I bought a new Mac just for photo editing, but Lightroom still feels unreasonably slow on it. I have tried both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, but both are not nearly as responsive as I would expect. Especially when doing things like using the Heal tools. Are there any settings I can adjust to make it operate faster?
8 GB is the reason, especially if you’re using Raw files. Adobe will rip through RAM on my Windows machine with a dedicated GPU memory. I’ve seen it eclipse 20 GB of RAM from time to time (mostly because it’s available it will cache images).
Apples M series chipsets are very efficient with everything being contained on a single die. With that, RAM is a shared resource for the CPU and GPU. Since Lightroom accelerated certain tasking via GPU (like heal or masking) it might run slow if the CPU is also running a lot of data through RAM. I’d open system monitor while you’re running Lightroom and see if you’re hitting a bottleneck.