Making a brief statement on its Lightroom developers’ blog, Adobe appear to finally be taking photographers’ concerns about the slow performance of one of its most-used photo-editing software options seriously, particularly when performing certain functions.

In a short blog post, Adobe Product Manager Tom Hogarty writes:

“I would like to address concerns recently voiced by our community of customers around Lightroom performance, as improving performance is our current top priority. We have a history, starting with our first public beta, of working with our customers to address workflow and feature needs, and we’d like to take that same approach regarding your performance concerns. We already understand many of the current pain points around GPU, import performance, certain editing tasks and review workflows and are investing heavily in improving those areas.  Over the past year we’ve added numerous enhancements to address your performance concerns but we understand we will have a lot of work to do to meet your expectations.”

Adobe is also asking its users for feedback, providing them with a survey to fill out in which they can highlight three particularly egregious performance issues they would like to see resolved. The example Adobe provide reads: “Adjustment brush after about the 10th adjustment is slow, particularly after using a preset.”

Considering the popularity of Lightroom and that photographers have been calling for improvements for quite a while now, it’s encouraging to see Adobe break its silence and taking complaints seriously.