Puget Bench for Lightroom Classic 1.0 Released!

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Introducing Puget Bench for Lightroom Classic 1.0

Today, we’re excited to announce the official 1.0 release of Puget Bench for Lightroom Classic – a major milestone in our mission to bring real-world performance testing to every corner of the creative industry! After extensive development and feedback from users, the Lightroom Classic benchmark has graduated from beta to its first full release.

With version 1.0, we’ve rebuilt the benchmark from the ground up for stability, consistency, and compatibility with the latest versions of Lightroom Classic. New features include:

Full integration into the Puget Bench for Creators application (including the Puget Bench Result Browser)
Support for both Windows and macOS.
Expanded camera format testing and AI tool coverage.
Improved consistency between runs.
Enhanced logging and automation options for commercial users.

Whether you’re a wedding photographer managing thousands of RAW images, a studio retoucher processing high-res portraits, or a hardware reviewer analyzing system performance, Puget Bench for Lightroom Classic is designed to provide clear insights into how your system performs.

What is Puget Bench?

While gaming or synthetic benchmarks can offer general insights, they fall short when it comes to measuring performance in the actual workflows that matter to content creators. That’s where Puget Bench comes in. Puget Bench is a suite of performance benchmarks developed by Puget Systems, designed to evaluate hardware using the same real-world creative applications professionals rely on every day.

We built these benchmarks out of necessity. There simply wasn’t a reliable way to test hardware using real creative applications in realistic scenarios. Due to this lack, we began the process of turning our knowledge of both computer hardware and creative workloads like video editing, motion graphics, and photography into a series of benchmarks to help guide users into making the most informed workstation purchasing decisions possible.

Our benchmarks cover a range of applications, including Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, and Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve. And today, we are releasing the latest addition to our lineup: Puget Bench for Lightroom Classic!

How it Works

Puget Bench for Lightroom Classic runs directly on top of your installed version of Lightroom Classic. Instead of approximating workloads through synthetic methods, it uses real photos and replicates realistic workflows, producing results that accurately reflect how your system performs in practice. Because the benchmark operates within Lightroom Classic itself, it automatically accounts for software changes – whether that’s new hardware support, performance optimizations, or even regressions introduced by bugs.

Our benchmarks are a key ingredient in many of the hardware articles we publish, but are also available for anyone to download and run. They are free for personal use, with paid and press licenses available for commercial use or for access to advanced features like CLI automation, local logging, and beta releases.

What Camera Formats are Tested?

The new Puget Bench for Lightroom Classic is designed to test a variety of tasks. At its core, the goal is to measure how well your system handles photos from different types of cameras. While no benchmark can test every possible format, we focused on four cameras that cover a wide range of users we surveyed:

Canon EOS R5 Mark II (.CR3 45 MP)
Panasonic LUMIX S1RII (.RW2 44 MP)
Sony Alpha 1 II (.ARW 50 MP)
Nikon Z8 (.NEF 47 MP)

For each of these formats, we run a range of tests to determine how fast your system is able to process them. These tests include the basics like importing and exporting, along with generating smart previews.

Testing AI Features

In addition to testing various camera formats, Puget Bench for Lightroom Classic also measures performance for many of the new AI features in Lightroom Classic, including:

Select Sky
Select Subject
Reflection Removal
Denoise
Enhance Details
Super Resolution

These tests provide valuable insight into how your CPU, GPU, and overall system configuration affect Lightroom Classic’s most demanding modern tools.

Conclusion

The release of Puget Bench for Lightroom Classic 1.0 marks the next step in our ongoing effort to make performance testing transparent, measurable, and relevant to real creative work. Whether you’re evaluating your current system or planning your next workstation, this benchmark gives you the data you need to make informed, confident decisions.

Best of all, you can download and run the benchmark on your system at no cost. As long as you have an active installation of Lightroom Classic v15 or newer, you’re ready to go!

For a detailed breakdown of the tests included in this benchmark, visit our full test methodology page. And if you’d like to stay informed about future updates to Puget Bench, you can sign up for our newsletter below.