However, some more advanced power supplies have what they call a zero RPM mode — they don't even need to spin the PSU fan(s) until the load reaches some percentage of total output. With Photo Mechanic you open your folder of RAW files then browse through them and tap a key to tag (select) any shot you want to end up importing into Lightroom. 2020. I don't like Quick Access taking up space in the File Explorer sidepane. I began researching air cooling options for my 9900K. Photography Workflow - Year-End Activities, Integrating JPEGmini Pro to Lightroom Workflow, Lightroom 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and CC Performance Comparison, Tips for Photographing the Great Conjunction. I've been running these two SSDs half a year so far and have only put about 8TB of writes between both drives. Here is how you can build a powerful PC for Photography Needs: We will go through the above steps in the next pages, depending on the type of PC build you want to make. In a worst case scenario a bad PSU could damage or even kill some of your components. Then there's insanely fast HMB2 VRAM. My large desktop computer tower was my first target. Adobe's recent upgrade to Lightroom Classic CC brought some performance improvements, largely related to increased multi-core performance for generating previews. After some research I discovered two things: Lightroom has no support for a dual card SLI setup. While I was initially concerned this case might be a bit larger than I wanted, I ended up being rather pleased with it, especially the mostly black/gray theme with the internals. These corrections can also be done first if desired. Adobe software seems to be more optimized for Nvidia graphics cards. In the case of 3200MHz DDR4 RAM this is 3.2 billion cycles per second. You definitely don't need a top of the line card for Lightroom but if you're going to get one anyways you'll want to learn towards an Nvidia card. Sometimes I'll spend the most time leveling a shot and finding a good crop. Corsair recently released a newer version called the H115i PRO RGB but the main differences seem to be a pump head with RGB LED lights and mag lev fans that aim to be quieter (which I will probably order separately and swap out my current fans). But I'm using it less and less these days. They are mostly ones that can benefit from more cores and to varying degrees.49 Despite the difference in NAND types used between the 960 PRO and 960 EVO, the performance isn't too dissimilar (likely thanks to the EVO's great use of SLC caching): 960 PRO — 3,500 MB/s seq. Both of these just make it easier to setup your RAM so you don't have to do it manually. I really can't understate the magnitude of this. If you need a bit more control there's also Virtual Desktop Enhancer and Peach. But that's not really my thing. The bigger the screen, the bigger the win. On lower resolution displays I've heard that having GPU acceleration enabled can actually hurt performance as your computer spends time sending data between the CPU and GPU that the CPU could have just done on its own in a shorter amount of time. And if you do end up needing some help, I am sure you can find someone in your family who can give you a hand. Just something to hold me over for a year or two until a great 5K display came out. Performance of workloads optimized for Intel AVX instructions can be signifcantly greater than workloads that do not use Intel AVX instructions even when the processor is operating at a slightly lower frequency. When I talk about Lightroom being efficent or not efficient with multiple cores, you can see the difference in the CPU usage in task manager between the two tasks. They let you pick exactly what color paracord is used for each pin on the cable, but I opted for the same gray pattern on all of them. I was excited to build another SFF PC. That refers to the length of the card: 22mm wide and either 42mm or 80mm long. At times I will jump directly to the Tone Curve but I often really only go there to tweak one or two RGB curves a bit, not everything at once. 13 And then the ridiculous $3,000 Nvidia Titan V based on the Volta GV100 architecture was released with even better performance, though aimed more at the AI and machine learning developer crowd than the gaming crowd. There's also the whole single vs multiple 12V rail discussion to be had if you're really curious. Under complete 100% load like with a benchmark or Premiere Pro rendering a video, loads it could reach up to 72°C. You can follow him on Instagram and Facebook. For this build, I decided to go with the Z390 chipset, paired with the Intel Core i9 … So imagine booting up your operating system in a matter of seconds and using that extreme performance for cashing and other read/write-intensive operations. But I'll pass on that. I have been interested in photography for over a decade but didn't really start taking it seriously until I built out my photoblog and started crafting photosets of trips. Finally, here's the finished computer and desk setup! Also, if I were to upgrade my processor and motherboard down the line, the new motherboard may not recognize the array. Increase Camera Raw cache to 20GB or more: As instructed by Adobe in their optimization guide. The first thing I do with any new Lightroom installation is move the catalog to my Dropbox folder. 33 If you're really, really hardcore you can even run the processor entirely without an IHS. Otherwise, you're better off with fewer cores with a very high clock speed. When I'm done editing a photoset I just drag the local folder to the NAS network drive inside the Lightroom Library module. This should give me solid headroom to overclock the RAM past 3200MHz and still have a low CL even if I have to loosen it up a bit. To change these defaults, go to the Develop module and change any settings on a particular photo that you would like to have as the new default for every photo from that camera. It’s unclear as to what exactly Lightroom … For example, I think on my earliest 7700K benchmarks, I didn't wait long enough after import to start building previews and Lightroom was automatically applying my default camera profile corrections at the same time. If my New Zealand trip exceeded 800GB I can't imagine how many more SD cards I'd have to carry along if I had RAW+JPEG enabled.51. PCPartPicker.com is one relatively new resource that I have found to be invaluable. I started ordering parts here and there, slowly accumulating everything over a week or two. My personal preference is to store current year photos (the ones I actively edit) in SSD storage and move everything else to slower, network-based Synology DS1819+ (see my detailed review of the DS1817+), which is absolutely amazing as a home server. The thing that speeds up my workflow more than anything is not presets, but actually just a quick way to copy and paste develop settings with shortcut keys. Back in the day a corrupt BIOS flash would have just meant a dead board. Currently there are a few levels: DisplayHDR 400, 600 and 1000. Nothing is really holding me to macOS on the desktop. For some reason I was unable to get it to work just by using the scan code number for the original keys. So that leaves us where we started last year when I wrote this article: building a custom Windows 10 PC is a fantastic option for those desiring more power and the ability to continually and easily update the performance and capabilities of their computer as they see fit. And well, it's really not possible to find really fast, low latency RAM in anything larger than 16GB sticks; even that is a challenge. This PC also does exceedingly well at 4K and VR gaming which I was going to talk about in this post but decided to leave out. These systems are easy to use, as long as your case is large enough to support the radiator size you want. To do the latter I have to install a separate indexing service called Everything. To solve this I only installed the SSD under the heatsink first and would install the other one after I had Windows up and running. Yes, you can get way more colors with a 10-bit setup: 1.07B compared to 16.7M for 8-bit. Modern high-end computer cases actually use real glass instead of scratch-prone and flimsy lucite or plexiglass. You can create and set different profiles that determine what speed the radiator fans and pump should be running at for each temperature range. 2020 WCG "wide color gamut" standard for UHD content that is legitimately a massively wide gamut that no consumer display comes close to these days... yes, all of this is confusing as heck. This ensures that dual-channel mode will be activated. And these embedded previews that come straight from the RAW won't look like the processed previews in Lightroom though as they did not go through Adobe Camera Raw. And if you want to see new features being tested, you can easily sign up for Windows 10 Insider Preview builds. Configure keyboard to control monitor brightness using AutoHotkey: I got the monitor brightness buttons on my Mac keyboard working. I have also become accustomed to modifying the time and date display in Windows by using T-Clock Redux. With the main components installed it was time to connect the remaining power cables, attach the front panel LED and power switch cables, the front panel USB cable as well as a micro-USB cable for the Corsair AIO pump.35 Before talking about our 4K system, let’s talk about a potential starting point. 2100) and UHDTV 8K televisions. The most stressful part of the build was now out of the way. Global non-detail corrections, such as Exposure and White Balance. It's like what happens when you move your cursor above an inactive Google Chrome tab. I have not had any issues after setting it up the one time. I do recognize that there is tremendous value in only having a quick preview functionality and I'll keep tinkering to try to change or improve my workflow with it in some way. Building a Lightroom PC Why I switched to Windows and built a water-cooled 5.2GHz 6-core editing machine If there's one thing that will make even the most powerful computer feel like a 7 year old rig, it's Adobe Lightroom … Cortana is Microsoft's "truly personal digital assistant." Typically PSUs tend to be the least efficient at very high and very low loads. Given their exorbitant costs, it's definitely not worth the hassle in my opinion for an extremely negligible performance increase. I had to pick out which of the many different models I wanted. It's all just a hassle right now. I could care less about LED fans, weird intake designs and other questionable aesthetic choices. At some point, desktop processors began shipping with thermal paste instead of solder to connect the CPU die to the IHS. There are two primary factors to weigh up when selecting a new CPU: the number of cores on the single CPU (two physical CPU’s don’t help much) and it’s clock speed.Lightroom makes good use of multiple cores for image processing tasks such as building previews, working in the Develop module, and exporting photos, so it’s worth selecting a quad-core processor if possible, even though other areas of the program ar… Efficient: Again, fairly common these days to find PSUs with the 80 Plus efficiency designation, of which there are now a bunch of tiers: bronze, silver, gold, platinum and titanium. As for why I wanted two — more on that in the section below. After saving the settings I changed, I put in the Windows 10 USB stick and rebooted to the installer. I also ran the Premiere Pro PPBM H.264 encoding benchmark. So cramped. That's almost double the price of the CPU. Yes, it's a tiny portable speaker that I'm using for my desktop computer. Beginners tend to be confused about the difference between Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. This is a long blog post. I even remember when the beta of the first version came out in 2006! Cable sleeving and velcro ties for taming PC cables under the desk. Material was the first aspect of Fluent design that I noticed in parts of the current Windows 10 release. And not in some slow VM. 6 Enabling Profile Corrections has an impact on performance so it is advised to do this step last. Whatever, I'm fine with that. It has the zero RPM fan mode I was talking about, is fully modular and has an 80 Plus Platinum rating. I had heard so much about the crazy performance of these tiny new PCIe NVMe M.2 SSDs that I had to try one. In the past you sort of had to wing it when it came to picking parts for your build. I nudged it a bit higher to 3333 with 1.4V and it stayed stable.As explained in the memory section of this post earlier, you want low timings at a fast clock. Second, maybe I'm doing something wrong but the times on the Macs were faster than I was expecting. Chocolately is like the Homebrew package manager on macOS or apt on Ubuntu. Fluent design sounds exciting but it'll take some time to see what the fully realized vision will do for Windows 10. Facets of light can also already be seen, mostly in the hover states for various elements with reveal highlight. Remove the Recycle Bin from the desktop: I prefer to have a clean desktop. Although AMD has some interesting stuff coming out soon with their 7nm 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X chip, Lightroom is still historically most performant with Intel processors (but I am eager to see how it performs once they get released) and has diminishing returns with more than 8 cores nowadays except for certain tasks (exporting) which aren't a priority for me. to do a quick runthrough of the settings. Here's more on the topic if you're interested. And like designing4 I also find it way slower than 7-Zip. If I was going to use it in a RAID array, I'd get several of the WD Red Pro or Seagate IronWolf Pro drives (they have NAS/RAID specific features like TLER). I picked for one of the larger ones: the Corsair H115i has dual 140mm fans for its 280mm radiator. 17 In the section earlier in the post where I talked about why it's a good time to build a PC, well extremely high RAM prices is definitely one counterpoint. Second, Sensei enables easier searching by automatically tagging photos with keywords. Depending on the photo I may use something like Camera Landscape for more contrast and color but often find it too saturated and have to manually compensate for that. It was dubbed the "world's smallest gaming tower" at roughly the size of a shoebox. And these things are so fast already, I'm not sure I'd see a huge real world performance gain for the added risk. I've given other applications a shot but always come back to Lightroom. Nasim Mansurov is the author and founder of Photography Life, based out of Denver, Colorado. It's among the highest frequency and lowest latency RAM you can find.21 It's a basic Spotlight/Alfred equivalent for Windows. (I talk more about how Turbo Boost works later in this article). If the computer decides two cores should be boosted, then they are each at 4.6GHz. Just make sure you're getting a PSU with enough connections (and wattage) to support the number of devices you need to power inside your case.22. First off, I absolutely love the size of this case, even with the additional tophat. Increasingly less and less (more on that below), but there's still quite a few tasks from culling to pick the best shots out of hundreds or thousands all the way to numerous adjustments made individually on each photo. Ones that can justify the minimum business expense of at least $11,000 for a base model Mac Pro and display. You know where your Lightroom catalog would live…. Unfortunately, RAM prices are so high these days17 Have watched all the YouTube videos I could find and I came up with the below build… I was definitely spoiled coming from a 5K iMac. I was going to breakdown a list of all the current 5K monitors on the market and what was not good about each of them but I'll spare you the details.. Adjust the editing controls to get a look that you like. There are a few gotchas associated with this WSL setup. That roughly refers to how much bandwidth (each lane equates to 4 physical wires — two to send, two to receive) a particular device may require. to paste. It's for these reasons—easy firmware updates, ability to set over-provisioning and TRIM support—that I opted to not use my two 1TB 960 EVO SSDs in a RAID array. I also don't quite care enough to embed file-size-increasing ICC color profiles and save different versions of my files and serve up an sRGB version or a wide-gamut version depending on the device.23 That is not something I care about as it happens so infrequently compared to me fiddling with sliders in Develop. After Windows finished installing I went back to install the second M.2 SSD and then go back into the BIOS to ensure it was running at PCIe x4 speed (the default was x2). That would let me select a photo in Photo Mechanic, see it appear in Lightroom and then tinker with Develop settings or further zoom into the photo if it's one of those shots where I'm not sure I want to keep it yet. Enjoy! I simply don't like using presets as one-click-and-done filters. When I wrote this post, the new Apple Mac Pro was purely rumor and had not been announced. Nondestructive edits, sliders & filters make better photos online-simply. Previously, PCIe-attached SSDs had their own custom way to talk to the chipset and that lead to requiring custom drivers. Even with that, it's still very early for Lightroom GPU hardware acceleration and it leaves much to be desired. It's super easy to get started and there are a ton of plugins and themes. I wanted two low latency matched 16GB ram sticks for for a total of 32GB. This does also apply to the 8700K. Beyond these benchmarks I found a massive responsiveness increase in filmstrip browsing and navigating from photo to photo in the Library module (the same increased in Develop module a bit as well) and a noticeable performance bump when using the adjustment brush in the Develop module. If you're familiar with Lightroom you probably know about the different modules of the app. One thing I have discovered since writing this post is Windows 10 Debloater. Better to get CL14 RAM and run it at CL15 or CL16 when overclocked much higher, than get CL16 RAM at the same speed but only be able to get it to work overclocked at CL18 or higher. Taking a quick look at this chart from CPU Benchmark reveals that Intel has been dominating the performance benchmarks for a while now. Even if I were to purchase a new high-end Mac, you just can't get the best graphics card on the market (even with the new iMac Pro2 The build cost him just under $6,000, and he explained exactly … In addition it is a 10-bit panel, has HDR10 support and a ridiculous peak brightness of up to 1000 nits. While neither are perfectly using all of the CPU, exporting images is much more efficient. And on that note, why should you have a case with unsightly internal and external drive bays you may never use? Since I initially built this machine with a quad-core Intel 7700K and Asus Maximus IX Code motherboard before upgrading to the 8700K, I also ran the benchmarks on that rig. And as I had mentioned earlier, Lightroom and other Adobe applications I use frequently are more optimized for Nvidia cards at this time.13. Fortunately, overclocking is much easier than it was in the past. CAS latency (CL) does not represent a time value. This setting can be found in Settings → System → About. It has been around for ages, I'd imagine there is quite a bit of code cruft that Adobe would love to refactor and rethink. But yes in general any kind of UI scaling that is not 100% or 200% is generally bad news and has the potential to lead to blurry pixels. There are processors with more cores — from both Intel and AMD — but I don't think they would be better for what's important to me: Lightroom and gaming. It can do a bit more than that with various plugins you can configure. I followed these steps to only install the keyboard-specific software. I mainly use it to copy and paste develop settings across photos quickly: I just tap , to copy develop settings on a photo and . Not to mention the extra heat created with 4 sticks crammed right next to each other. Then I took one of the two 1TB Samsung 960 Evos from my last build for a combined 3TB of storage. Even with that setup the Lightroom performance difference is fairly indistinguisable. . This takes a long time but I don't care as much compared to speed in the Develop module; I use the opportunity to take a break and do something else while the computer works. Graduated filter rarely gets used anymore, but in the past I liked placing it above the horizon to make the top of the sky a bit darker, reduce highlights, boost contrast and clarity to make clouds pop. In fact, the one I went with was the lowest end model of this high-end ASUS ROG Maximus line that caters to the gaming and overclocking crowd.12. I would recommend putting your photos in a separate volume. 1 Which is still a bit overkill for what I use it for. I have some mixed feelings about the Start Menu though.37 Some thoughts on these numbers: first off, the import numbers are kind of cheating. I hated that even the newest models were typically behind Intel's release schedule and you couldn't get the absolute latest and greatest hardware, much less be able to overclock them a bit for even more performance. Graphics cards like this one are very heavy — especially this one with a larger than average heatsink — and have two bulky 8-pin power cables adding even more weight. It's exceedingly unlikely that the Mac Pro will find its way into many households, but rather fit in at creative agencies that will put it to work for advanced video editing and rendering. It can also map keys to some other functions. So yes, the comparable all core Turbo Boost speed of the 8700K is slightly slower than the 7700K chip. You may also see the latency listed as a CAS latency or CL value, that simply refers to the first and most important number for us of those four timing numbers. But the one thing I knew would be an issue: so-called GPU sag. There are also some interesting "Nano IPS" displays coming out from LG this year that also have Nvidia G-Sync and a great 98% P3 color space coverage. Fully-modular PSUs Why should a computer with a million internal drives and accessories have the same number of power supply cables as a basic setup with just one SSD? Adobe Creative Cloud: Lightroom Classic CC, Premiere Pro CC, Photoshop CC. The HEDT line is actually based on a new variant of two older microarchitectures (Skylake and Kaby Lake) but now denoted with -X to specify a new X299 chipset (named Basin Falls) instead of an older Z-based chipset.. And I already lost you.One thing to note is that we're on the 3rd generation of Intel desktop processors using a 14nm process, each with rather incremental improvements. They're still based on a 14nm process but Intel now has 8 core chips based on Coffee Lake using a newer Z390 chipset. I have been using wired Logitech mice for about a decade... but I recently switched to a Logitech MX Master 2S. 7-Zip lets me right-click on any compressed archive and extract right in place. 18 In a Ryzen rig there is something called Infinity Fabric (I swear I'm not making this up) that is like an interconnect between a set of CPU cores (which they call CCX) tied to the same frequency as the memory controller. That means that if you edited and converted your photo to sRGB, it should look close to how you intended on the vast majority of devices. You can run now Linux on Windows! In addition, I benchmarked each without an overclock and with. Definitely not as easy as turning on a Mac for the first time, but not difficult. I ended up with this triple fan ASUS model that also featured a huge heatsink requiring a 2.5-slot height. That's not the Lightroom Classic CC I've been referring to in this article. To get the absolute latency we plug it into this: 1/(data rate/2) * CAS latency. But it's a marked improvement. (Case panels and top shroud hat not attached)Watercooled delidded i7 9900kRTX 2080 Ti2TB 970 Evo ssd1TB 960 Evo ssd32GB ram pic.twitter.com/DVw7O1adoV. The Kaby Lake overclocking guide: Yea I know this is not a Coffee Lake guide for an 8700K but it's a thorough guide written by ASUS themselves that is a fantastic primer for navigating around the UEFI BIOS on ASUS Maximus boards and more. Then there's my desire for some basic editing functionality during culling just to see if a shot is worth keeping. And as a minor point, I was looking for RAM that would feel more at home in my mostly black PC and wasn't some obnoxious bright color. Try it for free! I was not concerned with lifespan as I would likely upgrade long before I saw any diminishing performance. That would be 1/(1333MHz) * 14 = 10.5 nanoseconds to complete an operation requested by the CPU. 2 Even the iMac Pro's Radeon Vega 64 doesn't compare to the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti (86.4 GPixels/s vs 1080 Ti's 139.2 GPixels/s and other such metrics) and definitely not the ultra high-end Titan Xp and Titan V. 3 Looking at the Aurora HDR site now, I can definitely tell they have toned it down a tad. First, the "auto" button now takes the shot into account and tries to find ideal settings for it compared to other shots.52 Unfortunately, Lightroom is still mostly dependent on the power of the processor, so it’s best to go for a quad-core Intel Core i7, if possible. For example, viewing a photo in the native Windows 10 photos app looks incorrect (at the time I wrote this article). I managed to place it at the very end which doesn't provide the best support. But if DCI-P3 was originally intended for the cinema, why should we care about it and why did Apple even push forward with it for their hardware? However, I'm currently testing out Notion which has a web support and a Windows 10 app. The cables are customized not only to the case but also the motherboard and graphics card to ensure optimal length, but also orientation: even in an individual cable, some wires are shorter than others to help promote a natural cable bend. This makes cable management much, much easier. Even then the fan only speeds up incrementally as needed. Apple is seemingly ahead of the game here (well, it's debated if P3 is good move for consumers). Yes, I switched to Windows. Just press CTRL (windows) or Cmd (mac) + Shift + H when you have a few stacks selected. There are way more options for GTX 1080 Ti cards at the time of publishing compared to when I started building this PC; for the most part look for anything with a huge cooler and you should be good. While I did benchmark these tasks, they're not really the type of task I was aiming to optimize with this build, so showing these results is a bit moot.