Originally Posted by
CPRich
One of the notes above reminded me - If you haven't calibrated your monitor and created/obtained custom .icc printer profiles, you may not get exactly what you expect.
It's not like your reds will turn out to be green, and it depends on your sensitivity/tolerance. But a 1-time investment is well worth it. You don't need to go crazy (unless you're a pro publishing in magazines) - my X-rite device/targets were <$300 are a great investment (they make everything else look right also).
I consider it one of my few essential accessories, along with the LensAlign setup.
Yes, calibration is a religion. I use Spyder 4 Pro, and set it up to remind me every 2 weeks for re-cal.
Now that we are on to equipment. I was forced to upgrade my desktop to the latest: SSD to run OS and all apps (boy is this nice!), and lots of SATA disk space inside the box. 27" primary monitor with a second 22".
I keep a Master catalog, and many individual catalogs. I often re-work using the individual catalog before merging it into the Master. It is a lot less time consuming to work with the individual cat. NOTE: all my cats are on SSD, with the backups on external USB3 drives.
Fortunately LR5.6 is quite stable.