Table of Contents for

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC Book, Second Edition

General Preferences

Let’s begin with the General preferences (Figure 12.3).

Show Splash Screen

At the top, you can select the desired language you wish to use. If you deselect “Show splash screen during startup,” you can avoid seeing the Lightroom splash screen (Figure 12.1) each time you launch Lightroom. This is just a cosmetic thing, and it depends on whether you want to see the splash screen as the program loads. After the program launches, if you select About Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC from the Lightroom menu (Mac) or Help menu (PC), you will see the Figure 12.2 splash screen, where you can read the full credits for the Lightroom team who worked on the program.

Check for Updates

When you first installed Lightroom, you had the option to choose whether to be notified automatically of any updates to the program. In case you missed doing this, you can check the “Automatically check for updates” option.

Catalog Selection

In the Default Catalog section, you can choose which catalog should be used each time you launch Lightroom, such as “Load most recent catalog” or “Prompt me when starting Lightroom.” You can also jump directly to the Catalog Settings by clicking the Go to Catalog Settings button at the bottom of the dialog. As the text message here points out, this allows you to apply catalog-specific settings. For more information about these settings and working with catalogs in Lightroom, refer to Chapter 3.

Import Options

When the “Show import dialog when a memory card is detected” item is checked, this forces the Import dialog to appear automatically whenever you insert a camera card into the computer. The “Select the ‘Current/Previous Import’ collection during import” option is checked by default, meaning that the Current/Previous Import collection is always shown whenever you import new files. This is what most people will expect to see happen. But if you prefer to have the import process happen in the background, then deselect this option. The “Ignore camera-generated folder names when naming folders” option can help shorten the import process if you wish to import everything directly from a camera card into a single Lightroom folder. For example, maybe you have a camera card with photos that were shot using more than one camera and they have ended up in several different folders. When this option is checked, the card folder contents are all grouped into one folder ready to be imported.

Completion Sounds And Prompts

In the Completion Sounds section, you can choose an alert sound to play after completing an import or export from Lightroom or tethered transfer. You will often see warning dialogs with a “Don’t show again” check box at the bottom. If you click the “Reset all warning dialogs” button, you can restore all default warning alerts.

Presets Preferences

The Lightroom Presets preferences are shown in Figure 12.5. You will notice the “Apply auto tone adjustments” and “Apply auto mix when first converting to black and white” settings have gone. Mainly because these options were never used much; most people found the auto-tone setting to be too hit and miss to be enabled as a default. However, the new Auto Settings is now regarded as being more reliable.

Camera-Linked Settings

The Default Develop Settings section is linked to a feature found in the Develop module Develop menu called Set Default Settings, discussed on page 370. Basically, if you check “Make defaults specific to camera serial number” and “Make defaults specific to camera ISO setting,” you can use these check boxes to determine whether certain default settings can be made camera-specific and/or ISO-specific. The “Reset all default Develop settings” button lets you revert all the Develop settings to their original defaults.

Location Section

If you would like Lightroom to save the custom presets you have created within the main catalog folder, you can check the “Store presets with this catalog” option. This is useful if you are migrating library images from one computer to another because it saves having to transfer the custom settings (such as your Develop settings) separately, should you wish to share your custom settings with other users. But then again, you might prefer not to also share your custom presets. This preference item gives you that choice. There is also a Show Lightroom Presets Folder button, which conveniently opens the Lightroom presets folder (wherever it is stored) so you can quickly access the folders that contain your Lightroom presets.

Lightroom Defaults Section

The other buttons in this section are all reset buttons that can be used to restore various Lightroom settings. For example, the Restore Export Presets button restores the preset list that is used in the File Export dialog (see page 450), and clicking Restore Keyword Set Presets resets the Keyword Sets template list. To explain this in more detail, if you go to the Library module Keywording panel (Figure 12.6), you will notice that Lightroom provides a few Keyword Set templates that can be used for keywording photos such as Portrait Photography, Wedding Photography, and Outdoor Photography (Figure 12.7). If you click the Keyword Set menu in the Keywording panel (or choose Metadata Keyword Set Edit), you can customize the default Keyword Sets. Restore Keyword Set Presets therefore restores the original Keyword Sets.

External Editing Preferences

See page 434 in Chapter 7.

File Handling Preferences

The File Handling preferences are shown in Figure 12.10.

Import DNG Creation

The Import DNG Creation options in the File Handling preferences refer only to the DNG settings that are used whenever you choose to import photos using the Copy as DNG option. First, we have the File Extension options, which can use lowercase dng or uppercase DNG.

Convert and Export Dng Options

The Import DNG Creation settings discussed here can also be found in the Export dialog, as well as in the dialog that results from choosing Library Convert Photo to DNG (Figure 12.11). In the case of the Convert Photos to DNG dialog, you have an option to “Only convert raw files.” Select this option to filter the conversion process so that it applies only to raw originals and not JPEGs or other non-raw photos. You can also turn on the “Delete originals after successful conversion” option if you wish to clear all the original raw files from the folders. I always check this because I am usually comfortable with removing the original raws after I have converted everything to DNG.

DNG compression

The standard DNG file format applies what is known as lossless compression. This method compresses the file size without incurring any data loss. And by this I mean no loss of image data and no loss of metadata or any other secret source data that is embedded in the original proprietary raw file. DNG compression usually results in a file that is slightly smaller than the original. The DNG compression method is often more efficient than that used by the camera manufacturers—but not always, as it may sometimes yield slightly bigger files.

DNG with lossy compression

The Use Lossy Compression option allows you to create lossy DNGs and this option is only available in the Convert to DNG and Export dialog settings. When this option is selected, the DNG conversion produces a linearized demosaiced version of the raw file adding lossy compression, making the saved file size significantly smaller. However, because the raw file data is kept in its linear form, it responds just like a regular DNG when making Develop adjustments. Such files read quicker because they are smaller, and because they are already demosaiced, the early-stage raw processing can be skipped. This, in turn, speeds up the raw image processing. The compression applied here is quite safe (equivalent to, say, a quality 10 JPEG setting), but having said that, it is nonetheless lossy and is not advised for use as a regular raw archive format. In the Export dialog, you also have the option to export files as lossy DNGs at reduced pixel dimensions (see page 456).

Updating DNG previews for third-party viewing

The DNG file format has been around for a number of years now and widely adopted as a preferred format for archiving raw camera files. One snag, though, is that the DNG-created previews may not always be up to date. This is not necessarily a problem if you are using DNG in Bridge or Lightroom, because the previews can easily be rebuilt when transferring DNG files from one Lightroom/Bridge setup to another. However, it is less convenient when working with other DNG-aware programs that are unable to rebuild a Camera Raw–generated preview. To get around this, you can go to the Library module Metadata menu and choose Update DNG Previews & Metadata. This does two things: It updates the metadata the same way as the Save Metadata to Files command does and rebuilds the JPEG previews contained within the DNG files.

Validating DNG files

A Validate DNG Files feature is located in the Library module Library menu. This can be used to carry out a DNG health check, although be warned that it can take a long time to process a large batch of files. Running a DNG validation check should not disrupt your work in Lightroom. You can either select a small number of files in the Library module first, or if you want to check the entire catalog, do so overnight. If no errors are found, you’ll see the dialog shown in Figure 12.12. If errors are found when running a Validate DNG check, you will see the dialog shown in Figure 12.13, which will include a more accurate report as to which DNGs may be suspect. When there are bad DNGs, these files will be added to a temporary Bad DNG Files collection that will be added to the Catalog panel. This could just mean a broken link between the catalog photo and the actual original, not that the source file (wherever it might be) is broken.

Checking DNG metadata status

There is a DNG view mode for the Metadata panel. This lets you see all the settings associated with a DNG file that would previously have been hidden. For example, this panel view mode can inform you as to whether lossy compression has been used (see page 563). You can also use the Filter bar to filter by file type, which can distinguish between DNG files that are lossy or lossless.

Reading Metadata Options

If only there could be agreement on common standards for the way metadata information is handled between different programs. Adobe’s open-source XMP specification has certainly gone a long way toward providing the industry with a versatile standard format for storing metadata information. But there are still a few gotchas that can prevent the smooth integration of informational data from one program to another. The Reading Metadata section in the File Handling preferences (Figure 12.10) is there to help resolve such inconsistencies. If you select “Treat ‘.’ as a keyword separator” and “Treat ‘/’ as a keyword separator,” this enables Lightroom to better interpret the keyword hierarchy conventions used in other programs.

Filename Generation Options

Filenames that contain illegal characters can also cause hiccups when you import such files into Lightroom. The “Treat the following characters as illegal characters” item can be set to recognize “/:” as an illegal character, or you can select the extended list of characters to encompass more potential bad characters that would need to be replaced. In the “Replace illegal file name characters with” section, you can then choose a suitable replacement character to use, such as a hyphen (-), an underscore (_), or similar characters. Some database and FTP systems may prefer spaces to be removed from filenames. For example, when I upload files to my publisher, the FTP server does not allow files with spaces in the filenames to be uploaded. This is where the “When a file name has a space” item can come in useful, because you can choose to replace a space with a hyphen (-) or underscore (_) character.

Interface Preferences

The Interface Preferences are shown in Figure 12.15.

Panel End Mark

The panel end mark is a squiggly symbol that can be made to appear at the bottom of the panel list in the Lightroom modules (Figure 12.14). You can access the panel end mark options via the End Marks menu in the Interface preferences (Figure 12.15). Or, you can right-click the end of the panels list, navigate to the Panel End Mark submenu, and select the Small Flourish panel end-mark option. Lightroom no longer installs a selection of panel end marks. As a consequence, there remains just one panel end mark (Small Flourish), and the default option here is None.

Custom panel end marks

Would you like to create your own panel end mark design? Well, it is actually not that difficult to do. To start with, take a screenshot of one of the Small Flourish panel end marks to get an idea of the scale of the design and how it will look against the panel background color. Next, create a new custom design in Photoshop scaled to the correct size on a transparent layer, and save this graphic using the PNG file format (which supports transparency). Now go to the Panel End Mark menu and select Go to Panel End Marks Folder (from the Interface preferences End Marks menu). This reveals the folder in the Finder/Explorer location where the panel end-mark image files need to be stored. Place the PNG file you have just created in there and reopen the Preferences dialog. You will now see your custom design listed in the Panel End Mark menu.

Creating a Custom Splash Screen

If you want, you can replace the standard Lightroom splash screen with your own design. To do this, you will first need to create a design in Photoshop and save it as a PNG. Once you have done that, go to Username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom (Mac) or Username\AppData\Roaming\ Adobe\Lightroom (PC), and place it inside a folder you name as Splash Screen. The next time you launch Lightroom, you will see this as the new splash screen. To revert to the standard splash screen, make sure the Splash Screen folder is empty.

Panel Font Size

There are two font size options: Small (which is the default setting) and Large. If you refer to Figure 12.16, you can see how the difference between these two settings is actually quite subtle. By choosing the Large setting, you can make the panel fonts more legible when viewing on a large screen at a distance. Notice how the Large panel font size setting also makes the panels slightly bigger in size. This change does not take effect until after you have relaunched Lightroom.

Lights Out

The Lightroom Interface preferences let you customize the appearance of the interface when using the Lights Out and Lights Dim mode. Bear in mind that these preference settings also allow you to create a “Lights up” setting. So, instead of using black as the Lights Out color, you could try setting it to light gray or white. I find using Lights Out with white is a handy alternative to selecting the Soft Proofing option as a way to quickly check how an image appears against white.

Background

The Background section lets you customize the background appearance in the Lightroom modules. You can set the fill color to several different shades of gray, as well as white or black. Lightroom also provides preference options for those working with a two-display setup, letting you customize the background options for both displays independently.

Keyword Entry

Spaces are normally allowed when entering keywords in the Keywording panel, and you separate keywords by typing a comma between the keywords. If you prefer to use spaces to separate the keywords, this is an option. If you do this, however, you have to remember to type quotes around any keywords that contain spaces. For example, the keyword Cape Fear would need to be entered as “Cape Fear.” If you don’t use quotes, you’ll end up with two keywords: Cape and Fear. The “Auto-complete text in Keyword Tags field” option is on by default and assists auto-complete as you enter keywords in the Keywording panel. If you go to the Catalog Settings Metadata tab section and click “Clear all suggestion lists,” this clears the cached keywords and flushes out any misspelled keywords.

Filmstrip Options

In the Filmstrip section you have the “Show badges,” “Ignore clicks on badges,” “Show ratings and picks,” “Show stack counts,” “Show photos in Navigator on mouse-over,” and “Show photo info tooltips” options. Some examples of badges are shown in Figure 12.17. With these items checked, you have fuller access to Library module functions while working in other modules. For example, let’s say you are working in the Develop module. You can use the Filmstrip to see at a glance all the current source images, with their labels, ratings, and pick status. You can hover over individual images to see a slightly larger preview in the Navigator panel, and the tooltip floating window can be used to quickly reveal the filename, time of capture, and pixel dimensions. The badge icons indicate whether keyword metadata has been added or the Develop settings have been edited. Clicking a metadata badge, for example, takes you to the Library module and expands the Keywording panel ready for you to inspect the keywords entered there. Clicking the Develop edit badge takes you to the Develop module, where you can resume editing the Develop settings. On the other hand, you may want to prevent accidental clicking, which is why there is an “Ignore clicks on badges” option. The “Show stack counts” badge displays a badge for image stacks along with a stack count number. These Filmstrip options extend the usefulness of the Filmstrip as a way to manage the Lightroom catalog photos.

Interface Tweaks

When “Zoom clicked point to center” is selected, the Loupe view uses the click point as the center for its magnified view. To understand how this works, try clicking the corner of a photo in the standard Loupe view. If “Zoom clicked point to center” is turned on, the corner zooms in to become centered on the screen. When this option is off, the photo zooms in with the corner point positioned beneath the pointer. Personally, I find that deselecting this option provides you with a more logical zoom behavior.

Performance Preferences

The Performance preferences (Figure 12.19) are mostly covered in Chapter 1.

Camera Raw and Video Cache Settings

Whenever you attempt to view an image in the Develop module, Lightroom builds full, high-quality previews direct from the master image data. In the case of raw files, the early-stage processing includes the decoding and decompression of the raw data, as well as the linearization and demosaic processing. All this has to take place first, before progressing to the stage that allows you to adjust things like the Basic panel Develop controls. The Camera Raw cache is therefore used to store the unchanging, early-stage raw processing data that is used to generate the Develop module previews so that this initial processing step can be skipped the next time you view that image. If you increase the Camera Raw cache size, more image data can be held in the cache. This, in turn, will result in swifter Develop module preview generation when you load these photos. The revised 5 GB cache limit should ensure better performance. The Camera Raw cache used to have an upper limit of 50 GB, but this has now been removed so that you can set the cache limit as high as you like. Bear in mind here that the Camera Raw cache file sizes have been much reduced in size. Since version 3.6, the Camera Raw cache has been making the Camera Raw cache files more compact. This means you can now cache a lot more files than was the case before within the limits set for the Camera Raw cache size. Consequently, you no longer need to devote quite so much disk space to the Camera Raw cache as was previously the case. For example, these days, a 20 GB cache should allow you to store around 20,000 cache files.

Lightroom Cc Preferences

The Lightroom CC/Lightroom mobile preferences are discussed in Chapter 1.

Network Preferences

The Lightroom Network preferences are shown in Figure 12.20. If you are using a proxy authentication server to access the Internet, you are advised to go to the Network preference section and enter your proxy authentication username and password. Lightroom can then use this information to get you out to the external Internet.

Lightroom settings and templates

The Lightroom preference file keeps a record of all your custom program settings. On a Mac, the preference file is named com.adobe.LightroomClassicCC8.plist and is located in the Username/Library/Preferences folder (Figure 12.21). On Windows, the Lightroom ClassicCC8 Preferences.agprefs file is located in the Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences folder (Figure 12.22). If the Lightroom program is behaving strangely and you have reason to believe that the preferences might be corrupted, then try resetting the preferences. To reset the Lightroom preferences, hold down as you restart Lightroom and select Reset Preferences from the dialog box.

Accessing saved template settings

When you save a setting in any of the Lightroom modules, the saved template settings are normally stored in the Lightroom Presets folder. The quickest way to locate this folder is to go to the Lightroom Presets preferences and click the Show Lightroom Presets Folder button. Or, for macOS, use the Username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom folder (Figure 12.23). On Windows, use the following path directory: Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom folder (Figure 12.24). Inside this folder, you will see a set of subfolders that contain the default and custom settings for the various Lightroom modules. You can make copies of these files and distribute them as preset settings for other Lightroom users to install on their computers, which they can do by dragging presets into the folder directories shown below.

Lightroom Previews Data

The Lightroom Previews.lrdata file is a self-contained file that holds all the previews and thumbnail data. In Figure 12.25, I used the context menu to show the package contents of the Lightroom Previews.lrdata file. This particular package was just over 300 GB in size and contained lots of .lrprev files. These are the thumbnail and preview cache files that are used by Lightroom to display the photos in the Library module and Filmstrip. The size of the thumbnail cache depends on how you set the File Handling preferences in the Catalog Settings dialog (Figure 12.26). If you want to keep the Lightroom Previews.lrdata size to a minimum, select Automatically Discard 1:1 Previews, and then choose the After One Day or the After One Week option. If you do not mind it growing in size, select After 30 Days or, even, Never. The choice is yours, but because hard-drive space is now so cheap, if you can spare the disk space, you might as well set this to Never. Otherwise, Lightroom will have to constantly re-render the 1:1 previews for the most commonly visited folders.

System Information

If you ever need to see an overview of your system setup, you can choose Help System Info. This opens the dialog shown in Figure 12.27.

An Ideal Lightroom Computer

The ideal computer setup for Lightroom depends on the size of the files you intend on working with. The raw file captures you will be working with may range in size from 5 to 50 megapixels, and the larger files will certainly place more demands on your computer resources. So, when looking for an ideal computer to run Lightroom, you definitely need to take the typical image file sizes into account. The most important factors affecting Lightroom performance are the processor speed and the amount of RAM that is available for Lightroom to use. These are followed by the speed and size of the hard disk and, to a lesser extent, the processing power of the graphics card. Lightroom is optimized to run on the latest Intel computer processors; at a minimum, you need a Mac featuring an Intel processor with 64-bit support with 4 GB of RAM and running macOS X 10.12 or later. And on the PC side, you need an Intel^® or AMD processor with 64-bit support with 4 GB of RAM, running Windows 10 64-bit (64-bit), version 1703 or later.

RAM

You will benefit from having as much RAM as possible, but you should take into account that the operating system and any other open applications will also consume some of that RAM. For example, if you happen to have just 4 GB of RAM installed on your computer, the operating system will use about 200 MB, while another 50 MB might be eaten up by various utilities. These days, 8 GB is a more realistic minimum starting point and most computers ship with at least 8 GB of RAM. But you should see significant improvements in performance if you install more than this, especially now that Lightroom is able to run as a 64-bit program and can therefore access RAM beyond the previous 4 GB limit.

Graphics Card

Until recently, the graphics card did not play such a vital role in Lightroom’s overall performance. All you needed was a card capable of running the screen display at its native resolution. However, Lightroom is able to take advantage of GPU support to offer faster Develop module performance. Currently, this applies to interactive image editing only, providing improved navigation and slider adjustment response. The GPU performance improvements will be most noticeable on bigger displays, especially high-pixel-density displays, and are also dependent on the video card, of course. So, the advice now is to select a fast video card for optimum Lightroom Develop performance when configuring your computer.

Hard Drives

On both the Mac and the PC, a default Lightroom installation installs the Lightroom catalog folder (which contains the catalog and previews files) inside the user’s Pictures or My Pictures folder. As your catalog grows bigger, these catalog files will increase in size, although there are options in the preferences to limit how long the 1:1 previews are preserved, automatically deleting them after a certain number of days. Don’t forget that the Camera Raw cache can also be allowed to grow, and this, too, can consume more disk space (though not as much as was the case with earlier versions of Lightroom). Another factor is multiple saved History states, which can cause the catalog to become bloated.

Drive Configurations

Multiple hard drives can be configured in a variety of ways, using various RAID methods. You need a minimum of two disks to configure a RAID system, and most off-the-shelf RAID solutions are sold as a bay dock that can accommodate two or more drives with a built-in RAID controller. For some people, RAID is the perfect solution, but for small photography businesses, it can be overkill.

Just a bunch of disks

There are varied opinions about which is the best way to manage a photography archive storage system. In my view, RAID storage is great but not always the best solution for all photographers. A perfect solution would be to have a high-capacity RAID drive system that is capable of storing all your images securely on a single RAID unit. I have seen photographers work with such setups, but even so, it is quite costly to have a multidrive unit that holds all your data running continuously and consumes lots of power just so that once or twice a year you can dig up a photo you shot six years ago. If you analyze your storage requirements, you will most likely find that the majority of files you access are those that have been shot in the last few years and you don’t need to have instant fast access to everything you have shot all the time.