Photo Editing with Lightroom and Photoshop.
As you may or may not have seen in my recent post (for those of you that haven't seen, I've been having a PC contest with a friend here) I have recently upgraded my PC for editing. But I thought I would talk a little bit more about WHY we started this competition, and maybe it will make a bit more sense.
I am primarily a photographer, and recently I got an A7Rii camera. This camera provides some amazing images, but also has some major flaws. Namely file size. It takes 42mp photos at 85mb a piece (RAW), and 4k video at about a gigabyte a minute (from my experience). I had a decently new computer with an i5 7600, 1060 6gb, 256SSD and 8gb of ram at 2400mhz. However, it was struggling to even edit the photos. Considering I take photos everyday, and even get paid to take them, this was obviously a problem.
I managed to make some money through crypto and thought it was a good idea to upgrade my PC to keep it up with my camera. After doing some research I decided that RAM and CPU would be most important to upgrade due to the way lightroom functions (a bit of a RAM hog, and exporting will use 100% of your CPU). I already had an SSD to store the photos on, and this increased performance a lot straight away.
I upgraded to an i7 8700k (six cores/12 threads, stock clock of 3.7 with a 4.7 boost clock), and 32gb of ram. Along the way I also needed a new motherboard thanks to Intel. Thanks Intel. One generation and a new motherboard... Anyway! Not being content I decided to overclock this as far as I possibly could reasonably. I managed to hit the silicon lottery it seems, I easily pushed 5.0ghz and further. However, 5.0ghz was what I settled on for long term usage as the temperatures are under control as is the voltage (1.280 volts at 5.0ghz). I didn't really want to mess with the RAM and decided to leave it close to stock (2600mhz, RAM is expensive....).
However, shortly after upgrading something occurred to me. I over-upgraded. My computer never even got over 50% RAM usage unless I had both Lightroom, Photoshop, and other programs open (usual stuff, Chrome, Steam, Discord etc). My CPU.... My CPU never even breaks a sweat. So today I wanted to share my experience with is, and what I think the true recommended specs for Lightroom and photo editing are. I am basing this off of my experience with an old FX-8350, i5 7600, i5 7500 and i7 8700k (using with different combinations of RAM).
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So... Of course this is going to happen. I open Lightroom and it's using quite a heavy amount of system resources. However, it was auto-adjusting images in the background. But this shows an interesting point! Just leaving Lightroom to do its own thing will at times draw a lot of system power. At this point it was going through 3000 images and just making small adjustments to colour and crop from my RAW files (each of which is about 85mb in size). This is also interesting as it shows that we can expect a decent (35-55% usage on my CPU) CPU usage when we edit our own photos and apply changes.
It is important to note though that this only applies to big image changes and this appears in short spikes. Such as when a colour filter is applied to an image.
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In this image I simply applied random filter after random filter. Each time I applied the filter you can see a spike to about 20-30% in CPU usage. As soon as I stopped it dropped back to under 5%. This shows to me that although Lightroom CAN use resources, normally it doesn't need them even on very big photos such as these. Once you have a quad core CPU of a relatively new generation, anything else is just convenience to make it faster and more fluid. Further, while in actual editing, I doubt you will ever see lightroom using a full quad core to even 80% (unless you are running lots of other tasks).
While doing this the GPU did also spike while applying filters. To... About 5% (from the usual 0-2%). This is a 1060, which is a pretty mid-end GPU, although admittedly very new. So I doubt you will have a problem with GPU unless you are running on older hardware. I would guess even a GTX 750 would perform fine on lightroom (I have a 750m in my laptop and it works great 90% of the time).
So... Exporting!
I tested exporting 159 images from RAW to Jpg at 300ppi. This task took 1:50 meaning that it processed 1.45 images a second. These images are essentially the largest you will get out of any camera on the market. Unless you are running a medium format NO camera will make bigger files. The only cameras I can think that come even close are the 5DSR (around 60mb at 50megapixels) and the D850 at about 50mb and 45 megapixels. The D850 can do uncompressed RAW at 90mb, but when you have lossless compressed I have no idea why you would do that. So what's my point? My point is that I can process 1.45 images a second, and any other camera I could possibly use would be faster.
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This is where Lightroom WILL use all of the CPU power it can get. My GPU still sat idle throughout this whole process though. So in short, this is my conclusion for CPU: Any quad core will give you decent performance. Anything above is just because you want to be faster. Further, unless you are shooting from an A7Rii or A7Riii, your times will be significantly faster and less demanding than mine.
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Ram is odd with Lightroom. It seems to start low, at about 2-3gb, but the longer Lightroom is open the more it requires. Eventually it will begin taking towards 10gigabytes of ram no problem. However, it never seems to go higher than about 10gb for me. The only time you will be requiring more RAM is if you want to run Photoshop and Lightroom simultaneously (which is rather cool and beneficial with the cross platform support).
Until now though I have quite possibly skipped over what is quite possibly the biggest factor for performance which is your HDD and thus cache size. I am using a 256gb SSD for my library, and I can't recommend an SSD enough.
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As you can see, I've set a 100gb cache size on my C Drive (SSD). This cache is incredibly important when it comes to speeding up the editing process.
So, realistically, what do you need to edit photos on your PC? While the actual minimum specs might be a dual core with 2gb ram, I will speak from my experience:
Minimum:
Any modern quad core CPU (i5, i7, Ryzen 5)
8gb Ram
Any HDD (however an SSD is highly recommended).
GTX 750 or R7 260
Recommended:
A six or eight core Ryzen 5/7 or Intel i7
16gb of ram, however if you plan to use Lightroom and Photoshop at the same time, 32gb.
SSD of 256gb or bigger
Any 10 series Nvidia card or 500 series AMD.
You can edit on much lower than these specs I am sure, but I definitely would not recommend it for a camera with big RAW files. However, if you only edit Jpg or smaller files I'm sure you'll have no problems at all.
I think that photo editing sits in a weird spot. If you look at video editing at 4k, there are lots of options specialized for heavy workloads (Threadripper and i9). However, for photo editing you don't need this kind of workstation power, but you do still need significant RAM and CPU speeds. This means you sort of have to aim for the higher end of the gaming spectrum of parts. A typical gaming build will work great for your photo editing needs, just make sure you up the RAM to 16gb minimum.
Also if you plan to overclock be very careful of your temperatures as you will be using 100% CPU during export phases.
This post wasn't related totally on facts but rather my experience and facts from my own systems. This and is my experience and my recommendations. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to ask and I will reply as soon as I can! Thank you for reading.