I presently use an I-Mac duo care with 4 gig of ram.
And I will be purchasing a Nikon D800, so my question is what do I need to work with the 36 megapixel files. At the moment I use Aperture and Capture NX 2 and I will probably get Photoshop.
I would like to get into a lap top because I sell photos at events, and I have no problem going Windows, but I do enjoy the I-Mac.
If I go a lap top which I think is best, I would probably get an extra monitor for use at home.
I am computer illiterate, so I really need help here.
Thank you
Dennis
I just last month finished assembling and installing a new desktop computer after using my previous desktop for over seven years.
I put an AMD 6 core Thuban 1100T on a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 motherboard with 16 GB of memory [on edit: not MB]. I have three drives in it: System (200 GB), Data (500 GB), and Photo (1000 GB).
I am running Windows 7 Ultimate SP1. By moving the Pagefile off the system drive and disabling Hibernation, I run with the Operating System using 24 GB in a 55 GB partition. I set it up this way so that I could move it to a 60 GB Solid State Drive (SSD) in the future, and so that I could back it up easily (with Acronis) to a compressed 16 GB file.
I'm glad I got that power because I recently did a stitch of a multi-row HDR pano on it. There are two rows of 12 panels and each has three exposures. Thus 72 shots are assembled into a 170 MPixel image. It took four and a half hours with Hugin and ran two cores most of the time but briefly used all six cores at once a few times. The output TIFF file (16 bit) is 1.3 GB. The Photoshop file with three layers is 2.9 GB. The JPEG is 88 MB.
Have all your files exist in three copies in two places.
I also have a bare drive slot in it where I put a 1.5 TB bare drive to back up the Data and Photo Drives and a couple of copies (versions) of the 16 GB OS backup. Once a month I swap it for one in the Safe Deposit box at the bank. If I step out of the house for a day I turn off the computer, pull the drive and hide it.
Since you're looking for a laptop I think I would look for one that has an intel i7 cpu. I'd also think about one with 8 gigs of ram at least, and a large HD. A DVI port and an HDMI port would be nice to hook your monitor up. One other thing, consider a SSD for the OS and programs and at the very least A 7200 RPM hd.
This would be a good start to your search, good luck.
I know there is new technology all the time. Maybe I am wrong in my thinking. I am 66year old and not in the best of health and I am on a list for the D800, I just sold my D3. I am thinking this will be my last camera body I ever purchase, my funds are limited. And I am hoping I can put together a computer that will also be my last one. I would like a computer that will only be used for photo processing with reasonable speed.
Thanks for any help.
Dennis
You are more likely to need / want to purchase another computer down the road than replace a very fine capable camera like a D800. All the same, it makes sense to get a high end computer now and keep it for a long time before replacing it. High end, but not bleeding edge.
I've had 2 Toshiba laptops and liked them both. Any on this page would be fine for you. Keep in mind you'll need a little high performance to edit images without pulling your hair out! Although if you're only working with jpegs, you may get by with something less powerful.
You don't mention if you plan on continuing to use Aperture. If that's your plan, you really don't have much of a choice. The i7 Macbook Pros are perfectly capable, though. The 8gb memory limit will probably be the only issue in terms of longevity.
leighton w wrote:
Since you're looking for a laptop I think I would look for one that has an intel i7 cpu. I'd also think about one with 8 gigs of ram at least, and a large HD. A DVI port and an HDMI port would be nice to hook your monitor up. One other thing, consider a SSD for the OS and programs and at the very least A 7200 RPM hd.
This would be a good start to your search, good luck.
There's also companies that let you custom build laptops.
I recently purchased that exact machine and am VERY happy with it. To start with, this is a great deal at B&H, it would be somewhere around $1900 configured this way purchased direct from Lenovo, and an equivalently configured macbook is $2300.
But there are two reasons I got this machine:
1) The 15" 1080P screen on the W520 (and T520) is 95% gamut, which I know isn't the same as a wide gamut external monitor, but it is very good for a laptop screen.
2) As mentioned, you can get some additional speed by running the programs off of an SSD. This laptop is one of only a few options that allows you to do this while still keeping a standard hard drive (most mid-upper Lenovos and Dell Precisions do as well) It has an MSATA slot, in which I have installed an 80GB Intel MSATA SSD . I have the OS and all of my programs installed on the (much faster) SSD, while I still am able to keep the original 500 GB hard drive for storage. It is also possible to replace the optical drive with an additional hard drive, if you need that much storage.
3) It has four RAM slots, so it is relatively easy to expand it from 8GB RAM to 16GB, and it can address up to 32 GB of RAM (although 8 GB sticks are still pretty expensive). Most laptops have only two slots and can address only 16GB RAM max.
I unfortunately haven't really been able to put it through its paces yet, as I am very busy studying for a licensing exam, but I've been exceedingly happy with it for everything I've thrown at it - not that my 10 MP EOS-40D files will give it anywhere near the same challenge as the D800 files. Anyway, I got it because I believe it is one of the more powerful laptops available, and won't break the bank.
I think the most important thing for you is probably going to be RAM. Doing editing on huge images like this just eats RAM for breakfast. I just upgraded from a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM to a Core i5-2500K with 16GB of RAM and the difference is enormous. Of course, the increase in processor speed is very big (4x speed), but the biggest difference is from just having enough RAM to deal with the big images. When processing a 6 image HDR with Lightroom and HDR Efex Pro, my active RAM utilization has spiked to 9 GB, and that's just with 16 MP images. Of course, the new machine handles that with ease, but I am very glad I sprung for 16 GB of RAM...I know that it'll come in extremely handy for processing HDRs of stitches (which I've done...three sets of stitched images = huge data use).
Of course, if you get a laptop with an SSD instead of a hard disk, even memory swapping with less RAM will be a lot faster than your current machine.
Dennis, the computer you have will definitely work with your D800 files - but slowly. Or at least slower than with your D3 files. In short, each photo has at least three times as much data to manipulate.
The primary issue is how fast you want it to work with those files. If you're cruising along then an upgrade can wait. If you're trying to get a lot done in a short time and/or if you are always tweaking images then you'll want something faster.
The latest 4-core i7 MacBook Pros are as capable as some of the lower-end Mac Pros and well exceed what your iMac can do in the same amount of time - but have you noted how much disc space you use ? Each new photo will be three times bigger than existing photos so factor that in too. And be aware that with a laptop you have much greater limitations on internal storage. A modern MBP or iMac will have access to speedy external data storage via the Thunderbolt interface - even if you only use a thunderbolt to eSATA adapter to use non-thunderbolt drive cases. Thunderbolt is very expensive at present and not very common (as in quite rare).
If you can upgrade your iMac RAM then do so - as much as you can. That will be 6 or more GB. 8GB is enough for most single-photo stuff unless you're into big panoramas made from stitching multiple photos. Buy the RAM from OWC (www.macsales.com) to save a lot of money compared with buying it from apple. You can be sure that 4GB is not enough - it is so little that there will already be a lot of swapping RAM onto the much slower hard drive every time it runs short of RAM. With bigger files that will become a major slow-down. I have rarely needed more than 8GB. Even when I did the computer still worked. 16GB for my MBP probably costs $250 now from OWC but was over $1600 ten months ago. At that time 8GB was only $100-$200. Buying the newest and biggest memory modules early in the life cycle is always expensive. I could upgrade now and be $1200 better off than if I had bought in March 2011. If you cannot add RAM then you'll be looking for a new computer before long.
An SSD (solid state drive) makes your computer feel very fast but is expensive and has limited capacity compared with a hard drive. I've got two in my MBP (one replacing the DVD drive) but there is still less than 1 TB of internal storage. At times I have run out until I weed out the chaff and clear some space but on a holiday I have photos coming in faster than I can cull them. Once again, buy the SSDs from OWC. They're better than the Apple versions.
The new 4-core computers are noticeably better than the dual core computers because the software can now use those extra cores - at least for anything other than writing data to the hard drive.
Chances are that now is a bad time to buy a new MBP because a new one is probably coming pretty soon. You might want to check out the rumours for new products.
Dennis H. wrote:
I know there is new technology all the time. Maybe I am wrong in my thinking. I am 66year old and not in the best of health and I am on a list for the D800, I just sold my D3. I am thinking this will be my last camera body I ever purchase, my funds are limited. And I am hoping I can put together a computer that will also be my last one. I would like a computer that will only be used for photo processing with reasonable speed.
Thanks for any help.
Dennis
Any operational reasons why you feel you need a laptop? Will you be processing photos in a hotel room?
To get good processing power in a laptop you are going to pay a lot of money. Core i7 laptop with decent specs and you will pay a minimum of a $1000. More if you want a better screen, faster cpu, etc. Mobile cpus are designed to save power and reduce heat output. Comparable desktop cpu's wull come with higher clock speeds because of that.
If you are on a budget and don't need the portability you will get lot more for your money with a desktop.
i'm curious why Hugin does this. using AutoPano Pro, it uses all the processors except at file load time and final blend. most of the time, it's using as many processors as you let it which normally is configured to the number of non-hyperthreaded (real) processors. on my 4 processor systems, i see all 4 processors maxed out most of the time and on my systems with 8 processors, i see them all maxed out almost as much of the time. hyperthreading for AutoPano Pro isn't all that useful.
Herb...
Monito wrote:
It took four and a half hours with Hugin and ran two cores most of the time but briefly used all six cores at once a few times.
What is Hugin doing? That's a seriously long time. I know it's not exactly the same, but I did an 18 image stitch of 12 MP images (3 rows of 6) in Photoshop's Photomerge (which I have found to be the absolute best panorama stitcher....I've used Hugin before, but not in the last year or so). With my Core i5 machine, it was able to fully assemble the panorama in under 3 minutes.
I also have done an HDR with two sets of 6 image stitches (again, not as intensive but still...) and HDR Efex Pro did it in under 40 seconds. For that HDR, it took me less than 5 minutes to do the two 6 image stitches and the HDR, including photo selection, export and selection of the HDR stuff.
I'm sure your image set would be much slower, but I can't imagine it would take 4 hours. I'd be curious to try with your source files, though I'm sure you wouldn't want to give them to me. Maybe I'll try taking my own set today and time how long it takes. (not that with the weather it would warrant HDR today).
It might also depend on the options you select for output. I asked it to output the fully stitched intermediate exposures too. Perhaps without those it would take less time. I haven't tested (with smaller sets!) to see if it makes a difference.
Well, I need to do a proper pano, but the timings should be somewhat similar...but I did mine super quick in the back of my car and just hand held with 3 shot bracketing. Since I was trying to do it fast on my break, I didn't do the proper care and alignment to make a great file (the stitches ended up with different perspectives due to camera movement and the close subject...so each exposure level stitch is fine, but the HDR sucks due to misaligned stuff). I did 3 rows of 8, but accidentally did 7 on the top (though with similar coverage), so 23 images @ 16 MP. Final stitch size was 154 MP.
My work computer isn't quite as fast as my home computer (it's a first gen Core i7...about 15% slower than my Core i5 machine except in hyper threaded applications, where it can make use of 8 logical cores...Photoshop only uses the physical cores though, so my home machine should be a little faster (also has a bit more RAM).
Anyway, Export from Lightroom to Photoshop took 1 minute 51 seconds to 16 bit TIFF files, per exposure level.
Merge #1 (0EC) took 4 minutes 7 Seconds
Merge #2 (-1 EC) took 3 minutes 17 seconds
Then I realized I had been exporting those two levels at 8 bit. So I made sure to do the 16 bit TIFF export on the +1 EC files...that's the 1:51 time from above...the 8 bit files exported in 1:30.
Merge #3, (+1 EC), with 16 bit files, took 7 minutes 20 seconds.
So, using the latter time for each merge, we arrive at 22 minutes for the stitching.
HDR, I don't have HDR Efex at work, so I had to use Photoshop Merge to HDR. I converted the two 8 bit files to 16 bit tiffs before the HDR. each file was around 900MB in a single flattened tiff. Merge to HDR took 4 minutes 25 seconds.
So, total processing time was 26 minutes 25 seconds.
Any particular reason you use Hugin? I have found Photoshop's Photomerge to be more accurate (and more importantly, automated)...I almost never have any stitching errors at all, unless I did a horrible job taking the pictures, or I'm trying to stitch ultra wide photos with foreground (which is never a good idea). The core i7 and new i5 machines are faster chips than yours, but not 9x so...benchmarks show my i5-2500K to be about 50% faster in Photoshop than your Phenom II X6 1100T, so you could expect about 40 minutes to do that work in Photoshop rather than Hugin...could be nice to lop off nearly 4 hours of processing time.
I was in the Mac store the other day and for something for the future, and especially running Aperture, if you can swing it then go with the MacBook Pro. It is not worth the money to upgrade the processor. It is worthwhile spending the little extra to upgrade to a Hi-Res screen. It was actually an Apple employee that told me not to upgrade the memory with Apple. You pay $200 to upgrade to 8GB. If you upgrade through Crucial you can actually get 16GB for $240 so even though Apple say's 8GB is the maximum it will take 16GB.
If you switch to a PC then you will have to re-purchase all your software and also find a replacement for Aperture. I have tried numerous occasions to switch to Lightroom but for me, I find it cumbersome compared to Aperture.
These machines use the same DDR3 RAM that Intel PCs use, right? Any reason you couldn't just get 16GB from Newegg or your local MicroCenter (if you're lucky enough to have one?) I paid $70 for my 16GB of Kingston 1600MHz DDR.
Dennis H. wrote:
I presently use an I-Mac duo care with 4 gig of ram.
And I will be purchasing a Nikon D800, so my question is what do I need to work with the 36 megapixel files. At the moment I use Aperture and Capture NX 2 and I will probably get Photoshop.
I would like to get into a lap top because I sell photos at events, and I have no problem going Windows, but I do enjoy the I-Mac.
If I go a lap top which I think is best, I would probably get an extra monitor for use at home.
I am computer illiterate, so I really need help here.
Thank you
Dennis...Show more →
Since you say you are "computer illiterate" and currently using an iMac then I would stay with Mac's. If you were on Windows I would say stay with Windows.
You should look at the higher end Mac powerbooks along with the Mac Air book. For speed the SSD cards are the way to go, that and max out your RAM. Max RAM and the SSD drives will be faster than any mechanical HD.
As far as Apple overcharging for their RAM, they do...for the most part. It tends to go in cycles but they always to charge a premium.
Regarding third party RAM. It's NOT all created equal. You can always buy "cheap" RAM but you risk having flaky things happening. Buy quality RAM, it's dirt cheap today regardless so you may as well buy the good stuff. OWC (Other World Computing) has the good stuff for third party. Don't be swayed by cheap RAM that has a lifetime warranty, it's still cheap ram.
Maybe I'll try taking my own set today and time how long it takes.