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Building Previews
so first things first is building previews. Building previews is really important based on your need at the moment. So I used to of these, therefore options. I use two of them on a regular basis. So one for one means that if you have a 6000 pixel wide file, then it's going to build a preview that it's 6000 pixels wide. So it's one for one. And that means that if I zoom into a photo or zoom out, I won't get the spinning ball that has toe have to wait for it while it's building a preview. But if I if I don't build the one for one's than when I zoom in to see if something sharper someone's eyes were open, then there's that little time out while it's building a preview for you and I have to wait for it so I never wanna wait on my computer. So I build the one for one's while I'm away from the computer or while I'm doing accounting or well, I'm sleeping or something, do something else. Let it build the one for ones and then come back and look at your photos. So the one for one, is the most e...
fficient way to look at your photos while you're looking at him, cause you can just zoom in and zoom out. But it's not the fastest way to get them in. So if I really need to see the photos right now because I'm a press photographer or because it's an event that I want to share a couple photos really quickly, I just got home from my kid's ball game and he did something awesome. And so I want to take that picture. I want to really quickly pull it in and share it out to the family. So in that case, I'm gonna go to embedded and sidecar. So the embedded and sidecar option is basically just taking whatever the camera built into the raw file, which is, there's a small embedded image, and what it's going to do is it's going to say, all right, whatever is already in the file, that's what I'll use, and so it can bring them in really fast. Some people use a program called Photo Mechanic and Photo Mechanic does just that. It uses the embedded in sidecar information to deliver the file really quickly to you. So if you're used to photo mechanic and you want to use light room for the process of importing in a and looking at your images on selecting images, use embedded inside car and you'll find that light rooms justice fast or maybe slightly slower. But it's still really, really fast, um, one for ones. It's gonna take a lot longer to build those so embedded inside car is the fastest way to look at your images really quickly and get them in. So we're gonna build. Uh, we're not gonna build any we're just going to do embedded inside car, and that's going to bring them in really quickly. The second option is building smart previews and building sparked previews Air really important, too, for several reasons. First reason Building a smart preview allows your system to be less taxed by the process of looking at photos and adjusting photos. In fact, if you go up to the light room menu and you go to the preferences inside of preferences, there is a performance option. So right here at the top of preferences, looking for purpose for performance. And then if you go into the performances area, um and scroll down here and say, Use smart previews instead of originals. Four. Image editing. If you check that, it will increase performance. So if you're using big files 30 40 50 megapixel files, those were pretty big files. And if you notice that when you're working on photos, it's just a little Laghi. I have a slower computer, and it's it's slowing everything down. This is the place to go if you turn this on and I'm not gonna turn it on right now because I think I have plenty of power to do what I'm doing. But if I was running a little slower computer or bigger files, these air 30 megapixel. If I was running megapixel files, I would certainly use the smart previews instead of the originals. So that's the first thing that Smart previews conduce for you is. It can speed up your system because it will work on those little files, and then it will just use the big files when it's time to export something really efficient. The second reason for smart previews is that if I have and remember all of my photos air, not on this computer, they're not on the computer itself. They're actually the original files Air here, right there inside of a raid. One system. And if I'm at home, I have a bigger raid. One system. And so my photos air. Never actually on the computer itself, they're always on an external drive. That is a raid, one system. So because I don't have those on my computer, if I want to just work on my photos, say, on the airplane on my laptop I can unplug all of my drives and just work on the laptop because I have the smart previews embedded inside of light room. So if I build the smart previews when I'm importing the images, then I can work on the images without the original images present. So that's the second really great reason toe have Smart previous built. There's 1/3 third. So the third reason is kind of a security thing, actually, Um, I have a friend who someone stole everything like they broke in and stole his His computer drives his cameras like the whole that they took everything, but he happened at his laptop with him on vacation, and he was actually on vacation with me at the time and he had his laptop and when he got home and discovered all of this mess and that he didn't have any of his hard drives and any of his computers. But he had his catalogue on his laptop and he called me in a panic. And he's like, I don't know what to do because I have no files and I've got these clients who need prints. And, uh and I asked him. I said, Well, look at him and see if the Smart previews were built and he said, Yeah, I was building smart previous all the time because you told me to and so he was always building him. He didn't know why, but he was building him. And I said, Well, then you're fine because you can actually print images from those smart previews, even without the original files present. In fact, I've printed a 30 inch print before, and it's not great, but it's passable. So he was able to print 2024 inch prints for the client without them ever suspecting there was a problem, because those files are actually really good files, even though they're quite compressed and they're but they're still raw. So I would actually prefer having my smart previews toe having a J peg of my images because those smart previous air really, really useful.
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