Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

Appendix C. OPTIMIZING LIGHTROOM PERFORMANCE

Lightroom is a fast, lightweight application that can usually run quickly, even on not-so-fast computers. But if you find Lightroom to be running slowly, thereare several ways you can improve its performance:

1. Keep ample free space on your system hard drive and the drive that holds the Lightroom database and preview files. This is true for all photo-editing and imaging applications—you don't want to be working from a drive with limited free space as data corruption may occur.

2. Load your machine with as much RAM as it will hold (or that you can afford). Lightroom likes to have lots of memory available.

3. If you have 4 GB of RAM or more, and your operating system supports 64-bit processing, make sure you're running Lightroom in 64-bit mode. If you're not sure what this means, you can find more information about it online.

4. Take control of your previews. Each time you make an adjustment to a photo, Lightroom has to render new previews. The speed it can do this depends on your computer hardware and the size of the original files you're working with. Remember that Lightroom maintains three separate previews for each image: thumbnail, standard size and 1:1. Lightroom will generate any previews it needs on-the-fly, sometimes this means you'll see a delay as Lightroom builds a preview. If Lightroom already has all the necessary previews rendered, moving between images should be quick. Using the commands on the Library

   For faster performance, you might ...