photo editing - hardware priority 5K imac

[ryanide]

I upgraded my iMac 5K 2015 4.0Ghz i7 to 40GB RAM and I think it was a waste as LR and Capture One barely use it. I does look like the CPU and GPU are being used more when cycling through my images.

 

[LTMstudios_Andy]

I upgraded my 2013 macbook pro Retina 13" to the 2017 i5 3.8ghz iMac, 2TB fusion drive with 32gb ram. Huge difference. I use Lightroom and Photoshop intensively editing wedding photos (35-40mb files in size). Running Catalogs of 120+ gb in size. Set photoshop performance to 100% memory usage and it's buttery smooth with no lag. Just make sure you have plenty of ram to set it at 100% cause both LR and PS are memory hogs while doing this (some of my wedding projects LR alone takes 12gb+). My system uses near 20gb of ram just running LR and listening to itunes any other programs running... Also I didn't opt for the full ssd upgrade due to it not fitting my budget at the time so I just place active projects on a external ssd and it's still blazingly fast. Snappy while scrolling through images. So the specs you're opting for you won't be disappointed.

 

[EdwardWeston]

I upgraded my iMac 5K 2015 4.0Ghz i7 to 40GB RAM and I think it was a waste as LR and Capture One barely use it. I does look like the CPU and GPU are being used more when cycling through my images.

According to Phase One - Source: https://www.phaseone.com/Search/Article.aspx?articleid=1720

Open CL will dedicate memory to several actions in Capture One.
The following outlines the softwares demand;
• Preview Update with different settings, styles etc: RAM
• Sorting/Rating: CPU cores and SSD speed
• Fit Image to Screen: GPU cores
• Process time: GPU processing units and CPU's and RAM

So for SORTING and CULLING - CPU and Hard Drive Speed

 

[danwells]

I certainly use most of my 16 GB (MacBook Pro), and I've seen Lightroom itself use 6-8 GB (plus some tasks that seem to be spawned by Lightroom) - I am pretty sure I tweaked an LR setting to let it go above 50%... A friend has had LR above 32 GB (absolutely huge library above 500,000 images!).

I'd certainly have a minimum of 16 GB of RAM with any significant (thousands of images) library, or if there are high resolution cameras involved. 32 GB with any really large (100,000 image?) library. My friend with the 500,000 image library saw a big boost from having 64 GB. Yes, Lightroom will run in 8 GB, but it will hit disk caching unless the library is small (both in number of images and in resolution).

At least the catalog and previews should be on SSD - the originals for large libraries quickly become impractical to store on SSDs, because several terabytes of photos are not hard to come up with!