I currently own a 27" iMac I bought in Oct 2010 (2.93 GHz i7 with 16GB DDR3 RAM and 256Go Flash SSD drive). When I upgraded to the Nikon D800, some tasks were a tad slower (such as loading previews or using the healing brush in Lightroom), but for the most part I was OK handling 16bit TIFF files in Photoshop (I allocated 10GB of the RAM to Photoshop for file handling which helped quite a bit).
That was until I started working with panoramic shots that run 250-350Mo !!! For example, converting to B&W with Silver Efex can take minutes once I hit 'Save'.
I can't add any more RAM to my current system and I'm wondering if upgrading to the latest 3.4 GHz iMac with 32Go of RAM would make a huge difference. I am torn as I would like to upgrade to the latest iMac in part for its better LCD, but I wouldn't want to do so unless I would be getting a major step up in performance.
Back in the day, my film scans were 200-300MB and they were fine even with a couple adjustment layers in PS. However at some point they'd hit the scratch disk and really drag down the system. More RAM and a faster processor help but to have significant improvement over your already decent system I suspect you need more than 32GB of RAM and a SSD RAID. My Mac Pro is running 64GB RAM with a OWC Mercury Accelsior E2 (SSD RAID on PCIe card) and it really burns rubber on big files.
If this helps, I just ran Activity Monitor and inspected Photoshop while converting a 390MB TIFF image with Silver Efex. Screen shots below (of course fluctuating but gives an idea)
Configuring one's preferences for PS is a dark art, as far as I can tell. Thankfully, there are some some kind folks out their with better knowledge than myself as to what Adobe has done under-the-hood with their software's memory and cache usage. At your leisure you'd do well to wade through the research done over at Digilloyd on this issue. Here's an appropriate place to start...
I run the NIK plugin collection both through Aperture 3 and PS CS 5.5 but I've never done a comparison for responsiveness between the two. I've learned to limit my round-trips through Photoshop to just those things that I need it for...like, say, up-rezzing to a broader color space and greater bit depth to perform localized sharpening or deconvolution techniques and then down-rezzing and/or converting to TIFFs to send them back into my Aperture pipeline...that whole, "use the right hammer for the job" thing.
Yes my slightly-newer-than-yours 2011 iMac 3.4GHz (i7 2600K) 16GB (not to be confused with the 3.4GHz i7 3770 as in the current iMac) gets the dreaded Spinning Beach Ball when there's heavy lifting to be done, and if I were doing this as my livelihood I'd would certainly figure how to budget for a Mac Pro.
From your Activity Monitor stats its clear that PS is doing what it's going to do on your current platform...push it past its limits with lots of paging between Real and Virtual memory. But before running out to throw more hardware at the problem I'll re-suggest that you get familiar with your preference settings and see how far that will take you.
A couple of other suggestions you might wish to consider, as well...
I run my photo applications on a separate partition on my drive. And I keep all my saved storage on another separate partition, as well. What this does for me is keep my photo work-space partition free from fragmentation and accumulated daily data clutter. The goal here is to maintain a clean drive space for faster read/writes for active work and to eliminate any unwanted processes from other applications running in the background.
Also, in your System Preference's Energy Saver tab be sure to set your "Computer Sleep" slider over to "Never", and deselect the check box for "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible"...in case you haven't, already.
Should these tweaks prove unsatisfactory for you (and I'm guessing they will) the move to the newer 3.4 GHz iMac will certainly offer some guaranteed relief. 16GB of 1333 MHz PC3-10600 DDR3 RAM becomes 32 GB of 1600 MHz PC3-12800 DDR3 RAM. And your CPU benchmarks will jump from 8,985 to 12,849 Geekbench...
Configuring one's preferences for PS is a dark art, as far as I can tell. Thankfully, there are some some kind folks out their with better knowledge than myself as to what Adobe has done under-the-hood with their software's memory and cache usage. At your leisure you'd do well to wade through the research done over at Digilloyd on this issue. Here's an appropriate place to start...
I run the NIK plugin collection both through Aperture 3 and PS CS 5.5 but I've never done a comparison for responsiveness between the two. I've learned to limit my round-trips through Photoshop to just those things that I need it for...like, say, up-rezzing to a broader color space and greater bit depth to perform localized sharpening or deconvolution techniques and then down-rezzing and/or converting to TIFFs to send them back into my Aperture pipeline...that whole, "use the right hammer for the job" thing.
Yes my slightly-newer-than-yours 2011 iMac 3.4GHz (i7 2600K) 16GB (not to be confused with the 3.4GHz i7 3770 as in the current iMac) gets the dreaded Spinning Beach Ball when there's heavy lifting to be done, and if I were doing this as my livelihood I'd would certainly figure how to budget for a Mac Pro.
From your Activity Monitor stats its clear that PS is doing what it's going to do on your current platform...push it past its limits with lots of paging between Real and Virtual memory. But before running out to throw more hardware at the problem I'll re-suggest that you get familiar with your preference settings and see how far that will take you.
A couple of other suggestions you might wish to consider, as well...
I run my photo applications on a separate partition on my drive. And I keep all my saved storage on another separate partition, as well. What this does for me is keep my photo work-space partition free from fragmentation and accumulated daily data clutter. The goal here is to maintain a clean drive space for faster read/writes for active work and to eliminate any unwanted processes from other applications running in the background.
Also, in your System Preference's Energy Saver tab be sure to set your "Computer Sleep" slider over to "Never", and deselect the check box for "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible"...in case you haven't, already.
Should these tweaks prove unsatisfactory for you (and I'm guessing they will) the move to the newer 3.4 GHz iMac will certainly offer some guaranteed relief. 16GB of 1333 MHz PC3-10600 DDR3 RAM becomes 32 GB of 1600 MHz PC3-12800 DDR3 RAM. And your CPU benchmarks will jump from 8,985 to 12,849 Geekbench...
First, that you're contemplating the hardware option another great Mac resource can be found over at Bare Feats. This exuberant bunch of folks just love getting a hold of the latest Apple gear and storage mediums and then torturing them with a variety of benchmark tools and, er, "Pro Apps" like Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut, etc., and, if you're so inclined, hardware-intensive games. You'll find your iMac (and later models) on their extensive list of hardware tests and see how it fared against its previous and subsequent incarnations (like my iMac), and other Mac products like MBPs and Mac Pros, etc.
Second, (and I should have touched on this before) the reality is, Photoshop is going to tax not just your CPU and RAM, it's going to demand the most of your Hard Drives. And there are hard drive choices that will make a difference in how PS behaves for you that you'll want to be keenly aware of if you're going to upgrade your existing machine or purchase another custom-configured iMac or decide to outfit your own Mac Pro. Again, the maniacs at Bare Feats have done a lot of virtual try-before-you-buy testing with Photoshop, et al, and various HDDs for you to help you understand what your choices are and why.
Real World Speed Tests for Performance Minded Apple Mac Users: http://barefeats.com/
(P.S. I have no affiliation with any of the links I have provided.)
BTW, if you end up playing around with the Tile Settings in PS for those panoramic shots I'd be curious if they helped make a difference for you. I've accumulated a lot of pano sequences over the years and have just never gotten around to stitching any of them together to see how it all worked out! D'oh!
Always nice to get such great support on these forums.
Another random question I have is what is the most painless way to shift everything over from one iMac to another. Is Migration Assistant still the best option ?
PS - If planning to buy 32GB of RAM on the iMac i7, should I buy from a 3rd party or from Apple ? Seems like a no brainer given price...but which company is best out there, Corsair and Crucial pretty equivalent ?
Make sure you are getting the best from your Mac before upgrading anything.
Repair permissions in Disc Utility is often a way to improve performance, as running Onyx (I think still freeware - install the right version for your OS and run the automation option).
May not help much but it will clean up your OS and have your system running at 100% to be sure before you spend £££ / $$$
Given there isn't a dedicated Mac forum hard to I know where best to post different people usually copies it different forums so get some pretty complementary views.
