Processing Large Files

[Jp_508]

I shoot with a Sony A7II 24mp & considering purchasing the A7RII 42mp. Here in lies my dilemma, when I process images from my A7II 24 MP 6000 x 4000 in raw my pc handles the adjustments very well, pretty much instantly in Lr & Ps when sliders are adjusted but if I jump to a larger 42 MP 7952x5304 image will I notice a drastic slower / lagging in adjustments when sliders are moved? I would hate to give up my instant adjustments in slider movements & quicker processing time for a bit more mega pixels. I just completed a pc build & pretty much at the top of what it can do without overclocking. Yes I'm sure if I overclocked it could be quicker but at a cost, like it to stay where it is, its quick & handles everything very nicely without shortening the life expectancy of my pc. Here are my pc specs:

Case: Phantek Enthoo Evolv ATX Glass

Power Supply: EVGA Supernova 750 G2, 750 watts

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z170X-UD5 (rev. 1.0) LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI, SATA 6Gb’s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel

CPU: Intel i7-6700K Unlocked

Cooler: Corsair H100i v2

Case Fans: 3 - 140's (Phantek) comes with the case

GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 1060

RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4, 32GB’s 2666Mhz, 2x16GB

SSD: Samsung V-NAND SSD 950 PRO M.2 NVM Express, 512GB

I would appreciate any input on this to help me make a decision. Thanks for reading....jp

[dj_paige]

What size (in pixels) is your monitor?

Are you doing a lot of brushing and/or spot healing on each photo?

[Jp_508]

My monitor is a Asus PB279Q 27" 4K/UHD 38 x 2160 IPS Display Port HDMI

And yes I do a lot of brushing, spot healing , & blending layers, at times 3 to 4 layers to complete a final image.

[dj_paige]

And also, when you are experiencing this lag in the sliders, is the GPU acceleration turned on, or turned off? (Go to Preferences, click on Performance, and is the "Use Graphics Processor" box checked or unchecked?)

[Jp_508]

I think you misread my original post, I wasn't having any problems, I was looking for advise, if my processing & rendering speed would be affected if I went to a larger mega pixel camera, would my pc be able to handle the larger files just as quickly as it does now with my 24mp A7II, that's why I included my pc specs. And yes my GPU acceleration is on. My performance at the present time is really good, just concerned that if I do jump to the A7RII & larger file sizes Lr & Ps might not be as quick to render results as it does now with my A7II 24mp, if it doesn't I have to ask myself is it worth it for a few more mega pixels & slower rendering / processing speeds. It's a large purchase dollar wise & don't want to regret it if I wind up with slower rendering / processing speeds.

[Bill Sprague]

I learned something new about Lightroom a few weeks ago.  I could combine files into a huge file.   I shot a landscape three across and three down with plenty of overlap. 

The hand held shot patten was like this:

1  2  3

4  5  6

7  8  9

Lightroom merged them into a huge DNG file.  It had no problem with the editing of the new, huge file. 

You could try this and do your own testing of a big file. 

[Jp_508]

Thanks for your input, much appreciated.

[johnrellis]

My performance at the present time is really good, just concerned that if I do jump to the A7RII & larger file sizes Lr & Ps might not be as quick to render results as it does now with my A7II 24mp

Many people get good performance from LR, some don't, and the causes of poor interactive performance aren't precisely understood.  (Some culprits: particular graphics cards and firmware, CPUs with more than 4 cores / 8 logical processors). 

You'll get the most authoritative answer by downloading and trying sample raws from dpreview.com or similar sites: Sample galleries: Digital Photography Review

[Jp_508]

Thanks for your response I will try that today. I had another comment that was similar with a website but they were jpg images and that's not going to do me any good, they were large dimension wise but because they were jpg & file size was only around 12mb. My file sizes in raw are 22mb now & I already know how that does in Lr. I'm looking for 3-4 images, raw, 36-42 mp, do a little post on each in Lr then open in Ps layers, do a little blending then re-import in Lr. I need to see how everything performs, if there is any lag at all when it comes to slider adjustments I'm opting out of the larger mega pixel camera & stay where I am with my 24mp A7II. Just built a new photo editing pc to get around the lag issue with my last one.

[Todd Shaner]

I recently ran a similar experiment on my well performing i7-860 system with Canon 5D MKII (21 Mp) raw image files and some downloaded 5D MKIV (50 Mp) raw image files. I was surprised to see very little difference in the Basic panel slider response. What I did find is that with 'Use Graphics Processor' enabled the Basic panel controls were slightly smoother, but the Local controls (Adjustment Brush, etc.) and Noise Reduction panel controls were noticeably slower. This is with a 2560x1440 display and modest Quadro 600 graphics card, which is very usable. YMMV with a different CPU, GPU and display resolution.

[Jp_508]

I did a test by downloading a 42 mb raw file, making adjustments & it worked just fine with no lag what-so-ever in Lr. I even combined 3 images and merged in Lr using hdr, made adjustments with no issues. After that made adjustments to 4 - 42mb images in Lr, imported into Ps using layers & making adjustments in Camera Raw & it was instant, no lags at all. I love what I put together for a photo editing pc, its just plain awesome. Now I know I can process larger image files at lightning speed. I can now consider purchasing a camera with larger mega byte files.

[Todd Shaner]

Good to hear! Processors with 6 or more cores currently have performance issues with LR so the 4.0 Ghz i7-6700K quad-core is a good choice. Just out of curiosity what differences do you see with 'Use Graphics Processor' checked and unchecked in LR Preferences?

[loubolb2]

I shoot with a 5DS at 50mp and sort through hundreds of photos and process dozens a day.  Lightroom for me, is horribly slow.  I work at a large CPU company and have multiple very high end PC's and nothing really speeds it up.  I work with many engineers and they actively use me to as an example to try and speed up Lightroom in hopes of using it as a performance demo.  At this time my fastest system is a Kaby Lake (latest Intel CPU) running 3 NVMe drives (about 10X faster then SSD) and an Nvidia 1070 video card.  There is NO noticeable increase in performance with these hard drives vs SSD drives in Lightroom.  Looking at perf monitors while running Lightroom shows that it is almost 100% CPU based.  The only solution I have found is to build minimal previews and smart previews and wait for those to complete (can be over an hour with CPU and 100%), then close Lightroom once it's done with previews, relaunch it and then start sorting and processing.  If I don't have time, or don't feel like waiting for previews, trying to process photos while building previews is not a pleasant experience.  Screen blacking out, waiting up to a minute for the crop tool to launch after pressing the button or waiting a minute to see a exposure change, its infuriating and to be honest I'm not sure why i continue to use Lightroom. 

[JP Hess]

Lightroom seems to be so unpredictable. I have this four year old PC that I have upgraded to Windows 10, it has 8 GB RAM, no video card (just onboard graphics). I play around with panorama images quite a bit. I use a 24 MP camera. I have one panorama that I have been experimenting with that is three tiers, total of 15 images, 123 MP. It took about 3 min. for the computer to stitch the image. But about the only slow down I experience is if I try to zoom in to 100%. The computer will stall for a bit. But as far as editing is concerned I can move along at normal speed.

[dj_paige]

There is NO noticeable increase in performance with these hard drives vs SSD drives in Lightroom

As I understand things, this is the proper result. Lightroom is very insensitive to disk speed, fast disks and slow disks take pretty much the same time in most Lightroom tasks because the real work is done by the CPU (and GPU).

[johnrellis]

Lightroom is very insensitive to disk speed, fast disks

Agreed.  With typical machines having 16 GB of memory or more, the SQLite database technology combined with OS X or Windows is very effective at caching the database file (typically a few gigabytes or smaller) in main memory.

[Jp_508]

Wow I'm surprised at how slow it is for you. I process anywhere from 150 - 300 images at a time without any problem. I am shocked at how quick it is. All my adjustments are instant in Lr & Ps, as soon as I move the slider it changes, no delay at all. My daughter does real estate photography & has an apple, she has anywhere from a 1 - 2.5 sec delay in her adjustments, she hates it but has had to deal with it.  I flag all the images I want to export usually around 50 - 60 and then export all to a file folder at the same time. They are large raw files that start out at 6000 x 4000 23mb & export to jpg at 3000 x 2000 & anywhere from 2mb to 7mb depending on the image, its pretty quick. I couldn't be happier with my Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2 NVM Express 512GB, I think I found the perfect balance for performance. It eats up any type of Lr & Ps processing. I have a friend who is a computer guy & he was taken back a bit how quick it was. I downloaded some full size A7RII images (42mb ea) and processed in Lr then blended layers in Ps & the performance was the same, actually a bit quicker it seemed. I think I was using all the cores more efficiently by loading them up, it really did seem faster then usual. I've read reviews saying that more cores isn't the answer to faster pc's, its how much the corers you have are being used. If you load it up it works better then not fully using them. This was my first pc build so I did lots of reading (months) before I put it together, money down the drain if it doesn't come together, have around $2,000 total invested.

[Todd Shaner]

jerryp97433002, thank you for the update on your performance. What's interesting is that another user with a system very similar to yours is NOT seeing good performance with LR 2015.10.

LR CC VERY slow on hi-end PC

We were able to get his system from extremely slow to "normal" slow, but usable. After an editing session on 1,300 image files it reverted back to very slow.

Re: LR CC VERY slow on hi-end PC

well, this didn't last long.

Just finished a job. imported 1300 new images. And LR is bag to it's useless slowness. culling these images will take a while ...

[Jp_508]

I've never done anywhere near 1300 photos at one time, maybe that's why I don't have an issue. I'm always around 400 at most & the average is about 250 a shoot. I've heard this about Lr but guess I'm falling into their sweet spot. I once did a shoot on a high end property & took the most images ever, 595. The first 50 went ok but did start to notice a slow down so I exited the program then opened it again & it was back to normal, had to do this about 3 times throughout the develop process. I thought at the time it was due to processing images as hdr putting a load on the program, don't make a habit of it & its not my go to workflow but at times its the best way depending on the lighting, have developed the skills to make an interior shot look realistic & not some color saturated burnt image. I know Lr says its the best cataloging system but read reviews awhile back (approx 1 1/2 yrs ago) that said the more files you load up on the catalog the slower Lr becomes. After reading that I decided to create a catalog for every shoot instead. Each job has its own file folder and contains a folder for the raw images, developed images, Lr catalog, & invoice. When finished I move the file to a hard drive mass storage. If I ever need to move a job folder it all goes together, I usually keep the file for about a year anyway then trash it. I am kinda surprised to hear that the same issue exists & hasn't been addressed by adobe. I'm sure there are plenty of people out the with the same issue. I was considering Capture One Pro 10 (for Sony) as something new to go along with Lr, just not up to the challenge for a new learning curve, going through that with Ps at the moment, one learning curve at a time is enough. Heard anything + or - on that program? So far I've been very happy with Lr & Ps meeting my needs. 

[loubolb2]

I just created a new catalog, cleared my cache and turned back on GPU processing.  Here is an example of my daily issues with Lightroom.  The workflow was: Dump card to local drive, import photos in their existing location to light room (108 i think), apply generic preset to imported photos and process. Photos are 50mp cr2 files straight from a 5DS.  I added some text to video to indicate when I clicked and how long it took to actually do what I clicked.

[Jp_508]

Wow that is a terrible lag problem you're dealing with. Had that same problem a year ago with my old pc (Dell XPS-8700), except it affected every function including opening up files. I had a software update that didn't work well with my driver, it was under warranty so I let Dell sign on & fix it. They downloaded and installed a chip set, problem solved. As for your problem if the pc works fine & its just Lr I'm at a loss. Sounds like you've tried everything I would do. The only thing I can see is a virus possibly or a plug-in that is affecting Lr. Plug ins are great but they don't always work as advertised. Last week I downloaded Nik Collection to use as a plug in, it gave me all kinds of problems. I opened an image in Lr then the plug in, didn't seem to work as the YT video I watched & followed along with, I exited out & shut down my pc, the next day I opened Lr to do some editing & exported a few images into Ps, now I have the dialog box you get in Lr when you go to click on a plug in on my Ps screen & it wouldn't go away no matter what I did, right in the middle of the screen. I exited Ps & Lr & tried it again...the same problem, dialog box on the screen again. I uninstalled Nik & problem solved, downloaded it again & it still happened. Uninstalled Nik & will never do that again. But it worked on my Dell XPS-8700 just fine, the only difference was I purchased the Lr Disk a few yrs back before Adobe went with the monthly subscription. Give it some thought if you are using any plug ins. Now that I think about it if you've purchased any presets or installed from another pc maybe something there. You wouldn't think there could be a problem but I ran into a different issue with Nik. Wish I could be more help.

[Todd Shaner]

jerryp97433002 said:

I know Lr says its the best cataloging system but read reviews awhile back (approx 1 1/2 yrs ago) that said the more files you load up on the catalog the slower Lr becomes. After reading that I decided to create a catalog for every shoot instead. Each job has its own file folder and contains a folder for the raw images, developed images, Lr catalog, & invoice.

For every person that tells us they use multiple LR catalogs to keep LR from slowing down there are an equal number who have 50,000, 100,00, 200,00+ images in one (1) LR catalog with no noticeable reduction in performance. In fact most people with performance issues who have created a new catalog and imported only 1,000 or less images still experience the same performance issues. You can test this by creating a new empty test catalog and then merge a number of your current catalogs. Just to be safe backup all of the catalog files before doing anything. The original smaller catalogs and image files will not be disturbed if you select 'Add new photos to catalog without moving.' Follow the directions in the below video:

Merging Individual Lightroom Catalogs into a “Master” Catalog « Julieanne Kost's Blog

[Jp_508]

Thanks for the heads up on that. Forums are great but you have to sift through everyone's opinion & make a judgement call based on hearsay. I know you know your stuff & trust anything you say so I will give it a try next week. My son is graduating college on Friday so we are heading out of town early tomorrow. When I first started using Lr I was pretty green and not completely sure what I was doing, making mistakes along the way is how you learn. Thanks as always you are a wealth of information.

[Todd Shaner]

Glad to help and thanks for the feedback on your system performance. If you do test the catalog merge option please let us know your results concerning any changes in performance. Enjoy your son's graduation!

[Jp_508]

It was already checked when I went into preferences, I didn't have to change anything so I couldn't tell you. I can say that I'm pretty happy with the performance. Sorry for not responding sooner I didn't see an email notice or I overlooked it, my apologizes.