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Archive 2024 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups

  
 
tommmi
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p.1 #1 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


I have used iMac for raw development and photo editing since 2011. I upgraded my 27" Mid-2011 iMac about a five years ago to 27" 2019 iMac and the performance leap was enormous. I've been happy with the rig, but it has started to feel a little slow since I've also upgraded my camera gear multiple times and the raw file sizes has increased quite a bit.

I have first generation M1 Macbook Air from late 2020 too, but I haven't used it for photography stuff at all. I also happen to sport a Macbook Pro with M1 Max chip from 2021 as my work laptop. So, I happen to have three quite different Apple systems here in my hands which itched my engineering nerve.


I collected 15 raw images from my photo archive from 6 different cameras (Canon 5D Mark II, GFX 50S II, M11, M240, Ricoh GR III and Fuji X-T3) (so 90 total) and ran batch processing in Iridient Developer on each of these three systems. All the systems are running the same macOS Sonoma 14.5 and using the same Iridient Developer version 4.2.1

I took time how long the batch processing took on each Mac on each camera system, meaning that I have the measured processing time in minutes and seconds for 15 photos batch from each camera.


Total time it took to batch process the files from each camera system took 12 minutes and 8 seconds on iMac with 3.7GHz i5 and 40 GB of RAM. The fastest processing time was 1 minute and 4 seconds for Leica M240 files (which makes roughly 4 seconds a photo) and the slowest was 3 minutes and 29 seconds for Leica M11 files (approximately 13 seconds per file).

Surprisingly, Macbook Air with M1 chip and only 8 GB of RAM, it took only 8 minutes and 30 seconds to batch process all the files. The M240 was again fastest (41 seconds total) and M11 slowest (2 minutes and 40 seconds), but this little fanless beast is wiping tables with the three times more expensive Intel iMac from roughly the same era!

After seeing these results I though that Macbook Pro with M1 Max and 64 GB of RAM would be kind of in the same ballpark with Air - it has basically the same processor architecture after all - but it was again much faster with total time of 4 minutes and 57 seconds for the whole set of photos. M240 files took 26 seconds to process and M11 files only 1 minute and 25 seconds. That is nearly three times faster than the iMac.


This is of course only a small experiment with relatively few files only and especially the M1 Air with passive cooling might start to hiccup if processing hundreds of raw files in a batch. But given that I can almost halve the processing time with M1 Air compared to my main rig, and with a three years old M1 Max system I can process the files in one third of the time that iMac requires. With more files the gap on absolute scale comes just ridiculous. In the same time my iMac processes 90 raw files, the M1 Max can process 220. And I haven't even talked about the preview rendering performance in Iridient itself.

I start wondering the options I have. Should I sell my iMac and buy a decent monitor to be used with my M1 Air? Should I sell my iMac and buy a decent monitor + new Mac with the newest generation M chip? Should I just keep my beloved iMac and plan my workflow better?

The question is rhetorical, just wanted to share my justification to buy a new Mac



Jul 02, 2024 at 04:57 AM
Tony Ross
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p.1 #2 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


You could start with using the M1 Air with a new monitor, but consider moving to a new Mac Mini - that way you'd get better cooling, and a machine better designed for running larger batches of photos. You can get an M2 Mac Mini now (or even an M2 Pro), and that could make a difference, too.


Jul 02, 2024 at 05:46 AM
rscheffler
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p.1 #3 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


The question in my mind is: how often do you need to run large batch exports or anything else CPU and especially GPU intensive over prolonged periods?

If you're just doing a handful of images at a time, then the iMac will serve you for a long time (as long as the OS can be updated and/or the apps you use can run on old OSes).

I came from a 2009 iMac that I used until 2022 to process Canon and Leica 20-24MP files in Lightroom 6. It wasn't fast, but fast enough for what I needed and editing itself was not sluggish with these files. But then I upgraded to Canon R system cameras (still only 24MP). To keep the old system running would have needed too much 'hoop jumping' (like DNG conversions) to process the new files. My budget allowed a MBP M1 Pro and yes, performance was a massive improvement. But I was also able to now benefit from many feature improvements in the current version of Lightroom, such as AI Denoise, which is very GPU intensive. It really benefits from the M chips compared to previous Macs using Intel with integrated GPU (though your iMac will have discrete graphics, it probably still isn't as fast as the M chips' integrated graphics). For example before OS 14 my MBP processed a Canon 24MP file in about 25-30 seconds in Denoise. A friend's older Intel MBP takes about 5 minutes! I guess my point is that eventually you may wish to use newer software or software features that rely on the capabilities of the M chips and likely will eventually have to transition.

Where I also noticed massive speed improvement was video editing. 4K editing is effortless and exports from DaVinci Resolve are fast, whereas my old system was slow even with just 1080P.

In some respects I'm in somewhat of in a similar situation, thinking about whether a custom configured Mini is an option for a home desktop solution (though my MBP certainly still does the job), or just go with a base Studio for not much price difference. While the various M chips have similar core performance, the differences you gain with the Pro, Max and Ultra are things like GPU core count, wider internal bandwidth for various processes, etc. Of course the Ultra is basically 2x Max stuck together... but I don't think I'd go Ultra for my needs.

If you haven't seen the Apple benchmarks thread, please do so (here).



Jul 02, 2024 at 11:30 AM
tommmi
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p.1 #4 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


rscheffler wrote:
If you haven't seen the Apple benchmarks thread, please do so (here).


Bummer! I tried to search for topics regarding Apple M chips, but apparently I wasn't that good for searching.. Thanks for the link! Very valuable thread.


rscheffler wrote:
The question in my mind is: how often do you need to run large batch exports or anything else CPU and especially GPU intensive over prolonged periods?

If you're just doing a handful of images at a time, then the iMac will serve you for a long time (as long as the OS can be updated and/or the apps you use can run on old OSes).

... ...

Where I also noticed massive speed improvement was video editing. 4K editing is effortless and exports from DaVinci Resolve are fast, whereas my old system was slow even with just 1080P.

In some respects I'm
...Show more

The root problem is that the iMac is doing just fine for all the other daily tasks I do with it. I used it also for scientific calculation, but it is more like traditional statistics, not resource-hungry machine learning or that kind of stuff (except some rare occasions but that doesn't justify the upgrade).

But, on the other hand, I enjoy photographing and I've also used months now to go through my photo library and develop old raw files. I've had my run-and-gun type of years in photography and now I'm paying for my laziness and culling and processing all those files, and trying to keep only a handful from a certain set or trip. Because otherwise I would never ever look those photos and enjoy them, and re-live the situations and scenes through them.

How I nowadays shoot, I try to shoot frequently, but with more focused resulting less files and that way less post-processing. This really got me stuck with my rationalization of upgrading the iMac!

I also thought about selling the iMac and buying the Studio Display but it is basically the same panel in different housing. But then I could use the display with my Macbook Air, and I also can take the Air with me if I need to. But that is quite an expensive display "just for" photo editing

I don't know. The more I think of this, the more complex it becomes

Not to mention all the discussions regarding the noise some units of Mac Mini and Mac Studio are producing...



Jul 04, 2024 at 07:22 AM
rscheffler
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p.1 #5 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


Sounds like the iMac will meet your needs most of the time. This will allow you to concentrate on your back catalog of images and revisit the topic in 2-3+ years after a couple more generations of M chips and devices have been released, which will likely result in more significant upgrade benefits.

But with your current collection of Macs, I would consider moving most of the heavy processing work to the M1 Max system, such as Denoise batches, batch applications of AI masks, batch RAW exports, etc., as it will be the most responsive. After transitioning from my ancient 27" iMac to a 14" MBP as my main editing system, clearly the laptop's much smaller (though higher resolution) display was a downgrade. I added a BenQ display from their photo editing product line and have generally been happy with this arrangement. If you use Lightroom and you want to use both the MBP and the iMac for editing and/or viewing your catalog, an option would be to put your LR catalog and image collection on an NVMe SSD in a TB enclosure (like the Acasis TBU405) so that you can easily move it between each computer.

If I can make a suggestion for dealing with mountains of old photos that have been ignored for years and years (a topic with which I am unfortunately extremely familiar due to my own massive back catalog) - when you make your initial sweep through a set of photos, only tag/select the ones you like. Don't spend time during this first sweep individually deleting the rejects. Move the keepers to one folder and move the rejects/outtakes to another folder. You can keep the outtakes - just in case - while ignoring them without guilt, for the rest of your life (I don't revisit my outtakes again 99.9999% of the time). Or just delete them - but for me that is a difficult final decision to make with my personal work, so I prefer to just ignore them. Anyway, my point is to focus your efforts on the 10-15% of images in a group you want to keep and quickly move the others someplace where they won't be in the way.

For 'work' I'm often dealing with image sets in the range of a couple thousand to about 10,000 images. Sometimes these can take me the better part of a day to cull, but often I can make a first sweep of a set of 10,000 sports photos in 2-3 hours. Why I have such a large backlog of personal photography that is usually in much smaller groupings, remains a mystery.



Jul 04, 2024 at 09:24 AM
bjhurley
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p.1 #6 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


rscheffler wrote:
You can keep the outtakes - just in case - while ignoring them without guilt, for the rest of your life (I don't revisit my outtakes again 99.9999% of the time). Or just delete them - but for me that is a difficult final decision to make with my personal work, so I prefer to just ignore them. Anyway, my point is to focus your efforts on the 10-15% of images in a group you want to keep and quickly move the others someplace where they won't be in the way.


I like this approach; I don't move the rejects to separate folders but sort my folders by star rating so the higher-ranked photos are at the top. When I have time I go through and delete the obviously bad ones, leaving the okay-but-not-great ones for later culling.

I actually know one professional photographer who deletes all his raw files after he produces a jpeg he's happy with; his thinking is that this prevents him from constantly revisiting and tweaking files he's already processed to his original satisfaction. I'd have a hard time with that as I'm always learning new things about postprocessing and have been able to go back and vastly improve photos I processed in years past when I had less knowledge and experience (or poorer taste!).



Jul 04, 2024 at 09:48 AM
rscheffler
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p.1 #7 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


rscheffler wrote:
You can keep the outtakes - just in case - while ignoring them without guilt, for the rest of your life (I don't revisit my outtakes again 99.9999% of the time). Or just delete them - but for me that is a difficult final decision to make with my personal work, so I prefer to just ignore them. Anyway, my point is to focus your efforts on the 10-15% of images in a group you want to keep and quickly move the others someplace where they won't be in the way.

bjhurley wrote:
I like this approach; I don't move the rejects to separate folders but sort my folders by star rating so the higher-ranked photos are at the top. When I have time I go through and delete the obviously bad ones, leaving the okay-but-not-great ones for later culling.

I actually know one professional photographer who deletes all his raw files after he produces a jpeg he's happy with; his thinking is that this prevents him from constantly revisiting and tweaking files he's already processed to his original satisfaction. I'd have a hard time with that as I'm always learning new things about
...Show more

Yeah, I have a hard time deleting raw files for the same reasons. For client work I have for years been converting raw outtakes to compressed DNGs, which are not much larger than jpeg files. Sadly those compressed DNGs are not compatible with Adobe's new AI Denoise feature... so lesson learned there. But at least they're only outtakes that are almost never revisited. More recently, with my current Canon cameras, I just shoot all client work in Canon's CRAW format, which is compressed RAW, which saves the later DNG conversion stage while remaining Denoise compatible.

The tagging method to sort images works perfectly fine in a database driven app like Lightroom. My 'fear' is: what happens if I leave Lightroom for something else? Or, what happens if the catalog is corrupted? Will all my metadata based edits survive the transition or loss? Long ago I decided to do my culling and sorting by 'physically' separating the images into separate folders that exist as such on the hard drive, rather than as metadata tags in a database, so that it is totally app independent. I also moved away from using a single catalog in Lightroom to creating separate catalogs for each project that resides with each project's files. This approach might be better for 'one-off' projects, such as for clients whose images will almost never be revisited. But there certainly is value in having a master catalog of all one's work for viewing and sorting all the keepers, which of course can also be done alongside individual project catalogs. I just don't like to have tens or hundreds of thousands of images in only one basket, so to say.

Life is too short to spend deleting photos. Just pick the better ones and move on.



Jul 04, 2024 at 10:28 AM
bjhurley
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p.1 #8 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


rscheffler wrote:
Long ago I decided to do my culling and sorting by 'physically' separating the images into separate folders that exist as such on the hard drive, rather than as metadata tags in a database, so that it is totally app independent.


That's smart. The only drive-based folder organizing I've done is to create a new folder for each month-year.




Jul 04, 2024 at 10:37 AM
Abbott Schindl
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p.1 #9 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


Your results are interesting, although not surprising. Each new M-generation brings a new set of comparative benchmarks. For example:
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-silicon-buyers-guide/
Various articles on M-series chips here: https://eclecticlight.co/
You could also peruse here: https://www.tomsguide.com/

In the end, though, successive generations of M- chips are faster than earlier generations, and each successive upscaling within a generation is faster than the lower versions of the same generation chip. I'm running on a M2 MBP Max and a M2 Studio Ultra. The MBP is so fast that I considered changing my ways and using the laptop for everything (docked for desktop use). But I really like having 2 machines for various reasons, so I bought the Studio Ultra.

The Studio's about 80% faster than the MBP, which I appreciate but don't really "need". As I'm processing a bit more video as time goes by, I configured the Ultra as a long-term video machine that would scream on stills (I use EOS R5; large files). But in the end, as I'm not on a clock and the work I do is mostly for me, I could have gotten by with lesser machines.

So: imo, you just need to sort through why you might want a new machine and whether the gain's worthwhile. Since you didn't express a need for more speed ("desire" is different from "need"), it sounds like you can probably wait for M4-powered machines.

And then there's the question of whether your software's really taking advantage of the available cores and memory. Have you run iStat Menus or other tools that show core utilization? I'm pretty amazed at how poorly most of my routine apps access the processor and memory to the fullest.



Jul 04, 2024 at 10:55 AM
OntheRez
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p.1 #10 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


tommmi wrote:
…I upgraded my 27" Mid-2011 iMac about a five years ago to 27" 2019 iMac and the performance leap was enormous. …


Can provide direct experience for one such upgrade. My 2017 iMac Pro 64 Gb Ram 2Tb drive with upgraded video replaced with the MacMini Pro (M2 pro) 32gb RAM 2Tb drive. My iPro had been going weirdly wonky and finally gave up on it. Would liked to have gotten some sort of Studio but at >$5K wasn't happening.

Interestingly enough the Mini is quicker at many but certainly not all situations. I find in Lr and Ps that this performance gain is not universal and - particularly interesting - by operation type.

The BIGGEST concern is the monitor. I - rather stupidly - assumed that Mini with an affordable similar quality 27" monitor (Dell S2722QC) would have the same image quality. Nope! The iMac Pro's monitor was dramatically better. I'm not expert in these terms but it seems the iPro was using something akin to what's now called 5K whereas the Mini seems to be roughly 4k UHD(?). The top end 5K monitors (27") such as Apple's Studio Display, Benq, Samsung, LG run $1.2k to $1.7k. Price out of range. If I had it to do over? I'd look for a refurbished, fully equipped iMac Pro.

Just one man's experience.



Jul 04, 2024 at 11:29 AM
tommmi
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p.1 #11 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


rscheffler wrote:
The tagging method to sort images works perfectly fine in a database driven app like Lightroom. My 'fear' is: what happens if I leave Lightroom for something else? Or, what happens if the catalog is corrupted? Will all my metadata based edits survive the transition or loss? Long ago I decided to do my culling and sorting by 'physically' separating the images into separate folders that exist as such on the hard drive, rather than as metadata tags in a database, so that it is totally app independent. I also moved away from using a single catalog in Lightroom to
...Show more

This is exactly what happened to me once. I was using Lightroom 4 or some other quite ancient LR and the database file containing all the starring, tags etc. just corrupted and refused to open. I had to start all over again. I was more aware of Lightroom catalog backups after that. Now I use XnView and save all star ratings, tags and other metadata to the photo files itself, thus preventing mass corruption of information.

In addition, I use folder based system nowadays. On the root level of my photos folder, I have folder for each year, and folder for certain categories, like "Trips & Travel", "Pets", "Parties & Celebration" etc. The yearly folders are my backlog - I'm going through them started from 2005, and organizing them slowly but steadily to these category folders. Some of the photos I feel like keeping, but doesn't suit any certain category, I just leave to the yearly folders.

That was a good tip to use the star rating as folders for each star. I think I will start use that too for folders and occasions that are harder to delete photos (like the deceased family members and pets - it is very hard to me to delete this kind of photos).


bjhurley wrote:
I actually know one professional photographer who deletes all his raw files after he produces a jpeg he's happy with; his thinking is that this prevents him from constantly revisiting and tweaking files he's already processed to his original satisfaction. I'd have a hard time with that as I'm always learning new things about postprocessing and have been able to go back and vastly improve photos I processed in years past when I had less knowledge and experience (or poorer taste!).


This is my philosophy today, too. I'm keeping only the jpeg's after editing, actually I have done that back in the days too for some rare cases and I haven't regretted this approach.

In general, I try to keep things simple, and I think this approach keeps the catalog very clean and curated. I hope so, at least..



Jul 04, 2024 at 02:03 PM
tommmi
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p.1 #12 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


Abbott Schindl wrote:
So: imo, you just need to sort through why you might want a new machine and whether the gain's worthwhile. Since you didn't express a need for more speed ("desire" is different from "need"), it sounds like you can probably wait for M4-powered machines.

Exactly. I don't actually "need" the extra speed and performance, but I do "desire" for it. This leads me thinking for selling the iMac and buying the Studio Display to be used with Macbook Air till the M4 (or even M5) comes out.

Abbott Schindl wrote:
And then there's the question of whether your software's really taking advantage of the available cores and memory. Have you run iStat Menus or other tools that show core utilization? I'm pretty amazed at how poorly most of my routine apps access the processor and memory to the fullest.

At least the system monitor tells me it is using multiple CPU cores, though I haven't paid attention is it utilising the GPU cores (on M1) are well.



Jul 04, 2024 at 02:12 PM
rscheffler
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p.1 #13 · Raw conversion benchmark between Apple setups


tommmi wrote:
This is exactly what happened to me once. I was using Lightroom 4 or some other quite ancient LR and the database file containing all the starring, tags etc. just corrupted and refused to open. I had to start all over again. I was more aware of Lightroom catalog backups after that. Now I use XnView and save all star ratings, tags and other metadata to the photo files itself, thus preventing mass corruption of information.

In addition, I use folder based system nowadays. On the root level of my photos folder, I have folder for each year, and folder for
...Show more

My folder organization is simply YYYYMMDD_name_of_project. Within that are folders for raw selects, raw outtakes, processed versions of the raw selects and a copy of the LR catalog. I save all LR processing settings to each file before finishing a project to ensure the edits/metadata are saved to the file or accompanying XMP sidecar file. I have separate HDDs that are for jobs, sports, travel, family & friends, etc. But I also have another set of HDDs that are simply everything in chronological order, and duplicates of these are the 'back ups' to the more organized drives. That's as far as I go sorting images by genre at the root/folder level on the HDD - I actually prefer by date, but that's me. Personal work I also upload to Google Photos in addition to other cloud back ups (Amazon's AWS, in addition to HDD back ups). I like Google Photos for how it is searchable by image content without having to maintain a true local photo database that is only as good as the keywording of the photos (which I'm 99% too lazy to do most of the time, however I do apply generically descriptive captions to all images - a habit from my newspaper days). That said, I use NeoFinder as my DAM rather than Lightroom. Initially it was simply to catalog my many HDDs so I would know where things are, how many copies there are, etc. It doesn't seem to get bogged down by hundreds of thousands of database items and it creates a database for each HDD. Therefore if one corrupts, it doesn't take down the entire database (it searches across these separate databases and is a seamless process from a user POV).



Jul 04, 2024 at 02:29 PM





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