Lightroom 1 is quicker than before (but colours are bust)

Kev M

Kev M

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You can call me Sir.
Edit My Images
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I fired up lightroom for the first time in yonks tonight and it's impossibly slow. Now my PC isn't exactly up to date but Lightroom never used to be this slow. When you enlarge an image in the library view or transfer it to the editing bit it takes ages to show the full pic from the preview, then any adjustments take forever.

it's currently version 1.2, I was without internet for a while and when I got it ack I couldn't see any benefit in uodating as I didn't need the extra cameras that were added. By all accounts it's not a bad thing because there's something wrong with 1.4 or something :dunno:

Is it worth updating? Could ther be something else wrong? Last thing I did a few months back when I last used LR was to take all photos off my PC and put them on my external hard drive, could this be an issue? I also have all of my photos in one catalogue, should I split them down into seperate catalogues by year to try and reduce the size of them and will this help with performance?

Any pointers would be gratefully recieved.

Kev
 
editing shots from an external drive is veeeery slow. i discovered that!!!
 
I keep all my photos on an external hard drive and have no problems. Have you optimised your catologue? Go to file, catologue settings, and choose optimise. Did you reimport your catolgue after moving your files?:thinking:
 
Janice said:
editing shots from an external drive is veeeery slow. i discovered that!!!
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Is there a reason for that Janice? Why would it be slower than if the HD was inside the big box instead outside in the little box?

hillwalkinggirl said:
I keep all my photos on an external hard drive and have no problems. Have you optimised your catologue? Go to file, catologue settings, and choose optimise. Did you reimport your catolgue after moving your files?:thinking:
Click to expand...

Hmmm, good question. If I remember rightly once I sorted out all the photos into the right years I created a new catalogue as for some reason I'd ended up with a load of different catalogue from my previous fumblings and wanted everything in one place. I'll try your recommendations and come back tomorrow if it's still boogered.
 
Most of my Lightroom editing has been done off an external drive, on a 4 year old laptop without any speed problems. Are all your other progs running ok? How much space do you have on your C drive - i.e. is it nearly full? As for catalogues I've never been one for taking much care over them. With my photos being on different drives and PCs and being moved around they serve no purpose for me. I import photos as and when required, work on them, and what happens to the catalogue doesn't concern me. Create a new one and work from that to see if that fixes it.

1.4 was an improvement over 1.2 - allegedly, although it doesn't exactly leap out and smack you in the face.
 
There have been quite a lot of people reporting this happening and it is a known bug. As mentioned, try optomising the library, if this doesn't work then try updateting LR.
 
I didn't have too much more time to play last night but here's what I found. I optimised my catalogue and it made no difference. I then created two more test catalogues, one on e the external HD and one on the desktop into which I imported the two photos I had been looking at last night. There was a massive difference, it was taking between 5 and 10 seconds to change form the preview to the final image rather than close to a minute so I think it might be because my catalogue is too big.

I then decided to break my catalogues down into years. I only had time to do one last night so I created a catalogue for 2005 and imported all of the 2005 photos from the original catalogue. Once it had finished all of the photos had a realy bad red colour cast. At this point I gave up and went to bed, I'll try and take a look tonight if I have time. Overall though this is starting to be a bit of a PITA.
 
Kev M said:
I didn't have too much more time to play last night but here's what I found. I optimised my catalogue and it made no difference. I then created two more test catalogues, one on e the external HD and one on the desktop into which I imported the two photos I had been looking at last night. There was a massive difference, it was taking between 5 and 10 seconds to change form the preview to the final image rather than close to a minute so I think it might be because my catalogue is too big.

I then decided to break my catalogues down into years. I only had time to do one last night so I created a catalogue for 2005 and imported all of the 2005 photos from the original catalogue. Once it had finished all of the photos had a realy bad red colour cast. At this point I gave up and went to bed, I'll try and take a look tonight if I have time. Overall though this is starting to be a bit of a PITA.
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Have you tried creating a new catologue and importing the photos directly from the disc and not from the catologue?:thinking:
 
Kev

You might want to consider updating to LR 1.4.1. This version has the bug fix for 1.4.

I suspect your speed problem is down to the (I assume) USB drive. I've got 30,000+ images on an external drive, but it is a eSATA one and have no problems with LR. I'm now running 2.1 but had no problems with1.4.1.

Rather than make a totaly new catalogue try selecting all your 2005 images and " Export as catalogue" This will make a new catalogue but include all the previews and corrections . May solve that red problem.

Is your catalogue on the externa drive or internal hard drive. If it is this may contribute to the speed overhead.
 
hillwalkinggirl said:
Have you tried creating a new catologue and importing the photos directly from the disc and not from the catologue?:thinking:
Click to expand...

I was going to do that first but it looked like it would take longer so I went for the other way and then gave up and went to bed.
Chappers said:
Kev

You might want to consider updating to LR 1.4.1. This version has the bug fix for 1.4.

I suspect your speed problem is down to the (I assume) USB drive. I've got 30,000+ images on an external drive, but it is a eSATA one and have no problems with LR. I'm now running 2.1 but had no problems with1.4.1.

Rather than make a totaly new catalogue try selecting all your 2005 images and " Export as catalogue" This will make a new catalogue but include all the previews and corrections . May solve that red problem.

Is your catalogue on the externa drive or internal hard drive. If it is this may contribute to the speed overhead.
Click to expand...

Cheers Chappers, I'll try the export as catalogue thing tonight and see what happens. The problem catalogue is on the external HD which has a firewire connection so I think is supposed to be quicker than USB.
 
I would at least have the catalog on an internal drive, because although FW is quicker than USB it is not as quick as an internal connection.

I would also advise updating to 1.4.1, as there were a few exra features added along the way.

Something else that could be slowing things down is the preview settings, what size previews are you making on import, and is the preview file still in the same folder as the catalog?
 
Kev

Firewire 800 is quicker than USB but Firewire 400 is about the same speed as USB. So moving the catalogue to the internal drive should help. Although I have my images on an external drive the catalogue is on the internal.

I can understand having the catalogue on the external if you want to move between machines but it does slow things down if you are not using eSATA interfaces
 
Okay, I've not managed to try everything yet but to start with I exported all 2005 photos to a new catalogue and they're still red. The photos in windows explorer are fine so it's something within lightroom. I've gone to import a photo into the new catalogue, checked it in explorer and it's fine, then when you get the preview when you're importing it it gets the red cast, it's most noticeable in the skin tones and gives everyone instant sunburn.

AFAIK there's no colour management options in Lightroom so why would it do this. It reminds me of when I imported a photo into CS2 and gave it an RGB profile, that turned everything red I think but lightroom doesn't do the colour management thing until exporting by all account.

Heeeeelp. Could something be corrupted? If I install the latest version 1.41 would I be able to revert back to 1.2 or not and if so how? Computers aren't my strong point I'm afraid.

Thanks very much for your help peeps it's appreciated.
 
I think you should be able to install 1.4.1 as a separate installation to your existing one (assuming you specify a different folder on install obviously) like you can do with Photoshop. You may not be able to run both at the same time though (again, like Photoshop).

Regarding your red, I take it you've gone in to Preferences and selected the Reset all develop settings button? Just stabbing in the dark here. Another thing you could try is to convert one to dng and see what happens. I switched all mine over to dng when I got fed up of keeping track of the xmp files. I used the separate dng converter as it was a lot quicker than doing it within LR. As I had xmp files it added the develop settings to the new dngs.
 
Kev

LR does have colour management. It's just you can't do anything about it. It will use the default monitor profile for viewing, and all the conversion work is done in ProPhoto RGB. It's not until output can you set output colour space preferences. I wonder if the monitor profile has got changed. Have a look and see if it's as it should be. Explorer has as you know has no colour management so that's why I'm looking in that direction. If in doubt you could set the monitor profile to sRGB and see if that makes a difference
 
I'm confused now. I hecked the profiles on the desktop and the only one was the one from my calibrator, I found an sRGB one somewhere and added that but it made no difference.

Then tonight I connected the external drive to the laptop and despite being slow there were no colour issues. There is either something wrong with the PC or more likely something wrong with lightroom.

When you update LR does it remove the old build and install from new (I'm guessing at this given the size of the update files) or is it just an update bolt-on thingy? At the minute after moving house I can't find the original disk which had the license key number on it. Can I find the number in LR somewhere so that I can uninstall it and then re-install it with something from the internet and enter my key?

Cheers,
Kev
 
Cheers F-Stop I've not seen that before and it looks handy. What is he referring to in para4 about the lightroom cache? Id he talking about the catalogue. I don't rememer seeing any reference to cache when I've been fiddling on the computer.

I'm getting quite annoyed now with the colour issue even more than the speed issue. I uninstalled lightroom and re-installed it but it still turns skin tones bright red when you try to import them. I had a look in CS2 which I hardly ever use and that did the same thing. As soon as I openened the image it turned red. I had to go to view>proof colours and select my monitor profile to get the colours to look even vaguely normal.

Any pointers? Anyone live near me who wants to solve my problems in exchange for a few beers?
 
The colour problem could be one of several things.

Proofing to your monitor profile or to sRGB is basically turning off colour management so it's not really a fix. The first thing to check is that the profile for your monitor is correct, if you're using a calibrator re-calibrate just to make sure everything is as it should be. Then double check the new profile is assigned as the default profile for your monitor. Then open LR and see how things look and report back and I can go through some stuff on Messenger to get it sorted :thumbs:
 
Cheers for the offer of help pxl8, I think I've got to the root of the problem after having a late one last night. It seems that my calibrator is either bust or it is creating corrupted profiles. I found some old information on the adobe forums that mentioned deleting all colour management profiles from the monitor which forces it to use sRGB (even though I had selected it manually before to no avail). Et voila, colours in LR are normal. I then re-calibrated my monitor and the colours were bust again, removed the new profile and hey presto reasonably correct colour was restored.

Fingers crossed this is the end of it. Colour management is just far too difficult for it's own good.

Thanks again all,
Kev
 
I'm using a HP somethingorother LCD monitor of circa 2001 vintage and a pantone huey which got one end chewed by one of my springer spaniels. I might stick my name down for the travelling calibrator to see what happens.
 
Yeah, that doesn't sounds so good for the Huey, if nothing else the sensor window might have a bit of Spaniel drool on it which would probably not do much for the calibration :lol:
 
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