Changes I make, such as those referred to in Picasa above, but when done in LightRoom, take ages. Now, the thumbnails take FOREVER to render, they render in stages, and the full-sized picture takes several seconds to render on screen. OK - so now I fire up Lightroom (v1.4.1 or v2 0 both the same). But I can then sharpen, adjust colour balance, red-eye, bring up the shadows, adjust colour temperature, etc etc - all on the RAW file, - AND ALL AT VERY HIGH SPEED. I can import a folder full of DNG RAW files, and they take a second or so to render the full-size picture if I pull up a single photo.
It renders the thumbnails in a flash, and keeps them in a cache so that I can scroll as fast as possible and never have to wait for thumbnails to appear or be re-rendered.
It reads all my JPGs of course, but it also reads my RAW files in DNG format from both my Pentax cameras - one K10D and one K20D. I have a very fast PC, consisting of a quad-core CPU running at 3.6GHz, 4Gb of RAM, nVidia 8800 Ultra video card driving a 30' Samsung monitor (fully colour balanced).
