Maybe LightRoom wasn't that slow

A while back I wrote about how slow LR was when using gradients and brush tools. Even on my 8-core MacPro, the beach ball kept on spinning forever. Today, as I was watching the L-L video “Where are my #$$$”% images”, I realized that I had turned on the “Automatically write changes into XMP” option. This makes LR write every single movement on my sliders into the XMP sidecar file (or the DNG file) as I do the movement, and the slowdown is caused by the disk bandwidth. When I turned off this option, LR in snappy, and I am happy.

So, go into the catalog settings and uncheck the “Automatically write changes into XMP” option inside the “Metadata” tab. You should also go into the “View Options” under the “View” menu, and tick off the “Unsaved Metadata” checkbox. That way you will get a small arrow on each photo that contains unsaved metadata. Every once in a while, and at least every time you quit the session, select those photos and hit Cmd-S. You will not lose work even if you don’t save, but then the metadata is only stored in the LR database file, and not as part of the image file. If the metadata is stored in the image files, you will get back everything if you reimport them into a new catalog, which is good if the lightroom catalog gets corrupted.

Lightroom slowdown

It’s been a while since I last did some Lightroom work now. Since then, version 2.3 has arrived.

This evening I sat down to process some shots I made down by the waterfront today. I did some basic adjustments, and then one single gradient before I decided to tweak the sharpness be bit.

Bad idea!!

It seems like Lightroom is unable to response to the sharpness sliders when there is a gradient in the stack. I haven’t tried it with local editing, but I expect similar behavior. The strange thing is that it doesn’t really consume CPU or RAM while doing this, and if it did, I have loads of both. It looks more like the gradient makes the software prone to napping. It’s just slow for no good reason. I mean, if it slowed down due to the intense calculations needed to process the gradient I could understand. It seems like it’s just some very poor quality programming, like Adobe goofed. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last, but I hate it every time.

Just some left behind bananas.

UPDATE:

The picture of the rotten bananas was not meant to be illustrative, it was just a lucky coincident. LightRoom, like bananas, are quite good, but not when it has turned bad.

new gallery solutions

I tend not to update my galleries as often as I want to. I have tried to find the best middle ground between look and feel, and easy maintenance, but I see now I have to work more on the easy updating. Right now, I’m running an export from LR, resizing and framing the pictures. Then I copy them to my RapidWeaver work directory, open RW, import the images, and publish to the web. Too much work.

So now I have started to investigate into directly exporting images from LR instead. The trick is to find the right gallery template, or make one myself, and to figure out the best structure and work flow. This solution makes it difficult to synchronize the menus and look between the galleries and the rest, but I’m starting to feel that I really don’t care that much. As long as it looks good, I can live with a small inconsistency.

Anyway, I have started to try out some templates, and I found one that contained support for Cooliris. I’m pretty sure it will be too much for my galleries, but the effects are very cool (as eye candy). If I start to use that template, I may keep the option of using it. After all, it is optional. The main viewing capability is done by the Java based uuuh not Lightbox …. not Greybox ….. uuuu …  one of the boxes, I don’t remember which.

Anyway, have a look here http://www.lentic.net/test_gallery

You’ll have to install some CoolIris shit to make it work, but once you do, press “Start slideshow” at the upper right corner. I’ll probably remove that gallery some day soon, so forgive me if the link stops working.

cropping tool in Lightroom

I still haven’t settled on my input sharpening, mostly due to lack of time for experimenting. I’ve read a couple of small articles on the subject, but it seems that most don’t really know what their talking about. The main problem is the “Detail” slider. One thing is to just fiddle with the sliders until it looks about right, but I want a systematic approach to it. A way to quickly set the sliders very close to the optimum. If I just turn “Detail” to 100%, I have a pretty good method for the others.

Anyway, I was doing some quick processing of some recent takes when the grid in the cropping tool suddenly disappeared. Things like this happens from time to time if I accidentally press some button. The good thing is that I then learn a keyboard shortcut in order to fix it again.

The shortcut in question is the letter “O”. Press this when in crop mode, and you’ll toggle through a series of different grid overlays. Some of them are not symmetrical, and those can be flipped around by pressing Shift-O. Still haven’t figured out how I turn it off, but I like it on, so I don’t bother.

local corrections, Lightroom or Photoshop

It’s been a while since LR 2 came about, and I’m increasingly fond of the new gradient and brush tool for local correction, but it’s definitely not for everything. Like with everything that is new, I have used this tool maybe a little too much lately, making it a bit difficult for myself. The thing is, even if it is local adjustments, they are not as precise as in Photoshop. First of all, unless you have one hell of a computer, the time you wait for the spinning beach ball (hour glass in Windows) will limit how much tweaking you do to a mask. My computer, an 8 core mac pro, really kick ass, so this isn’t that much of an issue for me, but I have tried to use it on a 2.16GHz iMac and it was not that fun. The second thing that limits the precision is that you have to paint the mask by hand. Ok, you can get some help, but the vast number of methods for creating masks in Photoshop is unbeatable. As a side note, the lack of precision when creating masks was my main issue against LightZone. This was even more annoying than LightRoom since the masks were made by creating vector drawings. Anyway, it seems like it is very important to not get stuck in LightRoom  when Photoshop can do a much better job, even now when LightRoom has become this versatile.

I must be close to blind

I really don’t understand how I could avoid seeing this before.

Just now, I looked at some photos in LightRoom, and I flipped between the Develop and the Library module. The colors changed!!! aaaaah. This should be a color managed app. What is happening???

The reason is of course how Library and Develop handles sharpen settings when showing images in less than 1:1. For some reason, Adobe has decided not to preview the sharpening in Develop when you’re not zoomed in to 1:1. They say it isn’t accurate anyway due to the low resolution of the computer screen. In the Library module on the other hand, the image shown is a rendered jpg version, baked with sharpening and all. If I zoom in to 1:1, the images are exactly the same.

So, how do I handle this?? I guess about the same way I handle color mismatch in PHotoshop at odd zoom levels. Did you know that?? If you have a layered photoshop file and show it at, say 33% zoom, the colors may be way off (wrote about it back here). This is not real, just a symptom of the fast, but inaccurate resize algorithm used for the screen. The solution is to zoom in to 1:1 or flatten the image. 

Moral:  Never do critical color adjustments without double checking at 1:1 zoom level.

Fixing a broken Lightroom catalog

Every time I think I see the end of the current race at work, a new skeleton drops out of the closet. Hopefully it will end soon, but this means heavy prioritizing on my home computer time. Blogging has been too far down the list. Instead I have amused myself with a trial version of LightRoom 2. I have used version 1 since it came (or more correctly, since the beta), and this upgrade looks like it is worth it. I really like the brush and gradient tool. I have even bought the Luminous Landscape tutorial, and it was actually quite good. Quite a few hints and tips, and it was entertaining enough to watch the whole 7.5 hours.

Anyway, what I wanted to write here is a little hint that may be useful for others out there.

Just an hour ago, I managed to break my Lightroom catalog. I had started a task that took up too many resources, and I tried to abort with the consequence that Lightroom became unresponsive. Probably it would have passed, but I’m not ery patient with stalling software, so I killed it. Bad idea.When I tried to restart, I got an error message saying “An error occurred when attempting to change modules.”, and when I clicked OK, I only got a grey window. No library – nothing. I tried to check integrity, but that said everything was ok – still no library. I tried a lot of stuff without much hope, like reinstalling and all that. Nope.I’d hate to go back to my 6 days old backup since I had done a lot of library stuff lately that I didn’t want to trash.

Then I came across the magic spell. I created a new empty catalog, and imported the corrupted one. It worked. I haev got all my metadata, keywords, collections – Everything.