Adobe Lightroom CC Now Has Smart Previews for Faster Performance

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Adobe today announced its latest version of Lightroom. Among the various features and fixes is the addition of Smart Previews, which will give your software an instant speed boost when you’re working with large, high-resolution photos.

Smart Previews were already used in Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile apps for iOS and Android. Instead of working with the original RAW photo files themselves, the mobile apps generate a lower-resolution “Smart Preview” for you to edit. Your finished edits are then synced to the original files.

Lightroom CC (2015.7) and Lightroom 6.7 brings this same performance “hack” to desktop photo editing. While Smart Previews were already used in Lightroom desktop when editing original images that were disconnected from your computer, Adobe now gives you the option to always use Smart Previews, even when the original files are available.

Simply go to Edit->Preferences.

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Select the Performance tab, and in the Develop section check the box that says Use Smart Previews Instead Of Originals For Image Editing.

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Click “Ok”, restart Lightroom, and you’re good to go.

You should find that high-resolution photos that previously caused your computer to struggle can now be edited much more smoothly, as though it were a smaller photo.

A number of other features and improvements were found alongside Smart Previews in the latest Lightroom update.

Camera Support

Adobe is adding support for a number of newer cameras, including the latest iPhone 7 models and the Canon 5D Mark IV. Lightroom can import and edit dual pixel RAW files from the 5D Mark IV now, but the software does not yet support any dual pixel RAW functionality.

Publish Stock

You can now publish photos directly from Lightroom CC to Adobe’s Stock Contributor Site. The Adobe Stock Publish Service can put your photos in front of millions of photo buyers using the Creative Cloud and help you earn money.

All Synced Photos

You can now drag photos directly to the “All Synced Photographs” collection when looking at your Catalog panel. Your images will be synced with the Creative Cloud, allowing you to edit, organize, and share them while using Lightroom on various devices.

Use Adobe’s Update mechanism to bring your Lightroom up to the latest version to get started with these new features.