A corrupted monitor profile is often to blame for Lightroom preview issues, whether that be a mismatch in colours between programs, or simply blank grey previews.

Lightroom uses the profile differently to other programs (perceptual rendering rather than relative colorimetric), so corruption in that part of the profile shows up even though it is not noticeable in other programs.  It often happens with the canned profiles that come with many monitors.

Ideally you should recalibrate your monitor with a proper hardware calibration tool, however not everyone has one to hand.  To confirm that the profile is the problem, you can remove it and replace it with a standard profile.

How do I change my monitor profile to check whether it’s corrupted?

Windows XP

1. Exit Photoshop Lightroom.
2. Choose Start > Control Panel > Display.
3. Click the Settings tab.
4. Click the Advanced button.
5. Click the Color Management tab.
6. Click the “ADD…” button.
7. Choose a standard RGB color profile, (i.e. sRGB IEC61966 – 2.1. )
8. In the “Color profiles currently associated with this device” field, select the new profile you just picked.
9. Click the “Set As Default” button.
10. (Optional) Select the old profile.
11. (Optional) Click the Remove button.
12. Click the “OK” button.

Windows Vista

1. Exit Photoshop Lightroom.
2. Choose Start > Control Panel > Color Management.
3. In the “Profiles associated with this device” field, select the default monitor profile.
4. Click the Advanced tab.
5. Click the Remove button. or Change the Device Profile to a standard RGB color profile, such as sRGB IEC61966 – 2.1.

Mac OS X

1. Go to System Preferences > Display
2. Select the Color tab
3. Press the Calibrate… button and follow the instructions.  Turn on the Expert Options and calibrate to gamma 2.2.

Excerpt from Adobe Lightroom 2 – The Missing FAQ

Extract from Adobe Lightroom 2 – The Missing FAQ

Think of it this way… did you ever play with colored modeling clay when you were a child?

Imagine you’ve got a ready made little model, made out of a mixture of different colors, and you’ve also go separate pots of the different colors that haven’t been used before.  Yes, you can push the ready made model around a bit and make something different, but the colors all smudge into each other and it’s never QUITE as good as if you use the nice fresh separate colors and started from scratch.

Your JPEG is like that ready made model – it’s already been made into something before.  You can take it apart and change it a bit, but if you try to change it too much, it’s going to end up a distorted mess.  Your raw file is like having the separate pots of clay – you’re starting off with the raw material, and YOU choose what to make of it.

So yes, editing JPEGs is non-destructive, in as much as you can move the sliders as many times as you like and the original file isn’t destroyed in the process.  But when you do export to a new file, you’re applying changes to ready-made JPEG image data.  If you’re working on a raw file format, you’re making a single adjustment to the raw data, rather than adjusting an already-processed file.

You’ll particularly notice the difference in changing a white balance or rescuing a very under or over-exposed photo.

Extract from Adobe Lightroom 2 – The Missing FAQ

There are a number of options to choose from when importing your photos, and which you choose will depend on your own browsing habits.

Minimal shows the thumbnail preview embedded in the file.  It’s the quickest option initially, but it’s a very small low quality preview (i.e. usually with a black edging and about 160 px along the long edge) so you then have to wait to render previews as you browse.  Minimal previews are not color managed.

Embedded & Sidecar checks the files and their sidecar files for larger previews (approx. 1024 px or larger), giving you the largest ready-built preview it can.  It’s still just a temporary option – Lightroom will build its own previews as soon as it can.

Standard builds a standard-sized preview used for browsing through the photos.  You set the size and quality of these previews in Catalog Settings.  Standard-sized previews are highly recommended – it will greatly speed up browsing performance if Lightroom isn’t having to render previews on the fly.

1:1 previews are full resolution so they take up more space, but if you wish to zoom in on your photos in Library module, it will save Lightroom having to render 1:1 previews on the fly, which would slow your browsing experience.  If you’re concerned about the disc space that they take up, you can set them to delete after a fixed time (in Catalog Settings), or you can discard 1:1 previews on demand by selecting the photos and choosing Library menu > Previews > Discard 1:1 Previews.

You can either choose to render either Standard-Sized or 1:1 previews in the Import dialog or if you wish to render the previews later, select all (or none) of the photos in Grid view and choose Library menu > Previews > Render Standard-Sized Previews or 1:1 Previews.

In early version 1 releases, rendering previews at the same time as importing was much quicker than rendering them later, but this difference is no longer noticeable.

Some people are reporting problems burning CD’s or DVD’s from Lightroom since the 2.2 update.

The 64-bit version not burning is a known issue – that’s in the release notes, however some have been having trouble with the 32-bit version.

The solution – uninstalling and reinstalling seems to fix it in most cases, so it’s worth a shot!

There’s some confusion over a dialog box which has reared its head again in Lightroom 2.2. It appears when you try to edit a raw file in CS3 rather than CS4, and warns that you need ACR 5.2 for complete compatibility.

Are Adobe saying that you have to upgrade to CS4 in order to use Lightroom?  No!  So what are they saying?

Render using Lightroom will create a Tiff or PSD file and open that file into Photoshop.

Open Anyway tries to pass the raw data to Photoshop, and ACR opens the file directly into Photoshop without an interim Tiff or PSD file.

So…

CS3, ACR 4.6, and a camera that is supported in ACR 4.6 – you can press either.  At this point in time, the rendering appears to be the same.

CS4, ACR 5.2, and a camera that is supported in ACR 5.2 – you can press either.  They are fully compatible.

However…

CS3, ACR 4.6, and a camera that is NEW since 4.6 – you have to press Render using Lightroom as ACR wouldn’t know what to do with the data.

Once you’ve made your decision, you can check the ‘Don’t Show Again’ checkbox to bypass the dialog in future.

With future versions, the gap between Lightroom’s processing and older ACR versions will widen, and Open Anyway may not be able to process new Develop adjustments that you’ve made in Lightroom, however pressing Render using Lightroom will always create a Tiff or PSD version WITH all of your Develop adjustments rendered correctly, so even then, Adobe aren’t holding you over a barrel.

Extract from Adobe Lightroom 2 – The Missing FAQ

Yes, in fact it’s a very good idea to do so, and just have one or two top level folders. If Lightroom ever loses track of all of your photos, perhaps as a result of a hard drive failure, you will only need to re-link the top level folder and that will cascade through the rest.

So how do we go from this slightly nondescript tangle of folders…

to the tidy hierarchy….?

Right-click on the current top level folder and select ‘Add Parent Folder’. This doesn’t import new photos, just adds an additional hierarchy level to your Folders panel (and does a lot more behind the scenes…).

Keep clicking on the top level folder until you see the folder you’re looking for.

If you go too far and want to remove a top level folder, right-click on that folder and choose ‘Promote Subfolders’.

This does the opposite of ‘Add Parent Folder’, and will ask for confirmation before removing that top level folder.

Selecting ‘Remove…’ from the right-click menu gives you the choice of promoting the subfolders, but also gives you the option to remove all of the subfolders and their images from the catalog too, which you wouldn’t want to do when simply tidying up the hierarchy.

Extract from Adobe Lightroom 2 – The Missing FAQ

When the first preview appears, it looks just like it did on the camera, and then that disappears and it applies other settings. How do I turn that off?

The initial preview you’re seeing is the JPEG preview embedded in the file by the camera.  That JPEG preview has the manufacturer’s own processing applied in-camera, just as if you’d set your camera to shoot a JPEG rather than a raw file format.

A raw file is not a photo file like a JPEG or a TIFF. You can’t look at it – there’s nothing to see. You need some software to process it into a photo.

The camera manufacturer’s don’t share their processing secrets, so each raw converter creates its own interpretation of the sensor’s data.  There is no right or wrong – it’s just different.

So how do you get your file in Lightroom to look like that original camera JPEG preview?

In version 1, your best option was to shoot a series of files as Raw+JPEG, and import all of those files into Lightroom.  Try to adjust each raw file to look like the matching JPEG file.  Your aim is to find your ideal default settings for your raw files.  Having found your ideal settings, save them as a Develop preset for easy application to your photos, and or update Lightroom’s default settings to use your new preferred settings.

However it gets better than that… Adobe have been listening to the user’s cries, and have created a new profiling system, the public beta for which was released at the same time as Lightroom 2.0, and which went final with 2.2.

This new DNG Profile Editor allows the creation of much more detailed profiles than have ever been available to ACR and Lightroom before.

Whilst most users will never worry about creating their own profiles, Adobe have created ready-made profiles to emulate the most popular in-camera JPEG rendering for many Pro-level SLR’s, and contrary to the way the name makes it sound, these profiles can be used on proprietary raw files as well as DNG files.

The new camera emulation profiles are installed along with Lightroom 2.2, so if you haven’t updated yet, do so!  You’ll find the new profiles in the Calibration panel in the Develop module.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll post up the instructions on how to get rid of any beta profiles that you had installed, how to create a preset with the new profiles, and how to change the defaults to one of the other profiles, so watch this space!

Adobe Lightroom 2.2 is mainly a bug fix release with additional camera support.

New cameras: Canon 5D MkII, Powershot G10, Panasonic DMC-G1, DMC-FX150, DMC-FZ28, DMC-LX3, Leica D-LUX 4.

If you use one of the Panasonic or Leica cameras noted above, and you usually use the DNG format, do check the readme for further details.

The new color profiles will be installed, if you haven’t done so already, and it now defaults to the new Adobe Standard profile rather than the old ACR 4.4 matrix profile.

There’s a list of bug fixes in the readme file, but particularly notable are the improvements to the performance of the Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter, which is improving with each release.

Enjoy!

The default location of the Lightroom catalog is…

• Windows XP – [systemdrive]\Documents and Settings\[your username]\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom Catalog.lrcat
• Windows Vista – [systemdrive]\Users\[your username]\Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom Catalog.lrcat
• Mac – [systemdrive]/Users/[your username]/Photos/Lightroom/Lightroom Catalog.lrcat

• The catalogs are now fully cross platform, and the catalog file extensions are:
  *.lrcat is version 1.1 onwards.
  *.lrdb was version 1.0.
  *.aglib was the early beta.

The default location of the Preferences is…

• Windows XP – [systemdrive]\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences\Lightroom 2 Preferences.agprefs
• Windows Vista – [systemdrive]\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe Lightroom\Lightroom 2 Preferences.agprefs
• Mac – [systemdrive]/Users/[your username]/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Lightroom2.plist
• Preference files are not cross-platform.

The default location of the Presets is…

• Windows XP – [systemdrive]\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Presets
• Windows Vista – [systemdrive]\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Presets
• Mac – [systemdrive]/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/ Lightroom/Presets/
• Presets are cross-platform and are saved in a Lightroom only format (.lrtemplate)
• To find them easily, go to Preferences > Presets panel and press ‘Show Lightroom Presets Folder..’

The default location of all of the Camera Raw Cache is…

• Windows XP – [systemdrive]\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application Data\Adobe\Camera Raw\Cache
• Windows Vista – [systemdrive]\Users\[your username]\AppData\Local\Adobe\CameraRaw\Cache
• Mac – [systemdrive]/Users/[your username]/Library/Caches/Adobe Camera Raw/

The default location of the Adobe Camera Raw Profiles is…

• Windows XP – [systemdrive]\Documents and Settings\All Users\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Camera Raw\Camera Profiles
• Windows Vista – [systemdrive]\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe \Camera Raw\Camera Profiles
• Mac – [systemdrive]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles/

Your custom Camera Raw Profiles can also be installed to the User folders…

• Windows XP – [systemdrive]\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application Data\Adobe\Camera Raw\Camera Profiles
• Windows Vista – [systemdrive]\Users\[your username]\AppData\Local\Adobe\Camera Raw\Camera Profiles
• Mac – [systemdrive]/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/ CameraRaw/CameraProfiles/

Well, what can I say…. I have great intentions! 

First things first, and before this goes public, I’m going back and transferring all of the ‘what’s new’ pages into blog posts.  It’s just tidier!

Next in line, html versions of the book samples, for easy access.

And finally, well, you never know, I might get around to writing something!

The theory goes that the Lightroom update information will be posted here, along with any other related updates such as ACR, and then, if I’m really on a roll, I’ll hopefully get to post other tips, tricks and troubleshooting information here too.