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Building a Lightroom PC

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#171

Post by slantyyz »

alkonaut wrote: post #100

Word of caution 4K@27" is still pretty terrible in Windows. It's fine if you stay in specific apps for 99% of the time (such as a cad workstation or a Lightroom machine as in this case) but 27 requires scaling and many apps simply don't scale well. The "simple" solution is to run 4K at 32" or larger where you can run att 100% scaling. Unfortunately, if you want a screen with decent color you are adding serious money…

>> Word of caution 4K@27" is still pretty terrible in Windows.

Well, YMMV. I have been running 2 x 4K@27 with 100% scaling for a couple of years now, and I am very happy. I don't adjust the default font sizes in my apps either.

FWIW, my screens are between 21" and 27" away from my eyes at their closest and furthest points.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#172

Post by sumoboy »

PStamatiou wrote: post #76
SubiculumCode wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $6000 he could have got something like: CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2637v4, 3.5GHz (4-Core, dual threaded, HT, 15MB Cache, 135W) 14nm RAM: 128GB (8 x 16GB DDR4-2400 ECC Registered 2R 1.2V DIMMs) Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro P4000 GPU, 8GB GDDR5, 105W, Single-Width, PCIe 3.0 x16, Seagate 1TB Exos 7E2 HDD (6 Gb/s, 7.2K RPM, 128MB Cache, 512n) 3.5-in SATA just a quick build i did over at Silicon Mechanics

There's no real benefit of that much RAM in Lightroom (Premiere Pro is a different story). I also don't need spinning disk storage as I have a 12TB NAS (which is 3 years old, I can probably replace all the disks for 10TB models) for when I archive my shots, so faster M.2 SSDs were a priority. The dual CPU setup doesn't help Lightroom either -- it's not terribly efficient for multiple cores so I can't imagine it would…

Running latest lightroom on a 1950x w/1080ti card and CPU % doesn't go beyond 20%. Just unfortunate all this computing power is wasted.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#173

Post by yoodenvranx »

ISL wrote: post #167
slantyyz wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: If you're not selling work to be printed or resold as stock, how important is calibration these days? Given the proliferation of the screen as a photo consumption device, and considering how just about every screen out there has slightly different properties (color temp & gamut, brightness and contrast, OLED vs LCD), what will calibration necessarily accomplish?

Calibration puts you (hopefully) in the middle of the distribution of errors, so your viewer is more likely to see pretty much what you intended. I publish a lot of black and white images in part to further reduce the uncertainty of the end-viewer's calibration. Can't get a perceived color cast if there's no color.

> Calibration puts you (hopefully) in the middle of the distribution of errors

That would be an interesting research topic! Perhaps the average color of the un-calibrated displays is not the same as the one of a calibrated display.

For example most TV are put in some very colorful mode from factory and most user don't bother to switch it. The same is true for old Samsung mobile phones which had a lot of popping colors. You could switch them to more realistic tones but nobody ever did this.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#174

Post by neves »

07d046 wrote: post #19

I can't imagine spending $6000 on a computer for editing photos and then saying "It also means I don't plan to buy and meticulously use a color calibration device". My computer might not be half as fast, but at least I know my blues are the shade of blue I think they are.

I just use f.lux e mess all my calibration :-)

Another way to mess it is to buy a glass with "digital lenses" that will filter the blue spectrum.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#175

Post by alkonaut »

alkonaut wrote: post #100

Word of caution 4K@27" is still pretty terrible in Windows. It's fine if you stay in specific apps for 99% of the time (such as a cad workstation or a Lightroom machine as in this case) but 27 requires scaling and many apps simply don't scale well. The "simple" solution is to run 4K at 32" or larger where you can run att 100% scaling. Unfortunately, if you want a screen with decent color you are adding serious money…

Yes, I’d also opt for 100% and just ever so slightly too small text, over scaling.

You can always zoom text in web browsers, editors etc when so most reading is fine anyway.

If you have good vision and the screen not too far away it’s certainly doable - but 32 is a pretty big improvement.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#176

Post by Aloha »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #138
Aloha wrote: post #51

Anyone can be an amazing photographer - but there is a distinction between a camera nut, and a photographer, to this end, Ken Rockwell makes a really interesting point: "You need to learn to see and compose. The more time you waste worrying about your equipment the less time you'll have to put into creating great images. Worry about your images, not your equipment." http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/notcamera.htm You c…

It's ironic that you quote Ken there, because he is definitely in the camera nut camp. His entire site is dedicated to cameras and lenses, virtually nothing on actually composing or photographic technique. Most of his photos are generic family holiday snaps, particularly his newer photos.

Camera geeks have money - and he's a businessman first, photographer second. ;-)

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#177

Post by PStamatiou »

aneutron wrote: post #169

One thing to keep in mind: Disabling UAC is a VERY BAD IDEA. No matter how you look at it. Look at it this way, if you do that, then any moderately smart ransomware will be able to do wonders on your PC. That's reminiscent of a 4chan post where the user downloads a program, tries to execute, is then warned by Firefox, but ignores it, warned by the AV Software, but disables it, warned by Defender, and disabled, and fi…

Agreed - I mention that in the post as well. It can allow for any automatic software to take over. Known risk, especially for when I was setting everything up and installing 100 different things and getting the UAC full screen takeover so often.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#178

Post by PStamatiou »

t0mislav wrote: post #133
stef25 wrote: post #108

Isn't this a good use case for the iMac Pro?

I guess at the time of building this PC, iMac Pro stil wasn't announced. It would be great to hear what author thinks now about iMac Pro.

It was - but iMac Pro can't be upgraded. You want a new motherboard/CPU for the next gen that comes out in 9 months? Can't just go out and swap the parts out over the weekend. Also the Vega GPU in it is not as performant.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#179

Post by maxx »

There are lot and lot of advices in this article you SHOULD PRECISELY NOT FOLLOW when you build an editing PC.

> Watercooling

Watercooling addicts will try to argue that you can achieve a better cooling performance than with aircooling. The truth is that watercooling is at best only 1 or 2 degrees cooler than a proper aircooling system, or even worse in some tests. Then they will argue that watercooling provide a better performance/silence ratio, which also falls short when you consider that top aircooling systems are basically dead silent. You really don't want to deal with water in your PC (even with all-in-one systems) for nothing to gain.

> Not using a calibration device

I don't even understand how you can come up with the idea of writing an article about building a PC for photography/video editing while you don't already use and don't even plan to use a calibration device. The point is not even if you plan to publish, print or whatever, what is at stake is the way you view your own images. And there is ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE in buying a top of the line monitor if you don't calibrate it.

> Buying the best performing components

For 60-70% of the price of the top of the line product, you will get 95-99% of the performance of it. The same best performing product will anyway be "obsolete" (compared to the new best performing product) in a couple months and its price will drop 20-30%. This has always been true and will always be true for any PC building. This is even more true for an editing station since the top of the line will not even give you the 1-5% performance benefit you should expect.

> Buying a gaming video card

Particularly the top of the line. Your editing software will never use the processor and the memory that comes with such a gaming video card. And only pro cards will provide you 10-bit workflow, which is what you need if you bought an editing monitor with 10-bit panel and 99-100% Adobe coverage. You can buy an entry-level pro card, it will be more than enough for Lightroom/Capture One/Photoshop/Premiere/etc. IF you don't buy a pro card, then why do you buy such a monitor?

> Bothering with huge overclocking or with RAM latencies (!)

I agree it's quite easy now to do some overclocking, but you should not aim for the extreme. It's your work machine, you want stability.

> Delidding your CPU

What?! Just don't that. Let's be serious a minute.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#180

Post by JepZ »

Well, if you think water cooling is cool, try passive cooling.

A few years back I build my current PC:

- Core i7-4770S (Haswell, so you see its not that new anymore)

- 32GB RAM

- SSD 840 EVO 1TB (not that new either)

- some passive PSU

Last year I added an

- AMD Radeon 460

So the whole thing is completely passively cooled.

So no noise at all and I am pretty happy with the performance. I don't know what 'instant' performance in Lightroom means, but so far my experience with Darktable was just fine (actually, I was wondering why some options have a 'slow' or 'fast' suffix). That said, I am just a casual Darktable user, so I take all my photos in RAW and JPG and view them most of the time in the JPG version, but when I would like to create a photo calendar of some sort I use Darktable to get the most out of the pictures.

The only downside is that hardware doesn't age that good :-/

  $ grep -m1 bugs /proc/cpuinfo 
  bugs            : cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2
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