Dear Adobe,

First, let me start with “I love you”. You have been one of my best friends and partners for nearly the past decade of my life. When I think of all your beautiful application splashes and wonderful tools that allow me to be a creative, I am ecstatic. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say I think about your curvaceous béziers all day long.

[LEARN: 4 Lightroom CC Features You Should Be Using]

That being said, our marriage has a serious problem. Actually, you might remember this problem, because I’ve been talking about it for quite a while:

You’ve slowed down.

With every new wonderful feature over the years, you’ve gotten just a little bit slower. You don’t remember me speaking about this? Do you remember way back in 2012 when I wrote to you about my speed and optimization wish list? I just had a few simple requests to improve CPU and RAM utilization, yet you just ignored me.

Or how about when we taught photographers module hacks way back on LR4 to disable unnecessary modules from even loading? We’ve even shown users how to use Smart Previews to edit by manually disconnecting folders before you allowed us to do it officially.

All along the way we’ve built $4,000 and $5,000 machines just to figure out the ideal computer configurations for running Lightroom efficiently. In fact, that process led us to one simple conclusion: The only thing that really mattered, in the end, was clock speed.

[Lightroom 4 and 5 Hardware Performance Test: Single vs Dual CPUs, Hard Drive Configurations, Previews and More!]

We’ve done everything we possibly could to keep this marriage alive, including testing out whether an open marriage between Mac and Windows would be better for overall efficiency in our Mac vs PC testing.

In the end, no matter the operating system, you remain painfully slow. In fact, as I write you this letter, here’s what I am staring at from my $5,000 computer:

You know for a while now that we have been seeing other people. We have been teaching people how to use Photo Mechanic to review and cull.

If you don’t get help, if you don’t do something, I’m afraid this marriage is going to fail. Capture One doesn’t have the most attractive and efficient user layout, but its tools are quite beautiful and at least she doesn’t require me to purchase $5,000 computers every couple of years.

Yours truly,

 – Post Production Pye

Readers, if you are struggling with Lightroom performance, please comment below and share this article on Social Media! Let’s wake Adobe up together!