Lightroom not rendering grain properly

[whimandwillowphoto]

Gah, it's been a day - having another issue!

The presets that I use for editing have a certain amount of grain in them because that's my editing aesthetic. I reopened Lightroom today and the grain that it's showing in the preview in develop mode are REALLY intense, yet when I export them, the picture has the correct amount of grain.

So, that tells me that something isn't rendering properly with my previews.

Does anyone know a solution?

[Jao vdL]

Is the grain still wrong when you zoom 1:1 in Lightroom's develop module? What if you then zoom back? The grain and detail previews are sometimes really off in Develop if the settings are extreme and you are working on a fairly low pixel density display (i.e. less than WQHD), so if you are working on say a 1920x1080 display you should only trust the detail and grain sliders effect when zoomed into 1:1

[whimandwillowphoto]

Same stuff happens. However, I think we've identified the problem - smart previews.

The issue disappears when we stop using smart previews under the performance tab in the preferences box. Problem with that though is editing is slower. Is there a way to "fix" smart previews or another preview type that would be better?

[Jao vdL]

Grain and detail sliders will unfortunately always give the wrong results on smart previews since you simply do not have the resolution to render them correctly and applying them at the resolution of the smart preview will give very coarse grain. So best to not even go there (the grain and detail sliders) when working on just smart previews. Other kinds of previews are never used in develop so not much you can do except just working of the actual raw files.
by the way i have not found any significant advantage of using smart previews on recent machines with fast ssd drives. There is potentially a small difference in loading the raw into develop but current ssd drives have made that difference tiny and no longer really relevant at least for my workflow. In fact just the time it takes to generate the smart previews is a time sink (let alone big sink for disk space)  probably much larger than the speed advantage you might get from working with smart previews.

If you are a photographer that works with 1000's of images at a time, by far the fastest workflow is to not generate ANY previews. You import using embedded previews, which gives you almost immediate browsing access in library. Cull and select using that and just develop the keepers from the raw files. Smart previews are only useful in my opinion if you need to work on your files while your originals are offline (e.g. working from a laptop away from the studio where the original files are stored on a NAS server)