“Drank the Kool-Aid” did I make a mistake?

[DustinT]

Well, I just read all three pages of this thread and enjoyed the heck out of it. I love Apple's Koolaid, personally.

Regarding the SSD: You should really look seriously about this. Yes, you have plenty of RAM but, considering that you make a good living on your technology, there's no reason not to have a proper storage system.

There is good reason to believe when the new Mac Pros release there will be some substantial increases in performance. I suspect you'll benefit from that upgrade, when the time comes.

 

[dansmac]

Okay! I hear ya' all!

Just purchased two(2) 240G SSD new 6G devices from OWC today.

I will let you all know what performance changes I can document with my workflow.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Kept coming back to SSD so I will give it a try.

Dan

 

[dansmac]

Results are IN! Did the SSD Drives Help?

As discussed in this thread my workflow is "my" workflow and it truly works and provides good use of my time and value to my customers.

Also described in an prior post in this thread are the work-steps and a debate if using SSD's would make any difference at all:
Step 8: The real work now begins: Click on next image in Bridge browser screen … automatically launches Adobe RAW … make the adjustments as needed …. Move into Photoshop CS5 … touch up, filterize, correct, crop, and a bunch of other stuff as need to make the images rock.

Step 9: Do step 8 about 1,000 times and call it a day….

Any substantial performance enhancement would benefit my workflow as we do so many images for each job.

I did it! Purchased Two (2) SSD drives from OWC: 240GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD 2.5" Serial-ATA 9.5mm 6Gb/s Solid State Drive. Along with the kits to install in the Mac Pro CD case.

Only one of our computers is used to generate the DVD's for our clients so loosing a CD drive was no big deal. Installed two SSD drives with the OWC kits into the CD case. Easy install and took less then 20 minutes total. Partitioned the drives and ready to go.

BEFORE I installed the SSD drives I went back to a fashion job and post processed 20 images from that shoot and timed my workflow. Total time for 20 images was 18 minutes 4 seconds. Some images require a bunch of corrections and some very few. Very typical of any job I do.

What I needed to achieve with the post image processing.

BEFORE (as shot) and AFTER (corrected for publication):



Of course you cannot see the "real" results as the images are so small in the forum post.

AND what it took in "Step 8" to achieve the resulted image:




AFTER I installed the SSD drives - moved my applications to the first SSD and setup the Scratch & RAW cache for the second SSD drive.

RESTULS

- Load Photoshop - WOW! Fast
- Browse in Bridge - WOW! Fast

BUT .... Did it make a difference in Step 8?

... and the answer ..NONE (well maybe a little). 17 minutes 28 seconds. Add in human factors the statistical results are a dead heat.

The Activity Monitor confirmed again that NO disk access (HD or SSD) was going on during step 8.

CONCLUSION: Loading applications and working with other functions besides my PC CS5 workflow is "snappy" and the MAC PRO "feels" like a breath of fresh air. Very fast indeed. But my main photo image work has not changed. NO I cannot use Lightroom - we discussed this before .. and NO Aperture will not work.

O' well it was a fun intellectual exercise and using the SSD drives to load applications and other work is certainly a benefit. Did the "claims" of adding SSD drives would enhance my workflow no matter what ... well not so good.

Enough on this subject.... Back to the "day job" I have images to process!

Dan

 

[Whaditis]

hopefully the next Mac Pro will be able to utilize all 6G but in any case a great purchase for your machine that will give you a significant performance boost.

 

[DustinT]

Okay! I hear ya' all!

Just purchased two(2) 240G SSD new 6G devices from OWC today.

I will let you all know what performance changes I can document with my workflow.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Kept coming back to SSD so I will give it a try.

Dan

Cool beans, you bought the right SSD's too. I've got the OCZ version in my MacBook Pro and I love it. I took a look at your test results and a little math shows about a 5% improvement. Granted, you made a decent capital investment to get it but it will pay off not only in step 8 but in all other users of your production system. Honestly, I'd say its money well spent.

Finally, the controller in your Mac Pro doesn't support that bandwidth of those SSD. You are probably getting about half the performance from them that you should be. Can I humbly suggest that you would see more than a 5% improvement if you installed a 6 GB\s controller card? Starting at $50, its an inexpensive upgrade.

 

[DeeEss]

Sorry to hear of your experience. Sounds very frustrating.

So much is in the configuration. I too am a photographer with a huge files from a Phase One P65+. I have a crazy workload and workflow. My 2010 3.3 6 core with 24GB RAM and SSD's completely toasts it.

 

[tripleg]

I'm only dealing with Canon 1D4 images (about 16MP) but that seems to mirror what I found on my system. OS and application startup speeds were improved quite a bit but actual application usage really didn't see much of a boost from using an SSD.

 

[dansmac]

Sorry to hear of your experience. Sounds very frustrating.

So much is in the configuration. I too am a photographer with a huge files from a Phase One P65+. I have a crazy workload and workflow. My 2010 3.3 6 core with 24GB RAM and SSD's completely toasts it.

Off subject... how do you like the P65+ You should be simply crazy with that product! We shoot mainly events and have stuck with 1D4's and 5DMK II's for the most part. Have a Pentax 645D that I love in the studio but just can get the hang for fast paced events....I'm jealous!!

Dan

 

[WardC]

And this is why I use Photoshop CS3, and stick to this version...CS 5 is just a bunch of extra junk and overhead that is not necessary for photo editing, and it is buggier than CS3. CS3 is just simply fast and works.

 

[dansmac]

And this is why I use Photoshop CS3, and stick to this version...CS 5 is just a bunch of extra junk and overhead that is not necessary for photo editing, and it is buggier than CS3. CS3 is just simply fast and works.

If CS3 works for you....great!

Will not work for me. Been using Photoshop and a bunch of other photo applications from Corel and others since 1996. Long before the CS stuff!

What CS3 does NOT have that I need to do my job:

1. 64-bit processing
2. Spot Healing
3. Content Aware (this has saved me countless hours)
4. Adobe RAW that works with EOS 1D MK IV, 1Ds MK III, and 5D MK II
5. Mixer brushes
6. Custom panels (I use a bunch on my dual displays)
7. Adjust grain in RAW
8. Adjust vignette in RAW
9. (maybe more ... all I can think of for now)

....Dan

 

[scottsjack]

If CS3 works for you....great!

Will not work for me. Been using Photoshop and a bunch of other photo applications from Corel and others since 1996. Long before the CS stuff!

What CS3 does NOT have that I need to do my job:

1. 64-bit processing
2. Spot Healing
3. Content Aware (this has saved me countless hours)
4. Adobe RAW that works with EOS 1D MK IV, 1Ds MK III, and 5D MK II
5. Mixer brushes
6. Custom panels (I use a bunch on my dual displays)
7. Adjust grain in RAW
8. Adjust vignette in RAW
9. (maybe more ... all I can think of for now)

....Dan

Exactly. I've got CS3 on my Windows partions and CS5 on the Mac ones. There is no comparison between the two. The quality of Camera Raw conversions in CS5 (CR6) is amazing compared to CS3.

 

[VirtualRain]

AFTER I installed the SSD drives - moved my applications to the first SSD and setup the Scratch & RAW cache for the second SSD drive.

BUT .... Did it make a difference in Step 8?

... and the answer ..NONE (well maybe a little). 17 minutes 28 seconds. Add in human factors the statistical results are a dead heat.

The Activity Monitor confirmed again that NO disk access (HD or SSD) was going on during step 8.

CONCLUSION: Loading applications and working with other functions besides my PC CS5 workflow is "snappy" and the MAC PRO "feels" like a breath of fresh air. Very fast indeed. But my main photo image work has not changed.

I may be off to eat humble pie shortly, but a dumb question first... What takes nearly a minute per image? I had no idea this was the processing time involved. Yikes! That's unreal, and makes it completely obvious that you are starved by terribly inefficient workflow, software or in desperate need of faster CPUs. I now agree that loading 20 images to from disk is completely irrelevant here. Did I somehow miss this in the early goings of this thread? I somehow thought this was a highly automated batch process for thousands of images per day. My sincere appologies.

At any rate, for the benefit of others who may be more storage constrained, were the actual RAW images you were processing stored on the SSDs? Or were they somewhere else? It's not clear. All I see from your description above is apps, scratch and cache on the SSDs. The images must be on the SSD for them to benefit (although at 1min per image, again, this is probably irrelevant for you). You may want to try this and see if it makes things even snappier?

If it was me, I would have setup those two drives in RAID0 with 128K stripe size and loaded everything including the working images onto that single volume.

Again, sorry if I led you astray. I am wiser now too. However, it wasn't at all clear to me that the processing time was on the order of a minute per image. Damn.

 

[GoKyu]

Really digging this thread and trying to improve a fellow Photoshop user's performance

I don't think it's worth doing until you upgrade to the next Mac Pro (as its likely to come out pretty soon), but when you do upgrade, max out the memory - I believe this should allow the RAM to run at its fastest speed possible.

While it may not appear to have helped so far, I think having the SSDs are a big benefit, if you're using them in the right place. Think about it - if you're having to save 1000 images back to disk on a mechanical HD vs an SSD, you should see a pretty significant time decrease over that many files.

I know CS 5 (I use it a lot myself) has an option to take advantage of a video card with a lot of memory - that can help shorten the time it takes to render filters / perform repetitive actions (Enable OpenGL Drawing). Maybe consider getting a more powerful graphics card to offload more of the work away from the CPU and onto the GPU.

Good luck!

 

[wikus]

As discussed in this thread my workflow is "my" workflow and it truly works and provides good use of my time and value to my customers.

Also described in an prior post in this thread are the work-steps and a debate if using SSD's would make any difference at all:
Step 8: The real work now begins: Click on next image in Bridge browser screen … automatically launches Adobe RAW … make the adjustments as needed …. Move into Photoshop CS5 … touch up, filterize, correct, crop, and a bunch of other stuff as need to make the images rock.

Step 9: Do step 8 about 1,000 times and call it a day….

Any substantial performance enhancement would benefit my workflow as we do so many images for each job.

I did it! Purchased Two (2) SSD drives from OWC: 240GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD 2.5" Serial-ATA 9.5mm 6Gb/s Solid State Drive. Along with the kits to install in the Mac Pro CD case.

Only one of our computers is used to generate the DVD's for our clients so loosing a CD drive was no big deal. Installed two SSD drives with the OWC kits into the CD case. Easy install and took less then 20 minutes total. Partitioned the drives and ready to go.

BEFORE I installed the SSD drives I went back to a fashion job and post processed 20 images from that shoot and timed my workflow. Total time for 20 images was 18 minutes 4 seconds. Some images require a bunch of corrections and some very few. Very typical of any job I do.

What I needed to achieve with the post image processing.

BEFORE (as shot) and AFTER (corrected for publication):

[url=http://www.danpettusimages.com/potn/ex1.jpg]Image [/url]

Of course you cannot see the "real" results as the images are so small in the forum post.

AND what it took in "Step 8" to achieve the resulted image:

[url=http://www.danpettusimages.com/potn/ex2.jpg]Image [/url]


AFTER I installed the SSD drives - moved my applications to the first SSD and setup the Scratch & RAW cache for the second SSD drive.

RESTULS

- Load Photoshop - WOW! Fast
- Browse in Bridge - WOW! Fast

BUT .... Did it make a difference in Step 8?

... and the answer ..NONE (well maybe a little). 17 minutes 28 seconds. Add in human factors the statistical results are a dead heat.

The Activity Monitor confirmed again that NO disk access (HD or SSD) was going on during step 8.

CONCLUSION: Loading applications and working with other functions besides my PC CS5 workflow is "snappy" and the MAC PRO "feels" like a breath of fresh air. Very fast indeed. But my main photo image work has not changed. NO I cannot use Lightroom - we discussed this before .. and NO Aperture will not work.

O' well it was a fun intellectual exercise and using the SSD drives to load applications and other work is certainly a benefit. Did the "claims" of adding SSD drives would enhance my workflow no matter what ... well not so good.

Enough on this subject.... Back to the "day job" I have images to process!

Dan

unless the images you have to work with are stored on the ssd drive, you wont see improvement in batch processing.

if you want your batch processes to speed up, you should get two raptor drives in raid0, or another single large capacity ssd drive though it would cost you over a grand.

having an ssd is great but will only affect loading data that's on it.

 

[dansmac]

I may be off to eat humble pie shortly, but a dumb question first... What takes nearly a minute per image? I had no idea this was the processing time involved. Yikes! That's unreal, and makes it completely obvious that you are starved by terribly inefficient workflow, software or in desperate need of faster CPUs. I now agree that loading 20 images to from disk is completely irrelevant here. Did I somehow miss this in the early goings of this thread? I somehow thought this was a highly automated batch process for thousands of images per day. My sincere appologies.

At any rate, for the benefit of others who may be more storage constrained, were the actual RAW images you were processing stored on the SSDs? Or were they somewhere else? It's not clear. All I see from your description above is apps, scratch and cache on the SSDs. The images must be on the SSD for them to benefit (although at 1min per image, again, this is probably irrelevant for you). You may want to try this and see if it makes things even snappier?

If it was me, I would have setup those two drives in RAID0 with 128K stripe size and loaded everything including the working images onto that single volume.

Again, sorry if I led you astray. I am wiser now too. However, it wasn't at all clear to me that the processing time was on the order of a minute per image. Damn.

I understand the concept. AND and I did move a bunch of images from my internal HD RAID 1 array to an SSD to see if there was any difference in total workflow time. Result: NONE.

Please take a look at my prior post on workflow. Remember this workflow is for events that yield a large post-processed product of images for my clients.

EXAMPLE of a just completed job can be found at: http://danpettusimages.com/padilla/

Below is the TIME in my workflow including even MORE details.

I will select a RAW image at RANDOM from the above example site link and perform what I believe is needed to transform and process the image for my client:

• STEPS 1-7: irrelevant as these setup steps are only done once for processing up to a 1,000 or more images.
• STEP 8: The real work:
  • Double click image from BRIDGE CS5 (left display) and LAUNCH RAW. Total time = 1 second
  • Make ADJUSTMENTS in ADOBE RAW (white balance, fill, black level, vignette, grain, and other as needed) and load into PS CS5. Total time = 6 seconds.
  • OnOne Filter Actions (batched) to enhance color, dynamic range, and contrast. Total time = 16 seconds.
  • CS5 Liquify corrections as needed. Total time = 12 seconds.
  • NIK Filter Actions (batched) to add glow, tonal contract, and others as needed. Total time = 10 seconds.
  • CS5 Healing Brush. Total time = 6 seconds.
  • CS5 Dodge and Burn tools. Total time= 3 seconds.
  • CS5 Smart Sharpen tool. Total time = 1 second.
  • Action to save result on RAID 1. Total time = 1 second.
    

The above single image was 56 seconds of work. Pretty average. AND the amount of TOTAL DISK ACCESS (SSD or any) was 2 SECONDS. The load and save. ALL other function are managed in main memory.

SOOOO SSD's are great and work as advertised. BUT in my typical workflow they provide little to no enhancement.

Sorry! Thanks for the advise and comments but my workflow will be enhanced (it seems) only with a much faster NEW Mac Pro (next gen?) and that's about it.

Back to work....Dan

 

[VirtualRain]

The above single image was 56 seconds of work. Pretty average. AND the amount of TOTAL DISK ACCESS (SSD or any) was 2 SECONDS. The load and save. ALL other function are managed in main memory.

SOOOO SSD's are great and work as advertised. BUT in my typical workflow they provide little to no enhancement.

Yeah, I totally missed that aspect previously... you're absolutely right.

 

[toxic]

unless OS X is significantly increasing your productivity, I think you should switch back to Windows. the only way up on the Mac side is a new 3.33 GHz six-core ($$$) or a 3.4 GHz iMac, but that won't fix stability issues.

about Dell support: early in the thread, you said Dell always blamed the software for any problems. was this their business support saying this?

 

[dansmac]

unless OS X is significantly increasing your productivity, I think you should switch back to Windows. the only way up on the Mac side is a new 3.33 GHz six-core ($$$) or a 3.4 GHz iMac, but that won't fix stability issues.

about Dell support: early in the thread, you said Dell always blamed the software for any problems. was this their business support saying this?

My Experience with DELL Support:

The computers are really good. Over the years purchased six of them directly from the website as a "consumer" not their business site. Usually waited for a "special" Dell runs all the time that never see from Apple. But I always up'd my buy with a 3-year "in home" extended warranty believing anything goes wrong and it would be fixed immediately.

One of my XPS machines (my main computer system at the time) would not boot reliably. Called the toll-fee number and got their Tech Support Center in India. Went through two hours of "following the Dell script" on the phone and they concluded it was a "driver" problem. Updated all the drivers and of course did not help. Another call to India Support Center and another two hours of "script" work and he tells me it was MS XP Pro causing the problem. Re-installed the OS. Same issue another three hours on the phone and tells me that I should re-flash the BIOS as that will fix the problem. Downloaded the BIOS - re-flash and it never booted again! Two weeks of phone tag to India and no production work from me they finally sent out a technician under my purchased warranty and replaced the motherboard. Works fine ever since.....very frustrating experience....Two weeks and countless hours of phone time and I could of told them we had a real hardware defect in 10 minutes. They would not bend. Follow the script and and no time was I permitted to speak to someone else with more technical experience. I'm sure most problems are "operator error" and to save money Dell's service center in India is instructed to follow the script no matter what. I was not a delightful customer experience...far from it! Dan

 

[DeeEss]

Off subject... how do you like the P65+ You should be simply crazy with that product! We shoot mainly events and have stuck with 1D4's and 5DMK II's for the most part. Have a Pentax 645D that I love in the studio but just can get the hang for fast paced events....I'm jealous!!

Dan

Yeah it's amazing. The detail tonality and colour is out of this world. I still use a canon 1ds3 a bit, but rarely. It's hard to use anything other than the P65+ now! I've been considering a step up to IQ180 which is suppose to be in another league entirely. The P65+ is actually an incredibly quick capture for the sized file at 1fps.

Files I've seen from the Pentax look really nice - Are you happy with it?

----------

As discussed in this thread my workflow is "my" workflow and it truly works and provides good use of my time and value to my customers.

Also described in an prior post in this thread are the work-steps and a debate if using SSD's would make any difference at all:
Step 8: The real work now begins: Click on next image in Bridge browser screen … automatically launches Adobe RAW … make the adjustments as needed …. Move into Photoshop CS5 … touch up, filterize, correct, crop, and a bunch of other stuff as need to make the images rock.

Step 9: Do step 8 about 1,000 times and call it a day….

Any substantial performance enhancement would benefit my workflow as we do so many images for each job.

I did it! Purchased Two (2) SSD drives from OWC: 240GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD 2.5" Serial-ATA 9.5mm 6Gb/s Solid State Drive. Along with the kits to install in the Mac Pro CD case.

Only one of our computers is used to generate the DVD's for our clients so loosing a CD drive was no big deal. Installed two SSD drives with the OWC kits into the CD case. Easy install and took less then 20 minutes total. Partitioned the drives and ready to go.

BEFORE I installed the SSD drives I went back to a fashion job and post processed 20 images from that shoot and timed my workflow. Total time for 20 images was 18 minutes 4 seconds. Some images require a bunch of corrections and some very few. Very typical of any job I do.

What I needed to achieve with the post image processing.

BEFORE (as shot) and AFTER (corrected for publication):

[url=http://www.danpettusimages.com/potn/ex1.jpg]Image [/url]

Of course you cannot see the "real" results as the images are so small in the forum post.

AND what it took in "Step 8" to achieve the resulted image:

[url=http://www.danpettusimages.com/potn/ex2.jpg]Image [/url]


AFTER I installed the SSD drives - moved my applications to the first SSD and setup the Scratch & RAW cache for the second SSD drive.

RESTULS

- Load Photoshop - WOW! Fast
- Browse in Bridge - WOW! Fast

BUT .... Did it make a difference in Step 8?

... and the answer ..NONE (well maybe a little). 17 minutes 28 seconds. Add in human factors the statistical results are a dead heat.

The Activity Monitor confirmed again that NO disk access (HD or SSD) was going on during step 8.

CONCLUSION: Loading applications and working with other functions besides my PC CS5 workflow is "snappy" and the MAC PRO "feels" like a breath of fresh air. Very fast indeed. But my main photo image work has not changed. NO I cannot use Lightroom - we discussed this before .. and NO Aperture will not work.

O' well it was a fun intellectual exercise and using the SSD drives to load applications and other work is certainly a benefit. Did the "claims" of adding SSD drives would enhance my workflow no matter what ... well not so good.

Enough on this subject.... Back to the "day job" I have images to process!

Dan

It seems in the meantime you could cut the bajeebies out of that process time by dropping those color efex, OnOne filters etc which take forever and are a cpu hog. It looks like most of what you need can be done simply, elegantly and quickly with a curve and a saved action. As you say, it's hard to tell from a small jpg, but it may be worth revising it in the meantime since you've invested so much in the new machines.

I also recommend reading about optimizing photoshop on the mac on the macperformanceguide.com site. I found it really helpful. http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html

 

[toxic]

My Experience with DELL Support:

The computers are really good. Over the years purchased six of them directly from the website as a "consumer" not their business site. Usually waited for a "special" Dell runs all the time that never see from Apple. But I always up'd my buy with a 3-year "in home" extended warranty believing anything goes wrong and it would be fixed immediately.

One of my XPS machines (my main computer system at the time) would not boot reliably. Called the toll-fee number and got their Tech Support Center in India. Went through two hours of "following the Dell script" on the phone and they concluded it was a "driver" problem. Updated all the drivers and of course did not help. Another call to India Support Center and another two hours of "script" work and he tells me it was MS XP Pro causing the problem. Re-installed the OS. Same issue another three hours on the phone and tells me that I should re-flash the BIOS as that will fix the problem. Downloaded the BIOS - re-flash and it never booted again! Two weeks of phone tag to India and no production work from me they finally sent out a technician under my purchased warranty and replaced the motherboard. Works fine ever since.....very frustrating experience....Two weeks and countless hours of phone time and I could of told them we had a real hardware defect in 10 minutes. They would not bend. Follow the script and and no time was I permitted to speak to someone else with more technical experience. I'm sure most problems are "operator error" and to save money Dell's service center in India is instructed to follow the script no matter what. I was not a delightful customer experience...far from it! Dan

I think the problem is you didn't buy the business computers. Dell consumer support stinks, but, from what I can tell, business support is great.

 

[nanofrog]

My Experience with DELL Support:

But I always up'd my buy with a 3-year "in home" extended warranty believing anything goes wrong and it would be fixed immediately.

Unfortunately, buying through the consumer side was your mistake (even the optional support on the consumer side sucks, as it's all the same overseas call center).

You should have bought through the business side, and opted for the ProSupport option. Granted, it's still an option you have to buy (between $89 - $109 for 3 years typically), but you get faster response times and the call center is in the US, not overseas (no where near the same hassle before they schedule a tech to your location). They also know what they're doing comparatively speaking, and will escalate to someone with more knowledge when needed.

Drastic difference between both consumer and standard business support vs. the ProSupport business option (both base warranty support packages use an overseas call center contractor; Mahindra Satyam last I knew).

 

[CaptainChunk]

I must say however the surprise that the core applications from Adobe (Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3) have more stability issues on the Mac over the PC. That was (and still is) a shock.

The same can be said for Premiere and After Effects CS5 on the Mac side (haven't upgraded to 5.5 yet, so I have no perspective there). Strange stability issues (especially in After Effects, for me) and piss-poor graphics card support for Mercury in Premiere (not just Adobe's fault, really - Apple and NVIDIA have hands in that, too). These issues are either far less common or nonexistent in the Windows equivalents of these applications.

Adobe focuses a lot more attention on their Windows market and I can't say I can fault them for that - much larger market means far more devastating consequences when they don't fix things promptly for the user majority.


At this juncture, I'm sort of on the fence with my next workstation purchase. My primary reason for owning Macs (aside from the user experience I get with OS X) has been legacy Final Cut and those days are coming to an end. If I jump on the transition to Adobe or Avid for my video business, I'm going to start looking very hard at Windows workstations that more often than not, cost considerably less money.