However Flickr user MarkW Photo has found settings that greatly aid in the speed of the brush tool for Lightroom 2 nVidia users.

“I have finally fixed my slow performance issues with LR2! Today I did a bit of playing around with different performance settings. I’m using LR2 on a HP Pavillion 6258se Laptop. It has an 80GB Hard Drive, 2GB of Ram and the processor is a 1.8 GHz AMD Turion ™ 64 X2 Dual-Core. I had Windows Vista installed months ago but I downgraded back to XP due to Vista issues. First I opened the windows task manager so I could monitor the performance of Windows while using LR2. I noticed when using the develop tasks the performance stayed around 50%. When I used the retouch brush tools the performance still stayed around 50% but the brush tools were still slow. The more I brushed on the image the slower the brush refresh became. This told me that there must be a video performance issue and not necessarily a processor problem.

Here’s how I fixed the problem.

Mark “

Mark also mentions seeing an increase in the speed of Large Preview rendering.

As with all settings, your mileage may vary. Remember to note your original settings if you feel the need to go back.

“This tutorial will concentrate on what is known as application color management, which basically means that the ICC profile associated with a particular paper/ink combination must be selected in Lightroom rather than the print driver itself. Also, since the tutorial is intended to be useful to new and existing Lightroom users I will also include some of the basics associated with Page Setup and saving Print Templates.”

Read the whole article.

One of the most common issues Lightroom users have been having is print output. Particularly those mac users who have recently ugraded to the latest Leopard Max OS X 10.5 operating system. In this blog post, Tom Hogarty outlines some of the reasons why this can be so and points out the need to update the print drivers for your printers. If you are experiencing print output problems from Mac OS X 10.5, do read this post and use the Comments section to cross check with other users and their shared findings.

There are several comments on this blog that describe printing issues with Lightroom 1.3.1 on Leopard. For many these problems may not have existed before or perhaps the result is different from the current output of Photoshop CS3. Before I dive into the details lets clear up a few definitions:

• Application Managed Printing – this is when you set the printer profile in the application prior to printing. Typically the profiles provided by printer manufacturers are designated by printer type and paper type. You also have the ability to create custom profiles using a third party hardware device. The most common error in Application Managed printing is forgetting to turn off the color management options in the settings available in the print dialog box. I recommend this workflow to professional photographers.
• Printer Managed Printing – this is when you tell Lightroom or Photoshop that the colors and conversion will be managed by the printer. Adobe applications will send the printer a tagged file the printer will then convert to an internal specification.
• Tioga – Legacy printer driver technology introduced with Mac OS X 10.0
• CUPS – Leopard’s current printer driver technology introduced with Mac OS X 10.2

The root of the discrepancy between Pre-Leopard and Post-Leopard printing results is the behavior of the underlying printer driver technology. Prior to Leopard, printer drivers could use either the Tioga printer driver technology or the CUPS technology. With the introduction of Leopard, CUPS is required and Tioga is no longer a valid option. There was a large ecosystem of Tioga-based printer drivers available prior to the Leopard release. Leopard has been released with some CUPS-based printer drivers included and printer manufacturers are working to provide updated drivers based on the newer technology.(Epson has posted beta print drivers for its professional line here: Epson Beta Drivers) But clearly, the support for the newer printer technology is nowhere near as widespread as the previous technology. One point of frustration is that while older or partially compliant drivers can generate a print the results are less then stellar. It may be fine for anyone printing out an invoice on their black and white laser printer but for photographers who have grown accustom to extracting the highest fidelity out of their software and printer, it’s unacceptable. This is particularly true for those who use an Application Managed print workflow. Printer Managed workflows may generate ‘ok’ results but I don’t know many photographers who are satisfied with ‘ok.’

Read the full article…

From the Lightroom engineering team come a few pointers on known compatibility issues with Lightroom 1.3 and the Macintosh OS X 10.5 OS:

The Lightroom 1.3 release addresses many Leopard OS X 10.5 issues but a few outstanding problems remain or have been discovered.

• Time Machine compatibility still remains unclear at this time. Running Time Machine backup or restore operations while Lightroom is in use is not recommended until more information can be obtained. Interim solutions:
  • Have Time Machine exclude the directories where Lightroom catalogs are stored and use Lightroom to backup the catalog files
  • Run Time Machine when Lightroom is not running.
• There is a bug in the Lightroom 1.3 Print Module that can cause the application to crash on either OS X 10.5 or 10.5.1. Minimizing the template preview in the upper left corner can help reduce the frequency of this issue.
• The Finder in Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.5.1 can crash when viewing files that contain Lightroom XMP Snapshot data created in the develop module. This is an error in how the Finder reads metadata and will require an operating system update to solve. (I believe that this occurs more frequently with JPEG or TIFF files)
• Importing directly from a card may not copy all of the image files or may fail. Please copy the images to a local drive using the Finder first if you experience problems.

We will provide an update to address the print module issue but have not set a release date for that update.

John Beardsworth is a member of the core Adobe Lightroom beta testing team, so as you might expect, he should know a thing or two about Lightroom and in particular how to organise photos in a catalog, which is one of his main specialities (apart from being a professional photographer too). So I was interested in the following article where John expresses his views on the usefulness of multiple catalogs.

Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should : one or many Lightroom catalogues
Lightroom 1.1 made it easier to create and work with more than one catalogue, and it’s making some people think that’s how they should work. I’m not talking about when you’re travelling or need to move pictures between computers, but as a routine way of working. Apart from seeing it in blog posts and forum threads, I’ve been asked about it on a couple of occasions recently, and was also forwarded a discussion where one photographer quoted from my book:

Another way to think of Lightroom is as a centralized inventory system managing a warehouse – you no longer need to look through each pallet or bin to find the parts. And as your business grows, and you rent the neighbouring warehouses too, you still only need one system to keep control of your work.

The trouble is that those who are actually advocating the idea of using multiple catalogues (eg another one popped up just today at O’Reilly’s blog and has a particularly rich selection of dumb ideas) never reflect all that deeply on their true reasons for doing so. When you read between the lines, there are essentially two strands to their arguments:

• It’s a workaround for performance problems they’ve experienced with large catalogues

• They’re working “Bridge-style” and don’t really think about DAM

Looking first at the “necessity” argument, if it is indeed so, then clearly you do have no alternative. Just don’t believe, let alone advocate, that such working methods are the Holy Grail of good practice.

Is it necessary anyway? That’s a maybe. It is not yet possible to give simple guidelines (unlike iView’s 2Gb file size limit) for when a Lightroom catalogue might run up against a performance limit*. As a DAM program and image processor, Lightroom probes most areas of your computer’s operations, and let’s also allow for the possibility of some less than optimal code. Many factors other than the number of records in the database could be degrading performance, and so you may not really gain much, if anything, from splitting it up into smaller catalogues.

If performance limits did indeed force you to break your work up into multiple catalogues, there’s plenty to lose. For one thing, there is no better way to let some of your pictures slip through the cracks when you forget to import one folder, or when you add more images to a folder and forget to update the Lightroom catalogue covering those folders. As well as omitting items, you can easily duplicate them. Images may end up recorded in more than one catalogue, with adjustments and their descriptive metadata diverging, keyword spellings too, singular here, plural there. And unless your search needs are very primitive, you’re going to have to repeat searches in each catalogue file. So there’s a time cost. Frankly, while you may think you are smart enough to cope with such a “system”, few of us are, not for long anyway.

Read the full story…

Ian writes:
If you’re having problems with Leopard not being able to render a thumbnail, previews in CoverFlow, etc etc etc or worse (i.e worse = Finder is crashing not relaunching!) then try the following:

1. Select the image in Bridge or open it into Photoshop

2. Select “File Info” command from the File menu

3. Select the Advanced panel

4. Check for the presence of the metadata nameset http://ns.adobe.com/camera-raw-saved-settings/1.0/ (this is NOT a hypelink, so so don’t click it -see attached screenshot)

5. If above is present it’s likely the cause of the problem.

What do you do next?

You can hope that Apple changes Finder/CoverFlow so that it can handle this particular metadata nameset in JPEG, TIFF and PSD files.

Alternatively, you can delete the nameset using the Delete button in File Info (see screenshot below). The nameset is used to store the Lightroom “Snapshot” data, so deleting it from non Raw files shouldn’t lose you anything.

‘Jao’ writes:
“I think that part probably does not get written if you check minimize metadata in the export dialog.”

To which Ian replies:
It’s not written at all during file export. The metadata gets written to file when you Save it to file (Cmd+S) or if you have “Automatically write changes into XMP” active, but ONLY if “Include Develop settings in metadata inside JPEG, TIFF, and PSD files” prefernce is also active. You can switch this preference OFF from within the “Catlog Setting” dialog – “Metadata” tab.