A few days ago, fellow Inside Lightroom blogger Michael Clark talked about his use of 1:1 Previews to speed up his Lightroom workflow. At the risk of sounding off with a "me too!" post, I fully agree. For the last year or so since Lightroom was released, I've been letting Lightroom build its normal previews on import and slogging through the building of full-screen views as I work through a set of images. Then, last week—on the encouragement of my girlfriend, shooting partner, and photojournalist Pınar Özger—I flipped the switch and boy oh boy, what a difference it makes.

Compared to pruning down my shoot and then, much later, building 1:1 previews, the time savings seem to be significant. It's hard to measure quantitatively how tweaking your workflow speeds things up—especially when you are in the thick of a shoot and don't want to try things again the old and slower way. But, off the cuff, for my gigs last week and this where I've been shooting throughout the day and simultaneously posting a number of selects to Flickr as I go, I'd venture a guess that it's allowing me to do things 10-20% faster. That might not sound like a lot, except when the result is that you can shave hour or more off a 10- or 12-hour work day. Doing the kinds of gigs I do, I'll take every 10% I can get.

Quite frankly, I'm not sure what took me so long to jump on this particular bandwagon. If I had to guess, I'd say that the delay on import to build the previews turned me off when I tried this a while ago. After you import a batch of photos, the delay is noticeable and will load down a MacBook Pro quite heavily. However, I wish I had stuck with it to see the benefits. After all, if you are importing your cards as you go during a shoot, you can let your computer burn the cycles generating previews while you are shooting and everything will be ready when you sit back down.

Between using the 1:1 Previews and a few other tweaks to my workflow, I'm able to lift out photos to publish to Flickr during a shoot faster than ever. And considering that there is significant pressure to publish conference photos as soon as possible, I'd not hesitate to suggest that working photojournalists consider test-driving the use of 1:1 previews as well.

In short, give it a spin. Burn the CPU cycles. You'll probably be happy.

The photographs above are from the Money:Tech 2008 conference last week and the 2008 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference this week, both in New York City.