In this week's episode of 'Exploring Photography', I'll tell you how you can
optimize the performance of Lightroom cc-by turning off an optimization
feature and we'll look at the new import dialogue. I like it. A lot of people don't.
We'll let you decide what you think.
AdoramaTV presents 'Exploring Photography' with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of 'Exploring Photography' right
here on AdoramaTV. I'm Mark Wallace. Well, I'm hanging out here in a
hotel lobby. I'm on my way from Madrid, Spain to India and I was doing some work
in Lightroom and I started to think about all of the emails and comments and
posts I've seen on Facebook and Twitter about the performance issues of
Lightroom. Now, all of this comes from the fact that Lightroom, Adobe, actually has
released some new versions of Lightroom recently and a lot of people are
complaining, saying that there are some performance issues, that the new versions
of Lightroom are actually slower than the older versions of Lightroom. Now
that's one thing, the other thing is Adobe has released a new import dialogue
and that's making some people shy away from updating their Lightroom altogether, so I
wanted to talk about those two issues two totally different things: performance
issues and the new import dialogue. So let's first talk about the performance
issues. Now, what happened around April or May of this year,
Adobe released GPU acceleration. What that means is that the computer can now
use that video card to accelerate and increase the performance of Lightroom,
but what's happened on some machines it's actually making it slower. Let me tell
you why. When you use the GPU, the graphical processing unit, you have to
actually take all of that data, the picture information from the CPU, that's
the brains of your computer, you have to put that all over to the GPU and that
takes some time so that now the GPU can do some stuff. That has to come back
and forth and so there's some overhead involved and what happens on an older
computer or a computer that doesn't have a high resolution display or a fancy GPU, that
overhead actually slows things down and it actually is faster if you turn GPU
acceleration off. The GPU acceleration is really for those users that have high
resolution displays. There's 4K displays or if you have a Retina Display if you
don't it's probably not going to help you out and the good news is you can
turn that on and off to see if your performance increases really
easily, so let's hop into Lightroom really quickly I'll show you how to turn
off your GPU acceleration to see if that might increase your performance.
Alright, if you're having those performance issues remember this is only
specific to the develop module, specifically things, zooming in, zooming out,
panning around on an image, using the tone sliders, the present sliders, those
types of things. If you're having issues there then what you probably need to do
is shut off that GPU acceleration so it's pretty simple to do that. Just go to
your preferences, your
Lightroom preferences and then on my performance right here on this
Performance tab. I'll click on that and then you can see it right here. This is the
Use Graphics Processor. Uncheck that and that's going to fix those performance
issues for you because that overhead goes away. So it's pretty simple. If
you're having issues just uncheck that. Alright, well that's GPU acceleration it's up to you.
Turn it on, turn it off to see if it works. The other thing that people are talking a lot
about is the new import dialogue. Now, this happened because Adobe got a
lot of feedback from new users saying that importing photos was just confusing.
They weren't sure if the photos came in or where they went and so Adobe said 'Hey,
enough is enough
let's start from scratch and redesign the entire thing.'
Now, people have been using Lightroom for a long time have looked at this and said
"It's horrible. I don't like it. Make it go away", but the news is it's not going away. The new
import dialogue is going to stick around forever
And the thing is, if you've been waiting and hesitating to update your
Lightroom because of this new import dialogue, I think should go ahead and
update because in my opinion it's a pretty good Import dialog. I think it has
most of the stuff the old dialogue had, just laid out a little bit differently.
It's a lot easier to use, in my opinion, so here's a look at that import dialogue.
Let's take a look at the new Import dialog. I'll just click Import here. Now, in the
past everything was on one screen. Now it's divided into two separate screens,
two separate steps. The first step is selecting the photos that you want to
import. Now, the Lightroom will actually go and scan your hard drive and look for
some common folders. Well you might have pictures that need to be imported into
Lightroom, your pictures folder on your desktop, places like that, and so those
will show up or you can also browse your computer to go to a specific file or a
folder if you need to. Then of course you have your camera connected. That will
show up. I've got a card plugged in, also an external hard drive. So, you can go to any
of those places, it's really simple to select where the photos are coming from,
so in this instance, I'm going to select this card here and the first thing that's
going to happen is you'll see everything shows up and this is a much simplified
interface so you're asking where are the destination folders and where the source
folders? Well those are sort of hidden away, and so to get to those you could just
say import these photos. You don't want to do that because you haven't said where
they're going to go. So, over here there's this little gear. Once you kick that out this little side panel
shows up and now here are some of those things that you're familiar with, things
like the destination where you want your photos to go and if you want to import
preset or develop preset or build the previews, smart previews etc. Those
are all there. Some things are missing, specifically file handling now has
copy and add. Move has been removed, it's no longer a feature and the other
feature that's most notably missing is the check box that will
automatically eject your card
when you're import is finished. That has been removed. There's a lot of people asking
for Adobe to bring that back, myself included, but for now it is gone so to
get to the destination, you'll notice that there aren't all those folders and names
down here that used to be down there so now it's just like any other application,
where you want to store your images, you just select and then you go to the
folder that you want to store your images in so I'm going to say in my photos folder so
I'm going to hit cancel because it's already there by default and then you can put that into a
subfolder. From this I want to put these in the Portugal subfolder because I'm in Portugal
right now. You can organize these into one folder, you can organize them by date,
just like you had before so this should be pretty familiar to those of us that
have used Lightroom for a while. The other
thing here is you can now add these to a collection on import. That's sort of tucked
away in underneath there. It's really sort of nice and then you can also add copyright
information so when you click that you can add in your copyright 2015 Mark Wallace, if I want to
do that. Also, you can have your keywords added right here, so I can put in here
bus rides, this was a fun bus ride or whatever it is that you want to key
word your images with. All the rest of the stuff I think is pretty self explanatory
for those of us that have been using Lightroom for a while. The other thing that's hidden away
over here is this little folder right here. You click that. Now you can see all
of those source file so if you didn't, maybe, get it right on the screen as previous
to this, selecting which files you wanted to import, you can always do that here,
you can go in and figure out which device you want to use or which folder or you
can just browse the computer and it works just like it did before but by default,
that is hidden. Once all that's done then you can just click the Import and all of
your photos are going to be imported and everything else works just like it
did in previous versions of Lightroom. Alright, well I think you can see that
the new Import Dialogue is much simpler, it's pretty easy to use . Yeah, it's going to take a
little time to get used to it but I think once Adobe restore some of those
features that are missing specifically ejecting your card once the import is
complete and maybe that
move feature and some other things we'll be right back where we were and we'll start
to love the software, just like we used to and I think for new users, it's actually
better, I know a lot of people don't agree with me on that, in fact most people don't,
but I think it's going to be good for new users because it's much simpler.
Well, thanks so much for joining me for this episode of 'Exploring Photography'.
Don't forget to check out the Adorama Learning Center. We've got a ton of
videos and articles and things that you can check out to learn how to use Lightroom.
You can check out all the reviews on latest software and hard drives and all that
kind of stuff as well. So don't forget to check out the Adorama Learning Center and
also don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV. It's absolutely free and that
way you don't miss a single episode. There's just so much free and amazing
contentt, you don't want to miss out. So click the subscribe button and do that right
now. Well, thanks again. I will see you again next time.
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