Lightroom 4: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

Appendix

Lightroom Preferences

The Lightroom Preferences control the behavior of the program; they are not specific to any single catalog. The more you use Lightroom, the more likely it is you’ll want to tweak things a bit to suit your taste and your computer setup. Throughout the chapters of this book I’ve referenced specific Preferences in the context of the controls and functions they affect. Following are additional sample figures provided for reference, as well as showing the Preferences I normally use and brief descriptions of the available options.

What’s New in Preferences

In Lightroom 4 there have been a few changes and additions to the Preferences. Here’s a quick overview:

• On Mac os x, the Lightroom Preferences now have a language selection control. The language pack used by Lightroom is no longer dependent on the default operating system settings.

• dng preferences have been updated to support the new dng 1.4 spec. (For more information on dng read the section later in this Appendix.)

• The acr Cache now uses much smaller files. Instead of fewer, larger files measured in MB, the cache files are now many small files measured in the hundreds of kb. This is expected to improve performance. The large cache files used by previous versions of Lightroom will continue to be supported and read from when necessary, but they will no longer be created. Also, acr Cache files are now JPEG compressed (they used to be uncompressed). A Preference control for Video Cache Size limit ...