Editing Photos on an M1 Mac

[Clix Pix]

Yes, it's been rather a long time now since I've lived in a single-family house with a yard and all that! Before this condo there was a townhouse for quite a few years and prior to that a couple of rental apartments, etc., etc...... My husband did have a station wagon, which came in very handy for those times when he would buy something for yard work or some project involving wood, as he did like to repair and build things. These days I hire someone to do whatever needs to be done and they of course have their truck with their tools plus the necessary repair or replacement items.

Actually, with your kids both being teens, I would guess that one of these days you'll be adding another car for one of them to drive....

 

[jz0309]

@stillcrazyman I stumbled across this from the "competition", if you havn't seen this yet ...

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Minivan here. It can be really handy for hauling, too. IMO, there’s nothing wrong with owning a truck in the city, especially when one has work to do. Plus these days trucks can get pretty decent fuel economy considering their size. What I have a harder time getting on board with is paying upwards of $70k for a truck. I’d be afraid to do any actual work in a truck that cost that much! Truck are for use and abuse—that’s what gives them purpose.

 

[dimme]

I here good reports about preformance on the M1 mac mini, but I have also read quite a few stories about problems with monitors. Some complain about flickering and others about not being able to get RGB signal so the color are not correct. I am woundering what is out there for photo editing?

 

[kenoh]

I here good reports about preformance on the M1 mac mini, but I have also read quite a few stories about problems with monitors. Some complain about flickering and others about not being able to get RGB signal so the color are not correct. I am woundering what is out there for photo editing?

So far Mini M1 with Lenovo monitor seems to be fine.

Issues so far are that I have to run photoshop in Rosetta to get access to any of the extensions but NIK is not sending the updated images back to PS even when running the latest version. DXO response is blame Adobe.

I get the response and I understand that but just stings a bit when I forked out for NIK 4 less than a month ago. I know they didn’t force me to buy an M1 but well, it took a bit of the shine off it a little.

My fault, I didn’t check before and factor into my decision.

Anything M1 native seems to be really quick, anything run through Rosetta, not so quick. Also noticed when updating Lightroom Classic, it now syncs presets with LR and LR mobile. I used to have a larger collection of presets in my classic install and a slimmed subset on mobile by being picky about which ones get imported into LR CC. Was straight forward to restore a few that I needed from time machine but just watch this as it caught me off guard.

 

[boletus]

.The M1 macboook air I have running Big Sur has a major problem with RAW files. The RAW files from several cameras display incorrectly in Preview, Finder and Photos. The colours are totally off, they appear very warm in tone and much fine detail is lost due to oversaturation, nothing like scene that I originally saw. If I take Raw+Jpg in preview the JPG shows the correct colours whilst the RAW file is totally wrong . This seems to hold true for Nikon, Canon, Panasonic and Olympus RAW files. I have just noticed that in finder the thumbnails displayed in the folders containing the photos are displayed in the opposite way to this, the jpg files are overwarm in colour and too saturated whilst the RAW file thumbnails appear correct, something very strange is going on with colour management in either Big Sur or with the m1 Macbooks.

 

[kenoh]

.The M1 macboook air I have running Big Sur has a major problem with RAW files. The RAW files from several cameras display incorrectly in Preview, Finder and Photos. The colours are totally off, they appear very warm in tone and much fine detail is lost due to oversaturation, nothing like scene that I originally saw. If I take Raw+Jpg in preview the JPG shows the correct colours whilst the RAW file is totally wrong . This seems to hold true for Nikon, Canon, Panasonic and Olympus RAW files. I have just noticed that in finder the thumbnails displayed in the folders containing the photos are displayed in the opposite way to this, the jpg files are overwarm in colour and too saturated whilst the RAW file thumbnails appear correct, something very strange is going on with colour management in either Big Sur or with the m1 Macbooks.

I hope this isnt an annoying question but have you messed about with the Color profile in the Display Settings?

I am looking at my files in finder and preview and they are fine - M1 Mini

 

[Dockland]

I'm using a Mac mini M1 (16/1TB) with an external SSD in a cradle.
Not having any issues. Way faster/smoother than my Intel Xeon 128 GB/4TB Nvme/Nvidia 2080 TI Desktop (Windows/Linux)
Using Adobe Photoshop/Camera RAW and Final Cut Pro for video editing.

 

[dimme]

I am using a M1 iMac (16/512) no issues at all with lightroom and photoshop. Very happy with the setup.

 

[boletus]

Hi, thanks for your kind replies, much appreciated. The colour profiles are all at default for the system, they have not been touched at all. When I look at a RAW file in finder and click get info the colour profile for the file comes up as Display P3 when I would expect either srgb or Adobe as the profile. This Display P3 profile seems very biased towards reds and magenta, oversaturating the images to the point where detail is obscured making it very difficult to select the images that are worth fully processing. This colour profile is only applied as the images are viewed, if the file is exported to another computer running Linux then the files display correctly and exactly as I would expect them to. Also its not the camera causing the problem as I have tried four different ones from different manufacturers and its the same problem with each camera. I will sy the problem is most noticeable if RAW + Jpeg are taken of say a pink, magenta or reddish coloured flower or other object with similar colour, this Display P3 profiles exaggerates those tones far more than say greens or blues although they are affected but to a lesser degree. Apart from this issue editing photos in any software I have tried is fast and efficient, can't complain about speed at all.

 

[kenoh]

Hi, thanks for your kind replies, much appreciated. The colour profiles are all at default for the system, they have not been touched at all. When I look at a RAW file in finder and click get info the colour profile for the file comes up as Display P3 when I would expect either srgb or Adobe as the profile. This Display P3 profile seems very biased towards reds and magenta, oversaturating the images to the point where detail is obscured making it very difficult to select the images that are worth fully processing. This colour profile is only applied as the images are viewed, if the file is exported to another computer running Linux then the files display correctly and exactly as I would expect them to. Also its not the camera causing the problem as I have tried four different ones from different manufacturers and its the same problem with each camera. I will sy the problem is most noticeable if RAW + Jpeg are taken of say a pink, magenta or reddish coloured flower or other object with similar colour, this Display P3 profiles exaggerates those tones far more than say greens or blues although they are affected but to a lesser degree. Apart from this issue editing photos in any software I have tried is fast and efficient, can't complain about speed at all.

I think we have a winner...

Display P3

I wonder if someone could shed some light on this for me. I import Sony ARW images into Lightroom on my iMac directly from my SD cards. When I look at the info panel for these files they are showing as having a Display P3 profile rather than the AdobeRGB profile that they were shot in. I...

community.adobe.com

To quote above post:
"
I checked my Sony raw files and I see what you are saying. Get Info in the Mac Finder reports Display P3 for them too. I don’t know the definitive answer, but I will guess that the Mac Finder is assuming Display P3 by default to an image that it thinks does not have a profile. That would make sense here, because as Per said, camera raw images do not have an RGB color profile because they are not yet RGB, they are still single channel raw data.

I think it’s assigning Display P3 as an assumed default because it’s being viewed on a display with a Display P3 color gamut, which is true of all current Macs with a built-in display (iMacs, MacBook laptops…). If I am right about that, if the same file was on an older Mac with an sRGB display, the same Get Info window would assume it to be sRGB.
"


I checked and my external display. It is not wide gamut and so I am not seeing the effect of it defaulting to Display P3 when not overridden - which it wont be in a raw file.

Can you go into Settings -> Display and change the profile to an sRGB one and see if that helps? If it identifies the problem great. Beyond that then I am not sure of the way forward as you want to have that beautiful screen but not with mangled colours.

 

[kenoh]

Hi all,

An update that the TK Panel for photoshop has now been updated for UXP standard and so works natively in M1 PS (I am not affiliated or anything with them, but it is a good sign that we are now seeing that our tools we are used to are starting to be ported over). - Take Note DxO!!!!

I am noticing that if I leave Lightroom open for an extended period of time, the image within the window tends to flicker when I move the mouse around. Close Lightroom and restart and it is fine again.

 

[kenoh]

Edit: I got an insufficient memory error when mucking about with manually stitching a pano I was working on last week. I had expanded the canvas in photoshop to something silly big (in excess of 12,000 pixels wide and 4,000 deep). I was then trying to do a content aware fill. I also of course had lightroom, chrome (21 tabs open, youtube in 2 of them) and mail open in the background so I understand why it was running out of puff. Just posting this as a "managed to break it so not all rosy in the M1 garden" update...

 

[stillcrazyman]

Good to hear some good reports of using the M1 Macs in photo editing.

I’m still plugging away with my i7 2018 Mini. I’m at the point of waiting to see what the next generation of processors brings. An M1 Mini configured like the current M1 Pro / Max models would push me right into a new Mac.

We shall see.

 

[mackmgg]

Edit: I got an insufficient memory error when mucking about with manually stitching a pano I was working on last week. I had expanded the canvas in photoshop to something silly big (in excess of 12,000 pixels wide and 4,000 deep). I was then trying to do a content aware fill. I also of course had lightroom, chrome (21 tabs open, youtube in 2 of them) and mail open in the background so I understand why it was running out of puff. Just posting this as a "managed to break it so not all rosy in the M1 garden" update...

Have you updated to 12.1? On 12.0 I had a memory leak and had run into some issues occasionally, but it seems to be fixed now. Of course I've got an M1 with 32GB of RAM (whereas my old Intel was 16GB) so I haven't hit any limitations yet even with large panos! Just did a 50000x4000 pixel one just fine. Took about 30 seconds to generate the pano in Lightroom, and another 30 seconds to export a JPG. Would've been many minutes on my old i9 laptop!

The only time I've really completely run out of memory was a bug in a script I made, where it not only used all 32GB of my real memory, it also used up all remaining disk space on the SSD before macOS killed the process!

 

[kenoh]

Have you updated to 12.1? On 12.0 I had a memory leak and had run into some issues occasionally, but it seems to be fixed now. Of course I've got an M1 with 32GB of RAM (whereas my old Intel was 16GB) so I haven't hit any limitations yet even with large panos! Just did a 50000x4000 pixel one just fine. Took about 30 seconds to generate the pano in Lightroom, and another 30 seconds to export a JPG. Would've been many minutes on my old i9 laptop!

The only time I've really completely run out of memory was a bug in a script I made, where it not only used all 32GB of my real memory, it also used up all remaining disk space on the SSD before macOS killed the process!

Yep all up to date. 16GB of ram at my end. I suspect it was the Chrome tabs using memory and then the content aware fill consuming a chunk.

lol... Funny on the script comment. I have had a couple of those with my shoddy quality control on my scripting.

 

[stillcrazyman]

All in all, I’d still prefer to have 32GB of RAM just for sake of comfort.
I hope the new machines will allow that config.

 

[Robotti]

Lightroom consumes excessive amount of memory, if an external display is used. I'm sure it's a software problem that will be fixed at some point, but it's very annoying. I constantly run out of memory with just Lightroom Classic open, even though I have 64GB. For now, my options are either restart Lightroom often enough, disable GPU in Lightroom or use the Macbook Pro's display. When using internal display only, memory usage stops at around 13 gigs, which is what I've been used to seeing with Intel Macs.

 

[MCAsan]

The wife runs LrC on her M1 Mac mini 16GB without problem. I do likewise using C1P on my M1 mini.

 

[citysnaps]

I've been running LrC on my M1 MBA for about a year now without issue. My MBA has turned into my favorite computer.

 

[kenoh]

I've been running LrC on my M1 MBA for about a year now without issue. My MBA has turned into my favorite computer.

I really enjoy mine too (M1 Mini) however, I got a tutorial to do and the image that came with it was from a Fuji GFX100s and the M1 stuttered a little teeny bit. Nothing of concern mind you.

BTW the images off the GFX are GORGEOUS.

 

[mollyc]

I really enjoy mine too (M1 Mini) however, I got a tutorial to do and the image that came with it was from a Fuji GFX100s and the M1 stuttered a little teeny bit. Nothing of concern mind you.

BTW the images off the GFX are GORGEOUS.

you have a fuji gfx also? is there a camera you don't (or haven't) owned?

 

[kenoh]

you have a fuji gfx also? is there a camera you don't (or haven't) owned?

No no... (not yet anyway). The tutorial I downloaded came with a GFX file to learn along with.

 

[Slartibart]

Edit: I got an insufficient memory error when mucking about with manually stitching a pano I was working on last week. I had expanded the canvas in photoshop to something silly big (in excess of 12,000 pixels wide and 4,000 deep).

Is this with the latest LR and Monterey? By any chance you tried some other software for stitching? I occasionally stitch much bigger panos from 12bit/16bit images on an iPP 2020 with 6GB RAM without any problem… in Affinity Photo though.

 

[kenoh]

Is this with the latest LR and Monterey? By any chance you tried some other software for stitching? I occasionally stitch much bigger panos from 12bit/16bit images on an iPP 2020 with 6GB RAM without any problem… in Affinity Photo though.

It was Monterey, M1 native LR -> open as layers in photoshop with a load of tabs open on chrome.

16 bit images from raws. Each raw was from a 24mp camera.

Dont get me wrong, I am sure it was not the mac mini fault. was just adding some contrast as I had been gushing about the M1 previously so felt a bit of contrast was needed i.e. it isnt perfect.

I also suggested that you don't need more RAM so it was also a bit of a Mea Culpa as it bit me in the bum.