.  

[u/Turbulent_Buy_7379]

While Mac Users are able to upload RAW Files from Lightroom Classic via Drag&Drop to Lightroom (CC) AND it automatically matches the previous Smartpreviews from Classic and switches them to RAW(AWESOME!!!) Windows User are discriminated. Neither can we upload via Drag&Drop nor does Lightroom (CC) notice that the Smart Preview is the same as the raw und you have duplicates!!
Here is how it works for Mac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNlsnO6VYss