p.2 #1 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
azfreemans wrote:
I currently have a 2024 M4 Pro MacBook Pro as my mobile machine (and it also runs my home recording setup). It is a 14 core with 48GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. I’ve been doing some test editing on that machine since I got it with files from the A7RV and the Leica M11P, and I can safely say that just about any Mac Studio will be overkill, but I highly recommend going with at least 48GB of RAM for longevity’s sake. Skip the Ultra altogether, unless you’re editing video and running LLMs
You are right. I have M2 studio with some moderate extras. I can have Lr and C1 (which I use most) simultaneously open with word, teams etc, and mostly I cannot subjectively notice any difference in performance compared running just C1.
BTW A7rv files are not mythically hard on computer unlike heavy video work is.
My advice is not to spoend too much money to computer. The sweet point can be found in Mac Mini series or Maxbook Pro. Current M4 Mac Mini series is probably mostly higher performance than my 2 years old M2 Studio Enough storage is nice to have in laptop. I consider 32GB ram enough but why not have have 48gb for the piece of mind.
p.2 #2 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
I think this was a weird choice by Apple, and there has to have been a reason they weren't able to get the M4 Ultra out--perhaps they will reserve that for a new Mac Pro? But the problem is that the M4 Max is just soooo good. For many tasks it matches or outperforms my M2 Ultra. The open question is how good this new M3 Ultra is. There was a big jump in GPU performance from the M2 to M3 generation but the M4 had a nice boost in the CPU frequency so it really does well there.
I think the Ultra is better for the video editing and AI LLM crowd than most photographers. For mass batch editing the Ultra would be good, but you'd have be processing hundreds of images at a time to make it worthwhile.
I wasn't going to get one, but the one old Intel Mac we still use at work has died, and the PC we paired with that (Mac for tethered image capture; PC with an Nvidia 4080 for image stacking) is a bit long in the tooth on the processor side so I'm going to get an Ultra and combine the two. We use the box for stacking of images in Helicon Focus; interestingly enough my M4 Max handily beats the 4080 for that task. We do huge exports of several hundred images at a time, converting them to TIFF images in the process. For that task the more CPU and GPU cores you have the faster it goes, so that's the only reason I'll get an Ultra. Otherwise an M4 Max Studio would be a killer machine for Lightroom.
p.2 #3 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
Thanks to all who responded. I appreciate your thoughts.
I ordered a Mac Studio M4 Max with 16CPU/40GPU/16NE, 64GB RAM and a 2TB SSD. It will arrive on 3/21 and I can't wait. I'm planning to use it with my old (as in 12 years old) NEC P271 with Spectraview II. I used that with my iMac 2020 for a while until I decided to use the iMac monitor. I calibrated the NEC with the Spectraview II puck and software. I've calibrated my iMac monitor with a Calibrate setup and have been pleased with the color matching with prints from my P900.
If the NEC doesn't work well, I'll likely get an Apple Studio Display from Amazon for $300 less than Apple charges for the same thing.
I kept my Mac Pro trashcan (worst Apple purchase EVER) for 7 years and have had my 2020 iMac for 5. I hope to get many years of use from this new machine.
p.2 #4 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
Do let us know how it performs when you receive it. I priced up a Studio vs a Mini with near-as specs plus hub/SSD case for the Mini and it was about £300 extra for the Studio (here in the UK, so VAT etc. also apply). Certainly worth considering esp. if there are other factors between the Studio and the Mini which would erode the difference further.
Did you trade-in your 2020 iMac or keep it as a screen? Apparently there are 3P apps which enable the iMac to work as a screen, although I have not read any direct testimonies. My 2019 iMac screen is still very, very good so I am tempted.
p.2 #5 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
FWIW, I have a MBP 14” with an M1 Pro chip, 16gb of ram, 1tb drive, and a stack of external drives.
Almost nothing in photography slows it down other than aligning thousands of photos to output as a Timelapse. Similarly almost nothing audio processing slows it down other than Soothe live processing on multiple tracks. 3d vfx can be slow but is doable.
Most photo processing is well within any ASI Mac’s capability.
The monitor is becoming an important choice and there are interesting options opening up.
p.2 #6 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
Grievous Angel wrote:
FWIW, I have a MBP 14” with an M1 Pro chip, 16gb of ram, 1tb drive, and a stack of external drives.
Almost nothing in photography slows it down other than aligning thousands of photos to output as a Timelapse. Similarly almost nothing audio processing slows it down other than Soothe live processing on multiple tracks. 3d vfx can be slow but is doable.
Most photo processing is well with any ASI Mac’s capability.
The monitor is becoming an important choice and there are interesting options opening up.
agreed, anyone doing photos probably wants a larger drive for the simplicity factor, and the original M1 easily did photos and I probably wont upgrade until 4-8TB becomes norm..... I've done the external drive stuff and I'm so over it, but for mac mini/studio, that is a viable solution..... technically it's ok for macbook as well, I just dont like it.
you might appreciate max + 32GB+ if you're handling multi angle video, like some sort of broadcast that has 4+ 4K angles, or work with 8K on a normal basis, M1 can struggle with that..... cant see myself or the general public going the 8K route anytime soon, its been around for a while now, no one cares, the viewing audience mostly doesnt care about 4K as it stands
p.2 #7 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
The one advantage the Ultra has for photography purposes is the 60 or 80 GPU cores vs 32/40 on the Max. Lightroom, DXO and possibly others make extensive use of the GPU now for AI processes and the huge number of GPU cores more than offset the moderate performance/core improvements in the M4 GPU.
However, I agree that the M4 Max Studio is likely the sweet spot for most photographers.
p.2 #8 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
Grievous Angel wrote:
FWIW, I have a MBP 14” with an M1 Pro chip, 16gb of ram, 1tb drive, and a stack of external drives.
Almost nothing in photography slows it down other than aligning thousands of photos to output as a Timelapse. Similarly almost nothing audio processing slows it down other than Soothe live processing on multiple tracks. 3d vfx can be slow but is doable.
Most photo processing is well with any ASI Mac’s capability.
The monitor is becoming an important choice and there are interesting options opening up.
Could you please share links of "interesting options" for monitors ?
p.2 #9 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
doc4x5 wrote:
Today Apple released the new Studio Machines. Some of the nomenclature is confusing but basically it seems there are two chips, the M4 MAX and the M3 ULTRA. They can each be configured with different levels of CPU and GPU, RAM and storage. I suspect any of them will be pretty impressive.
I use a Sony A7RV. I process my files in Lightroom Classic and Photoshop with an Intel 2020 iMac with an i9, 64GB RAM, and 4 TB of storage. I have a RAID 5 array in an OWC Thunderbay (Thunderbolt 3) for my archive. I've figured out I likely do not need 4TB of internal storage, 2TB is plenty with the current external options. My final files after all my manipulations are in the 1-2GB range. I do straight photography, and use AI only for things like removal and masking, not generating things that do not exist in the original.
I'm excited by these new computers and would love to hear from those more knowledgeable than me which configuration is likely to give the best performance for my use situation.
The Base model Studio will be a huge upgrade for you-
I think you will be floored at the difference between the Intel chip and the M1/M2/M4 chip- Its shocking how far Intel has falled with silicon-
Also the current Gen Studio on sale for 1800 bucks is an awesome price. I currently own the M1 Studio and its still blazing fast for anything photo- For editing 8K video, it has some slow downs but that is to be expected.
p.2 #10 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
I’d echo what several people have said, that any Apple silicon Mac will be a huge improvement. For what I regard as normal still photo processing — by which I mean anything other than bulk processing or exports — I find it hard to see why any of the higher core count (CPU or GPU) are really necessary.
I say this based on my experience of having moved from a 2019 i9 16” MacBook Pro to an M3 Max (40 GPU cores) just over a year ago. I was not terribly happy with the 2019 laptop, because of what I felt was poor thermal performance — the fan(s?) would spin up at the least provocation. By contrast, I need to push the M3 quite hard before there’s a sound. Normal photo processing in Lightroom won’t do it.
The reason I chose the M3 Max was not for Lightroom, by the way. I also use it for a bit of AI stuff with Tensorflow (not LLMs) and GPU programming (using Metal, nothing to do with AI). None of this seems to stress it greatly; the performance is so much better than my old Intel Mac Pro (dual D700 GPUs). Running the de-noise feature in Lightroom will take a few tens of seconds, but that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
So, although future-proofing (and plenty of memory) is never a bad thing, there is no need for a top-end M3 or M4 for normal still photo processing, IMHO.
p.2 #11 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
RustyRus wrote:
The Base model Studio will be a huge upgrade for you-
I think you will be floored at the difference between the Intel chip and the M1/M2/M4 chip- Its shocking how far Intel has falled with silicon-
Also the current Gen Studio on sale for 1800 bucks is an awesome price. I currently own the M1 Studio and its still blazing fast for anything photo- For editing 8K video, it has some slow downs but that is to be expected.
Good Luck!
How about 36 GB Memory in Base Mac Studio ? Enough ?
p.2 #12 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
PIOK wrote:
How about 36 GB Memory in Base Mac Studio ? Enough ?
Plenty for photography. I use an M1 Studio with 32 Gb and am very happy with using LR and PS. I’m not one to count 1/10 of a second improvements with faster equipment. Once the computer does not hold me back…I’m fine.
p.2 #13 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
There are plenty of YouTube videos, comparing performance of these machines on RAW files and processing video…as suggested above, most of the differences between any and all of the Apple M processors are maybe 1/10th of a second or similar.
Or if you are batch processing thousands of RAW files at once, you might save a minute total per day going from 16gb ram to 128 gb ram etc. (again, this is using any of the Apple M1, M2, etc machines)
Even doing some pretty heavy video editing and rendering you might save a minute or two over the course of an entire day's work of *heavy* processing / rendering etc.
Anyone looking to spend thousands upgrading should have a look at these results first in my opinion.
p.2 #14 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
PIOK wrote:
How about 36 GB Memory in Base Mac Studio ? Enough ?
I have never needed a single thing more than my base model Mac Studio M1max version. It’s been amazing- Processing large Hasseblad files, 60MP Leica etc. Never needed or wanted more.
I only sort of want to upgrade for video processing of larger 6k/8k raw videos but it’s not really needed. It does pretty well still with them. For photography purposes, the base model will serve you amazing well for years to come.
p.2 #15 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
As I said before I do some video work ( mostly 4k ) on MacBook M1 Pro with 16GB Memory... I am happy with that, but what takes longer is mostly export if I add some extras to the video
Maybe I should try to work with 100 - 45MP RAW Files and compare to my old iMac. This could give me idea if I need more than 36 GB of Memory
p.2 #16 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
For anyone that has a Mac and is thinking of upgrading, I’d encourage the use of Activity Monitor (part of OSX), Mac-stats (free), or iStats menus (14 day free trial) to monitor system performance during your workday. I use iStats, as it’ll keep history for up to 28 days - so you can simply work as normal, and retroactively review your CPU, memory and swap usage. Similarly, when you buy a new Mac, you can use the 14-day trial period to profile your usage.
What you’re going to find is that for photography purposes, few if any applications (Lightroom, DXO, C1, ON1, etc) are optimized such that they actually saturate CPU, GPU, and memory. The “artisright” YouTube channel [https://m.youtube.com/@ArtIsRight/videos] has a lot of good photography and video editing tests, many of which compare M4 Mac Mini base/pro -> M2 studio Max & Ultra -> M4 MacBook Pro. In those tests he’s pretty clear that Lightroom certainly isn’t optimized to take advantage of all the GPU cores on offer.
I profiled my M4 Mac Mini pro while batch editing of a few dozen A7RV files, and using the most expensive DXO noise reduction. Suffice to say that the system wasn’t close to being stressed: memory pressure never exceeded 15%, zero swap used, sustained CPU use maxed out at 25-30% (with occasional 1-second spikes as denoise spun-up).
NOTE: if you’re working on video, the Mac Studio Max/Ultra’s extra video encoding engines and GPU cores will significantly decrease your export times.
p.2 #17 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
The M3 Ultra seems to be designed primarily for one purpose: running relatively large LLMs locally. This is because it can now be configured with 512Gb of which probably up to 384GB can be addressed directly by the GPU. For pure GPU performance, PCs with dedicated GPUs will be ahead but they will not have enough ram for large LLMs.
The lower single core performance compared to the M4 Max is probably going to hurt performance for what most users do most of the time.
p.2 #18 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
mike_the_kraken wrote:
For anyone that has a Mac and is thinking of upgrading, I’d encourage the use of Activity Monitor (part of OSX), Mac-stats (free), or iStats menus (14 day free trial) to monitor system performance during your workday. I use iStats, as it’ll keep history for up to 28 days - so you can simply work as normal, and retroactively review your CPU, memory and swap usage. Similarly, when you buy a new Mac, you can use the 14-day trial period to profile your usage.
What you’re going to find is that for photography purposes, few if any applications (Lightroom, DXO, C1, ON1, etc) are optimized such that they actually saturate CPU, GPU, and memory. The “artisright” YouTube channel [https://m.youtube.com/@ArtIsRight/videos] has a lot of good photography and video editing tests, many of which compare M4 Mac Mini base/pro -> M2 studio Max & Ultra -> M4 MacBook Pro. In those tests he’s pretty clear that Lightroom certainly isn’t optimized to take advantage of all the GPU cores on offer.
I profiled my M4 Mac Mini pro while batch editing of a few dozen A7RV files, and using the most expensive DXO noise reduction. Suffice to say that the system wasn’t close to being stressed: memory pressure never exceeded 15%, zero swap used, sustained CPU use maxed out at 25-30% (with occasional 1-second spikes as denoise spun-up).
NOTE: if you’re working on video, the Mac Studio Max/Ultra’s extra video encoding engines and GPU cores will significantly decrease your export times. ...Show more →
This is in line with my recent understanding that the mini M4 is, at least when it comes to photography applications, on about the same functional performance level as the Studio. You might (or might not) measure slightly higher specification is, but you aren’t going to see any meaningful difference in real world performance on typical photography applications.
(All bets are off if you do high-end, intensive video work.)
I just got the mini M4 Pro, and it is handling my Photoshop/ACR/Bridge workflow with aplomb.
p.2 #19 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
gdanmitchell wrote:
This is in line with my recent understanding that the mini M4 is, at least when it comes to photography applications, on about the same functional performance level as the Studio. You might (or might not) measure slightly higher specification is, but you aren’t going to see any meaningful difference in real world performance on typical photography applications.
(All bets are off if you do high-end, intensive video work.)
I just got the mini M4 Pro, and it is handling my Photoshop/ACR/Bridge workflow with aplomb.
Basically this was my line of thought coming off the M2 studio and going to the Mini M4 Pro model. I don't do video so that helped but my only real worry was Processing in C1 which is more processor GPU heavy than Ram and I did slow down a touch but at acceptable levels so I saved a bunch doing it and for me it was a travel weight and bulk thing and im very very happy with my M4 Mini Pro. Now I process sometimes at 3k images at once so that was important . I use C1/InDesign/PS and Bridge as my most used apps.
p.2 #20 · New Apple Studio Machines-Which one for LR/Photoshop with Sony A7RV?
GMPhotography wrote:
Basically this was my line of thought coming off the M2 studio and going to the Mini M4 Pro model. I don't do video so that helped but my only real worry was Processing in C1 which is more processor GPU heavy than Ram and I did slow down a touch but at acceptable levels so I saved a bunch doing it and for me it was a travel weight and bulk thing and im very very happy with my M4 Mini Pro. Now I process sometimes at 3k images at once so that was important . I use C1/InDesign/PS and Bridge as my most used apps. ...Show more →
None of you mention what MacMini M4 Pro you are using?
Memory...?
CPU ?
When I check upgrade of Mac Mini M4 PRO is only like $300 less than studio ( no way I will give up all ports and thermals for such low difference ) Studio looks better to me
