It'll be a little while before Adobe can deliver on its recent promise to make Lightroom faster, but that doesn't mean you can't still figure out ways to make the program work faster for you. Case in point: photoshopCAFE founder Colin Smith has put together this really useful video outlining 7 'hidden secrets' in Adobe Lightroom that will definitely help you get more out of the Raw editor.
Some of these tips are genuinely useful, and we're going to guess that at least one or two of them will be new to you even if you've been using Lightroom for years.
Smith covers the tips in detail (and shows you how to use them) in the video above, but here's the TL;DW version:
Right click in the panels of the Develop module and enable 'Solo Mode.' This only allows one panel to stay open at a time, collapsing the rest.
Click and drag your panel sidebar out to the left to make your sliders longer.
Hold down Command (CTRL on Windows) and double click the center of a shape like a radial filter, and it will automatically snap to the edges of the photo you're editing.
Right click and uncheck to hide both modules and panels you don't use.
The Develop module doesn't work on videos, but you can sync edits made to a single frame of that video onto the full thing. Just pull a frame, edit it, and then select the frame and video both and click Sync.
You can turn any collection into a 'Quick Collection' by right clicking it and selecting 'Set as Target Collection.' Now you can curate photos into that collection with a single click.
If you have multiple photos selected, you can still see the metadata for an individual photo without deselecting the bunch. Just click Metadata > Show Metadata for Target Photo Only.
And that's it! Obviously these tips are easier to take in by actually watching the video, so click play, learn a little something and let us know which (if any) of these 'hidden secrets' were actually new to you.
I heard a rumour that the new generation of 2000-bit D-Wave quantum computers will speed up Lightroom.... is this true? I've got a spare £600k to buy one if so! /PST
lightrooms biggest [dirty]secret is it runs like a snail on any computer ,from any maker
be it 100 or 10000 dollars
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom-cc-2017-poor-performance Issues such as laggy brushes, 6-10 second wait times when navigating between images, laggy UI interactions, colour shifting and screen blackout behaviours. Screen updates when moving sliders in the develop module can take several seconds to display, and don't even think about using the program in any capacity if an export or import is underway. i7 4790k @ 4Ghz 32Gb RAM SSD Catalog 2x HGST 5Tb RAID 1 image host drives nVidia 970 GTX 2560 x 1440 display, LR in Single Display mode only Windows 10 Pro 64bit
And one more funny thing. Looking at the number of bytes LR reads and writes, it's inexplicably writes more than it reads. Why the heck it writes data that it never reads?
because they are not optimizing code or coming up with recommendations for hw configs not working out ways to intelligently distribute tasks across cores they dont care and dont improve
people are currently jumping ship if they can find a way to adapt a workflow and adobe is scared .... it shows in their hollow promises ...
maybe they will get it together .. for the sake of shooter who depend on the software they pay for to work with efficacy and excellence
Don't go 4k (or 8k!) then.... I love my 4k screens..... but LR hates them. Adobe too busy makeing updated for iDontEarnMoneyOnMyPhoneOriPad users to care about their desktop application.
Affinity and even the new beta for Luminar show adobe up for this lack of interest.
If it wasn't for the "organisational aspect of LR's catalogue" - just like dragons den - I'm out - would be my course of action.
Adobe arrogance, they have us by the gonads in that respect, so can get away with it. Until a competitor forces them to evolve.
Same BS with all corporations who hate their customers.
tristan ... the more folks who see the true state of existence between corporations and customers, the better chance for change the better chance for customers to be given what they pay for
In my version of Lightroom (4.4), "Solo Mode" collapses all the panels, but if you have, for instance, only "Basic" open and you click to open "Detail", they both stay open; Basic doesn't collapse.
What solo mode seems to actually do is collapse all but the most recent panel you have opened, at the time that you select it.
#5 was unexpected. I thought he was going to show us Quick Develop in the Library. Not sure why Adobe doesn't support video in the Develop module if it can handle having every setting copied from a still to a video. Just do what he did behind the scenes.
But then having an intelligent design has never been a Lightroom feature.
1. Decent video card for the Develop module, critically important for 4/5K monitors. At least 500 CUDA cores if NVIDIA and the equivalent for ATI/AMD. 1GB of VRAM is probably sufficient but cards at this level typically have 3-4GB. Memory bandwidth of 256 is better than less though, just a guess, probably not too important for 1080 monitors. 8 bit (i.e. gaming) cards are faster than 10 bit (workstation), everything else being equal and sometimes are a bit less expensive though someday Lightroom will support the higher color accuracy cards. 2. Fastest multi-core processor you can afford for everything else such as import. But a 16 thread 2GHz will be slower than a 4GHz 8 thread processor. The upcoming i9x should be terrific once Intel gets the problems resolved. I'm targeting summer of 2018. 3. 16GB RAM minimum, more if you do a lot of jumping back and forth between images. 4. Separate SSDs for the Library and the Cache. I suspect putting the catalog on a 3rd SSD would help but haven't tested it yet. I need to rebuild my benchmark setup but it's gardening season. 5. Stay current with Lightroom updates. The July 2017 update resulted in 2-4X faster processing RAW Fuji X-T1 images.
I always hear about the performance issues and feel sad... has anyone considered using ACR just for the visual edits? I know it doesn't organize your pics but for simply editing it seems very fast.
@EDWARD ARTISTE I have an nvidia gtx 970, I never turned graphic card acceleration off and it works great. No problems even with 200 and more megapixel raw files made up by stitching a couple of photos.
I'm editing on a Dell 27 inch monitor attached to an Asus Laptop, Intel I7-4700HQ, 2.40Ghz, 16Gb Ram and have very little performance problems with Lightroom 5.6. One thing I did find very early in the piece (especially if you're editing on a laptop) is to make sure that the Power Options on the computer are set to Maximum Performance. In fact it's a good idea to go into the advanced options and make sure every setting is set to maximum. Don't even attempt to edit on Battery Power. As well as that keep the size of your preview files to the smallest viable size and Lightroom works just fine. Oh, and make sure you've set a decent size cache and clear it out regularly.
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