PSE Organiser issue

[simon g617]

I installed PSE 2018 last week and all was good until lat night I made the mistake of importing images on my computer using the organiser. Once that was done ALL my pictures appear grainy when I try and edit them. I also made the mistake of opening Lightroom 6 and a message came up asking if I wanted to use the organiser catalogue which I said yes to! Now picture are grainy in that application too!

Is there a way to recover all my photos?

[MichelBParis]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/simon+g617  wrote

I installed PSE 2018 last week and all was good until lat night I made the mistake of importing images on my computer using the organiser. Once that was done ALL my pictures appear grainy when I try and edit them. I also made the mistake of opening Lightroom 6 and a message came up asking if I wanted to use the organiser catalogue which I said yes to! Now picture are grainy in that application too!

Is there a way to recover all my photos?

None of your photos have been changed.

Neither in the organizer or in Lightroom, since both softwares don't store photos, only links in catalogs. Your photos are unchanged on your drive.

Importing means 'indexing', 'registering' that is writing the information about your photo file: exif data, your keywords and the location (drive + path) on your drive.

[simon g617]

OK, so how do I get the photos to look like they used to in Elements and Lightroom? Can I get rid of the 'Index' and get back to the way it was?

Sorry to be a pain but I'm quite new to the editing stuff but was doing OK until I did the index.

[MichelBParis]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/simon+g617  wrote

OK, so how do I get the photos to look like they used to in Elements and Lightroom? Can I get rid of the 'Index' and get back to the way it was?

Sorry to be a pain but I'm quite new to the editing stuff but was doing OK until I did the index.

The question is why and how do you see a difference since the files themselves have not been changed.

Are you viewing your files from another software like the Explorer or Finder?

About 'grain': the nature of digital images is to be made of pixels which are shown by the fixed pixels of your display. You only see the real content of your image if one image pixel is shown with one display pixel (that's called '100% zoom view')

Most of the time when you zoom in or out, the display is different than 100% and you only get an approximate image which looks 'pixelated' or 'blurred'. The approximation zooming process is called 'scaling' and is much less visible if you use zoom factors like 50%, 25% etc.

Another situation for not viewing 'crisp' images is when you browse 'thumbnails' in the organizer or Lightroom. They are highly reduced images. For instance a photo with 4 000 pixels in width is stored as 360 pixels wide, which is enough to see a full page of thumbnails, but when you want to display one photo full size, the enlarging results in a blurry image until the real image linked with the thumbnail is read and displayed clearly.

[simon g617 · Accepted solution]

I tried it again last night and when I opened the organiser it looked a lot better that it had the night before. I then configured the performance as I had read about on the Internet so that in the Preferences - Performance- Cache was set to the maximum of 8 rather than 5 and it then all looked fine. So problem solved