Lightroom offers a staggering number of tools to speed up your workflow. In this and the next instalment of Gear Talk, we’ll look at my personal top ten.
- Use Smart Previews
Smart Previews were introduced as early as in Lightroom 5. In essence, Smart Previews are to the Develop module what the regular previews are for the Library module: they allow you to work on your images and edit them even if the drive containing the originals is not attached to your computer. Because Smart Previews are a lot smaller (they are 2048 pixels on the long side and ‘weigh’ between one and one and a half megabytes) and they are stored on the same drive as the Lightroom Catalog, which is – or ought to be – the fastest drive in a Lightroom user’s system, the develop module runs a lot faster if you work based on the Smart Previews rather than the originals, especially if your RAW images are stored on slower external drives. So, although they were originally meant to allow people to work on their images while the drive containing the actual images was unavailable (e.g. on a train or an aeroplane), advanced Lightroom users started to deliberately disconnect their hard drives to force Lightroom to work with the Smart Previews instead.
In a more recent version, Adobe made this a setting in the Performance tab of the Lightroom Preferences so that you no longer need to physically disconnect the drive. Lightroom will then use the Smart Previews wherever possible and will only access the originals for tasks that require the full image data, such as noise reduction, sharpening, exporting in high resolution, sending over to plug-ins or Photoshop or printing…
This is an excerpt from an article by Piet Van den Eynde in issue 102 of FUJILOVE MAGAZINE (September 2024). Subscribers, you can find this article by downloading this issue from your subscriber area.
You will find the remaining part of this article in FUJILOVE MAGAZINE.
Join thousands of Fujifilm X and GFX photographers from around the globe to get access to all available and upcoming monthly editions of FUJILOVE MAGAZINE. START HERE >>>
