How to tell when LR is done rendering?

[bdosserman]

Hi,
   This comes up a lot for me, especially when trying to flip quickly through a bunch of wildlife shots to figure out which are sharp and which should be deleted. I'm running LR4 on not the latest hardware, and I'm OK with its speed for the most part, but I don't see any obvious way to tell when it's done rendering an image. Sometimes it shows "loading", but usually the "loading" disappears before the image is fully rendered, and sometimes it doesn't show up in the first place. Is there some other indicator for when it's rendered? I find that sometimes a not fully rendered image is hard to distinguish from a blurry image, and especially because the rendering speed varies drastically from image to image I have to sit around for a while to wait to make sure it's done rendering.

Thanks,

Brian

[Box Brownie]

Hi

If you are talking about the Importing & first cull, then for me I set the Import to render 1:1 previews...............cannot recall the settings but I think LR loses the 1:1's after 30 days so plenty of time to review and delete the rubbish.  This method ensures that the full size rendering is ready following the Import...........when I check the images one by one and click the mouse to zoom in there is a slight hesitation as it zooms in but never the "loading" I used to get before I Imported with the right setting.

Obviously after the 30days as I edit the individual images they do re-render but it does not take long on my slightly last gen Intel i5 Quad core
HTH

[kaelaria]

Exactly, you simply need to pre-render 1:1 - no there is no way besides going in to look, to know.

[luxborealis]

I don't pre-render at 1:1; perhaps I should, but I would be forever waiting for D800 files to render at 1:1 and my cache would balloon sharply. So, I'm in the same boat as Brian, except I can tell when LR has finished rendering - the image goes from pixelated to sharp (well, that's the plan anyway, sharp photos!).

[Rory]

The short answer is do not use lightroom for focus culling decisions.  There is no guarantee in lightroom that the image is rendered properly.  I have encountered the issue (occasionally) where the preview looks soft, even after generating 1:1 previews.  Sometimes going to develop and making a small change can force a new rendering that is sharp, but sometimes this does not work.  I have found other users who have encountered this behavior where the flag to rerender a preview gets out of sync somehow.  For the life of me I cannot understand why this is not a big issue for lightroom users.

I use photomechanic to make the initial cull, where I can be sure the rendering is correct, at least for focus.

[stamper]

I don't import images to my hard drive via LR but directly to my hard drive by drag & drop into a folder. I view them using Faststone and then cull and after that import an image I like into a catalogue. Obviously some will say I am not using LR to it's full potential. It suits me and I think it is a reasonable alternative to cataloguing everything and then deleting.

[PhotoEcosse]

I don't pre-render at 1:1; perhaps I should, but I would be forever waiting for D800 files to render at 1:1 and my cache would balloon sharply. So, I'm in the same boat as Brian, except I can tell when LR has finished rendering - the image goes from pixelated to sharp (well, that's the plan anyway, sharp photos!).

As above - and no problems whatsoever.

In subsequent edits, if a re-render is required, then the "loading" legend appears and, as soon as it has done, the legend disappears and the image jumps to the fully rendered sharp state. No time lag between the loading legend disappearing and the image being fully rendered..

With an i7 processor and 16Gb of RAM the average time to render from a 45Mb D800 Raw file is about 3 seconds (which I find acceptable but a professional processing 1000s of images a day might find tedious).

[AFairley]

Well I render to 1:1 previews on import, and when I later go through the images in full frame (30" Dell monitor), there is a brief lag (1 sec or so) before the image completely pops into "focus", which, if I am remembering right, doesn't happen on the second time through them.  This is on an i7 machine with 32GB of ram and a fast video card.  I have no idea what causes the lag

[bdosserman]

Hi all,
   Thanks for your comments -- it sounds like importing with 1:1 previews will help substantially, and I'll give it a try with my next batch of images. Again, I'm not complaining about rendering speed, but I'm still a bit mystified as to why there isn't a clear indicator when an image is done rendering. This is pretty trivial from a programming standpoint, and would help a lot with initial culling.

Brian

[Rendezvous]

You can change the preferences to discard 1:1 previews after a certain time frame. I believe that just leaves behind that standard size previews of each image.

[brianrybolt]

If you render on import, there is a 'progress bar' on the upper left of your window.  It will show you when the importing ends and also when the rendering is finished.
Brian