Skip to main content

Speed Improvements

Lesson 6 from: Lightroom Classic CC for the Professional Photographer

Jared Platt

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

6. Speed Improvements

Next Lesson: Lightroom Mobile

Lesson Info

Speed Improvements

One of the things that you can, that's different about Lightroom CC now, pretty good feature, although you're gonna go, oh that's kind of a little basic thing. But if you go to the Library module and you go into the import dialog box, inside the import dialog box is the option, instead of just looking at these photos, I can actually sort them by file type, media type, file name, so that inside of my import, I can sort them and then just choose the ones I want to import. So I've got shaking heads, like yeah, okay, that took a long time to get something that really could be helpful. So that way, if you have a folder you're importing rather than say, a card, you can say I just wanna import the PSDs, or I just wanna import the images that were taken on this camera's CR2s, and so then I can organize those and say okay, I only want it done by media file type, so here's all my JPEGs. Those are the ones I wanna put in. Or I wanna do it all by raw images. Okay? So good, right? So that's a nice ...

little improvement. It's something fairly basic, but it's very helpful. Okay, so you're gonna find that most of the things that are in Lightroom C, or Lightroom classic, that have been updated are, they're not big wow factors. I gave you the big wow factor first, which maybe was the wrong way to go. I should have built up to it, but I wanted you to love that one. And then I'm just gonna show you some of the other ones that are just like oh, good, that'll be helpful. So one of the things is that when you import, and let's go back to the import dialog box again. So when you're importing, remember before, there were these options, build the previews, and the previous you can build were: Minimal, Embedded & Sidecar, Standard and 1:1. And Minimal would import much faster and show you images much faster, but there's still a build time to it. And then Standard took a long time to build, and then 1:1 took an even longer time to build. And so people would, literally in frustration, go work in Photo Mechanic to import their staff faster, because they're like oh, that's just too slow. I gotta go. So Embedded & Sidecar, used to be, it did nothing different. Like, you would look at it and it would be like, Minim+al takes this amount of time? Embedded & Sidecar takes the same amount of time. So now if you use the Embedded & Sidecar option, it is literally using exactly what's on the camera, the same way that Photo Mechanic is doing. So if you need to see your photos instantaneously, like right now, choose Embedded & Sidecar and they would just show up. And if you tell it not to build the smart previews, if all you do is Embedded & Sidecar, it will be really, really fast and it'll (imitates shuffling noise) and you'll see exactly what's there, you'll be able to choose them really fast. But when you zoom in, you'll have to let it build the preview then, so it'll decide whether it's sharp or whatever. It takes some time. So that's another feature. They finally made Embedded & Sidecar do exactly what it says it's doing, which is just showing you what embedded in the actual image itself, okay? So that's another thing inside of the import dialog box. Now another thing you'll notice, and this is not something to show, it's just something to tell, which is its faster. So they went through and they really crunched the code and changed things and they actually decreased the size of the catalog. So the catalog used to be this big, and now it's gonna be like that big. So it's a small decrease in catalog size, but that means an increase in speed. So you're going to have a faster working catalog because of the stuff that they've done to it, but it's also gonna, your advantage is that your catalog is gonna be small too. So that'll be helpful to you in moving it around and copying it or backing it up and stuff like that. So that's just faster. You'll notice that your Lightroom is gonna operate faster as a result of all those changes. Clearly, it's gonna operate faster on newer computers. Older computers are not going to see those speed increases because it's trying to use the speed of things. So like for instance if you have an old graphics card, it can't use the graphics card to help speed it up. So you need to upgrade your graphics card if you want that speed increased that's used in using your graphics card. And if you want to, you can go to the Preferences menu, and in the Performance panel you'll see an option to use the graphics processor as part of the speed increase. So if you click on that, it'll speed you up. If you click on that and you have an old computer that's like a dinosaur, then it will slow you down because then you're gonna be trying to use something that is literally not made for that. And so just be aware. If you have a new computer, click that. If you don't have a new computer, leave it unclicked, okay? Also, interestingly enough, they used to have this camera cache setting size. It used to start at like one or two gigabytes or something like that. Like stupid, like it was small. They actually increased it to 20, like right off the bat so you can't not have it less than, I think, 20, which is where you should've, they should always done that. I keep it at 200 to give you an indication of how much you really should be using, but they got a minimum of 20 now. So at least out of the gates, if you install Lightroom Classic, it will be faster than it was simply because they set the setting in such a way that it will be faster. You could've done that in the old days, you can go back and increase that and you would've been faster, they just figure out that most people weren't going there and increasing that. So basically, that's, the cache is kind of the drive memory that it can use to kind of shift files around. The bigger that is, the faster your catalog can go. So that's another little increase. Some of the speed increases you'll see is when you're walking through photos. So like say you're looking at images like this, and you just walk through photos, it will walk quickly through the photos because it's intelligently figuring out, okay, he's going right and so I'm gonna build things in front of him going right. Oh, he turned directions, he's going left, I'm gonna start building things ahead of him this way. Instead of like, oh my gosh, he just went to this photo, I need to build it. So it's gonna try and build stuff ahead of where you're going, so you'll see that it walks a lot faster, both in the Library and in the Develop module. So that's another fast speed. Let's see, oh Smart Collections. Everybody know what a Smart Collection is? Okay, Smart Collections are a little bit smarter now. So if I go to my collections and I create a Smart Collection, it's a virtual collection based on things. And there's a lot more options as to what you can do. Like for instance, you can choose, I wanna see everything has lens corrections on. So they just added certain things. You can see everything that doesn't have a title in the space. So if you're really good at titling stuff for like social media so that when you post it, just automatically puts a title on it, it will show you all of the photos that don't have or do have titles. So things like that, they've just given you, what else, oh you can also see whether or not it has chromatic aberration on it. So you can then sort your photos and say I wanna see everything that doesn't have chromatic aberration, and then review it and make sure whether it needs it or not. So there's just me more options when you're deciding what kind of information to look for. So you just look in like other metadata or location information, all that kind of stuff is available to you, and now it has more of those options available to you. So Smart Collections just got a little bit smarter with more options for you to try and find images that you're looking for. So those are some of the things that are available there. If you're exporting, in the past when you export an image, you had the option at the bottom to decide what kind of metadata to put inside the file. So if you like, say you're making a JPEG and you're sending it out to the web, you could tell it to put all metadata, only the copyright, et cetera, et cetera, but you can now choose all except the camera raw info. So now, it's not gonna send out any camera raw info, like for instance what did I adjust on it? Did I bring the exposure up? Because they could see that in Photoshop if they looked at it. They could like, oh he did this, this and this and this. You can tell it not to that now. So that's just another little I don't want the world to know what my secret sauce is. Or I'm not sure exactly why you don't want them to know that, but it's like this pride thing. I don't want people to see what I did to my photo. Or even funnier is the person who doesn't want people to see what f-stop it was shot at and shutter speed. I don't want them to see that, that's my secret sauce. (chuckles) It's not your secret sauce. I promise you. All we had to do is study for a year and we know exactly what f-stop, it's very easy to figure out. So let's see. Oh, how many of you do like HDR stuff inside of Lightroom? Okay, so HDR has not made to Lightroom CC yet, neither has pano. But Lightroom Classic has the ability to highlight several images and merge them as an HDR, or make them into a pano. That just got faster because now you can work on one and set it going, and then work on another and set it going and then work on another and set it going and it will favor the stuff you're working on so it doesn't slow you down. And then when you let it go, it'll start processing it in the background. And when you start working on another one, it'll wait and let you work on that one. So it's figuring out that you're more important than processing, and so you can process a number of panos or HDRs much faster than you could before, because it's putting them all together. Dan asked, if you upload a JPEG file in Adobe RGB color space to Lightroom CC, does it maintain that color space or convert it to sRGB? This is an important question for pro photography. Okay, so remember that the color space inside of Lightroom is agnostic. So it's a raw color space. So if I upload anything in Lightroom CC up to the cloud, you're gonna be looking at that in its own color, it's in Lightroom's color space there. The color space of the JPEG is going to, if let's say it exports it, if you export it to a friend, like you're gonna save it out, you'll choose that color space. And by the way, the export dialog box inside of Lightroom CC is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very minimal right now. I guarantee it's going to increase, but right now you can either save it out as the original file, which is the raw file; or you can save it out as a JPEG, and there's almost no other options. So in that case, CC, if you're worried about that, don't export from CC until that option increases, because then you can choose. But what's gonna happen is it's going to export a JPEG in sRGB, because sRGB is the color space of the web or whatever. But an answer to the question of going to the cloud, it's not sending the color space of the cloud, because when it comes down to any of the other devices, they're still gonna be in the same non-color space agnostic color space. Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC, Lightroom Mobile, they're all gonna be looking at that file and applying the settings that you've put onto it, and so the file hasn't changed at all. So there's no color space transfer going on. The only time color space comes into being is when you export it and create a new file coming out. That's when you have to worry about that, and at that point if you're in Lightroom Classic, you'll have every option in the world. You'll be able to do ProPhoto RGB, 1998 and sRGB. When you go to CC, you're gonna be limited for a little while. Sweet, so one more question. This is kind of an interesting one, asking about, first of all they thank you for the class. Love the new features you're highlighting. How do you get a heads up in the future on changes Adobe makes? Is there a good source for that? Like, if you wanna know what just came out in the new version or you wanna know what's coming up, where do you go? So every time they release something, there's always a list somewhere. And the best source of that is actually Adobe itself. On adobe.tv, or tv.adobe, Adobe TV, just Google Adobe TV. In that area, when they release a new thing, there's always gonna be a blog post there that says what's new in Adobe Lightroom CC. That's where you're gonna find a list of things. But always check your Adobe Cloud little link right up here at the top of your computer or at the bottom if you're a PC user. If you go there to the Adobe drop-down panel, you can go to your apps and you can see all the apps that are available to you, and there's always a what's new. Se that little what's new in there? If you click on that, it will take you to a list of what's new. It won't show you in action, that's why you would go to like Adobe TV and see their blog post on it, but it will show you a list of all the things that are new inside of that particular new release. But make sure you check there on an often basis. I check there once every couple of weeks, I just jump up there and say is there anything new? Like have they updated anything? And if there is, I just update it because I always wanna be on the latest update.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Lightroom® CC Ecosystem PDF
Film Presets

Ratings and Reviews

user-200a2a
 

Really like Jared's teaching style...has a great sense of humor & education to support anything he says. Learned a tremendous amount and feel comfortable & confident that I understand the basics and how to take advantage of the LIGHTROOM ecosystem. Good job....this was my first Creative Live purchase and am very satisfied.

Candy Smith
 

Jared does a great job of getting over the fear of the changes that my photography friends were talking about when the cloud went into effect. He really encourages you to take full advantage of all that is available with the CC subscription across all your devices. Huge time saver which I appreciate as I have many projects going at the same time. I now travel way more than I thought I would, and Jared helped me move into a more mobil form of editing so I can use my time more wisely.

JennMercille
 

Before I took this class I used Lightroom Classic CC as a culling tool more than for editing. Jared Platt showed me how to speed up my editing workflow, and rely more on Lightroom Classic and less on Photoshop, which cut my editing time nearly in half. Platt teaches in a holistic style with humor, demonstrations and tons of knowledge that is easy to follow. I really enjoyed this class, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to speed up their workflow or take advantage of the new mobility features that Adobe has added to the Lightroom platforms.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES