Hot answers tagged performance
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TL;DR answer
In general, Canon DSLRs require a maximum aperture of at least f/5.6 to autofocus. Depending on the camera model, and with some exceptions, a maximum aperture of at least f/2.8 or f/4 enables cross-type and/or high-precision focusing. EOS-1 series cameras and the EOS 5D Mark III (with the latest firmware) can autofocus at f/8, but only with ...
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The reviewer may have used a sample of one. Lenses will vary.
The reviewer is measuring scientifically in the lab, pixel peeping using test charts and compiling MTF curves. Owners of the lens are taking vacations shots and pictures of the family dog.
the reveiwer has experience with a number of other lenses, including pro lenses. Owners of the ...
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You are asking two very different questions, because Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop of course do not have the same system requirements or use the same system resources.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4
Graphics Card:
Lightroom does not currently utilize the GPU for performance improvements. It is outlined in the Lightroom documentation here.
...
11
The answer is, it depends. Generally, firmware upgrades can
Correct flaws in the original firmware. For instance, if there were a metering mistake in the original firmware, that can get fixed.
Expose new software functionality. I'm thinking of CHDK here, that brings new functionality to canon powershot cameras (such as RAW shooting, timed shooting, ...
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Something that hasn't been mentioned yet: in 'Catalog Settings' turn off 'Automatically write changes into XMP'. This will prevent LR from automatically dumping its catalog metadata, keywords, rating, labels and develop settings back to your photo files. By doing so you will reduce the number of disk operations performed by LR. You can still write your ...
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I recently got an SSD drive for my primary boot drive. It was a moderately fast one, with consistent 270mb/s read and write speeds. I've used lightroom with the catalog both on the SSD and on a normal HDD, and I did not see a whole lot of performance improvement for my catalog, which is about 12,000 photos or so.
As I started investigating how to improve ...
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Upgrading to Lightroom 3.2 is cheap and easy. You'll find version 3 a lot more responsive than 2.6, and version 3.2 even more so. In most situations where Lightroom 2 makes you wait, Lightroom 3 will do its processing in the background, so you can continue to interact with the program.
You didn't say what hardware you're running, but if you're using ...
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I have actually tested this by separating some of my photos (around 1200) in to another catalogue as I was worried about putting all my eggs in one basked (incase of a failure). I found that there was very little performance increase by doing this, at least, that I could see or measure. My catalogue was ~3100 images in size prior to this.
One option I can ...
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In theory, it could if the camera used the right strategy for reducing the image size.
As you noted, with current crop-sensor cameras, the raw image remains the same no matter what JPEG size you have set. The JPEG image is simply scaled. This can somewhat reduce the appearance of noise, but the reduction is due to the image scaling algorithm (you can't fit ...
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All image previews are stored as JPEG files of various sizes inside of a .lrprev file. The loading speed of the preview images will likely not change much if you switch to DNG. The benefit of DNG is that it is an open standard format, and can keep the metadata in the same file as the image data, which simplifies portability. On the flip side, you would incur ...
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The speed of the memory card is definitely one constraining factor but as you suspect there are other bottlenecks. First there is the internal memory buffer of the camera. Each camera only has so much RAM installed. When you shoot this buffer is filled first and the camera does what it can to quickly empty the buffer to allow for more shooting. The size of ...
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In this very specific case:
I found an article on tests of GPU acceleration in Photoshop CS6 from Puget Systems -- a small retailer I'd never heard of, but their methodology seems sound. They actually test with the two video cards you're considering, so this is a very good data source. (The GT610 model they use isn't the mobile version, but reportedly ...
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I would recommend the higher CPU in this case. GPU acceleration in Photoshop itself can make a sizable difference, but only with a good GPU. The 610 is a bare bones "desktop" card that isn't really any better than the 4000. The only advantage it offers is the dedicated video memory, but that's going to have minimal impact when working with most gpu ...
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Given that you have a Canon, the lower RAW modes, mRAW and sRAW, DO INDEED UTILIZE ALL of the available sensor pixels to produce a richer result without the need for bayer interpolation. The actual output format, while it is still contained within a .cr2 Canon RAW image file, is encoded in a Y'CbCr format, similar to many video pulldown formats. It stores ...
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Without knowing the amount of RAM or processor speed, it's hard to make specific recommendations, but Lightroom will perform significantly better with more RAM and a faster processor.
It also doesn't hurt to occasionally optimize the Lightroom catalog, which helps increase the efficiency of operations. On a PC it's under Edit->Catalog Settings, on a Mac ...
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Don't let the catalogue grow too large.
Separating your pictures into several catalogues can bring a lot of speed.
For me the main waiting point is waiting for Lightroom to render the 1:1 previews - if I let Lightroom render those on import I can usually work faster.
Of course putting the catalogue on a fast hard disk (SSD) helps, too.
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Yes, there is a noticeable improvement if you're using a DAM tool like Lightroom or Aperture. The bottle neck in such programs is the disk drive. To see this for yourself, import a set of files and then watch the Activity Monitor. With Lightroom, you'll see that the disk activity will hit 100% while thumbnails get generated. CPU activity meanwhile will be ...
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A great deal here comes down to the simple fact that most of what's measured in a typical lens test has almost nothing to do with how that lens will perform in real life.
First of all, most lens tests emphasize resolution. This gives some idea of the largest print you could produce from a picture and still have it look sharp -- but doesn't tell you much (if ...
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I work with 21MP photos and in an effort to speed up Lightroom on my desktop I looked at what I could improve and it seemed replacing the disks was the way to go. Unfortunately, I can't say about 5400 RPM vs. 7200 RPM but I replaced a pair of fairly zippy Hitachi SATA 15,000 RPM (!) drives by a pair of 160GB Intel X25G2 SSD. The improvement was noticeable, ...
4
A camera can only write out information so fast. So once you have a card that can be written to as fast as the camera can write out there is no benefit to getting a faster card. The I/O bottleneck is on the camera side. The only benefit you'll see is when it comes to reading off the card onto the computer. Whether that benefit is worth the cost difference is ...
3
Just wanted to point that the information about focus points in EOS 600D/550D/500D/450D might not be accurate.
" Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi (400D), Rebel XSi (450D), Rebel T1i (500D), Rebel T2i (550D), Rebel T3i (600D), 30D
The center point is high-precision cross-type only when the aperture is at least f/2.8. If below f/2.8 but at least f/5.6, all points ...
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A SSD will boost all read and write operations to and from disk. The data transfer rate on a SSD is, depending on the model, between 100MB/s and 500 MB/s, while hard disks provide about 100MB/s. Latency and access times to your data on the disk are massively faster than on a hard disk.
Early SSD models did lose speed the fuller the disk got, current models ...
3
The SSD makes a really huge difference on my system but it is a Windows 7 64-bit machine, so the file-system is different from yours.
The thing is I kept the regular HDD for the boot drive and another two (RAID-0) for data (not photos). The SSD is used by Lightroom exclusively :) and it does not have much room left already since I could only afford 240GB ...
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I think what you're seeing here is the difference between an objective review and subjective reviews. The DPreview review includes a highly technical interactive diagram showing exactly how the image quality varies with focal length and aperture, with actual photos taken with the lens to demonstrate this. The statements you quote are statements of measured ...
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I'm going to speak from personal experience here and apparently contrary to popular opinion. I recently (within the last 3 months) switched from a 5400 rpm drive in my laptop to a 7200 rpm drive. While the difference in many things was quite significant - I didn't feel my photo editing experienced much of a bump up. I'm not saying that there wasn't a ...
3
There are reasons firmware upgrades are issued and that is to fix flaws (most of the time) or extend functionality (some times). In all cases, a firmware upgrade should never make things worst but it is just software, so it may happen, the firmware is programmed by humans too!
Manufacturers often put out a list of fixed issues but sometimes are very vague ...
3
Tim Grey, whom I would consider a reliable source, once stated in his newsletter:
Adobe indicates there is no practical limit to catalog size from a performance perspective, and I can tell you from experience that even with 283,669 in a catalog, performance remains good.
This was a little more than one year ago and he referred to recent versions of ...
3
I tried this experiment, and found that performance was effectively unchanged with two catalogs, where one was about 1/10 the size of the other.
What really made me give the experiment up, though, was all the hidden costs to doing this:
If you want to share keyword hierarchies between the libraries, now you have to spend time exporting and importing ...
2
A great tip for speeding up performance in Aperture 3 is to turn of the Faces feature. I found this to be a substantial speed increase on a MBP i5 2.4GHz with 4GB RAM.
From the Aperture > Preferences (Cmd+,) menu, click the General tab, turn off Enable Faces.
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First of all, you need a graphics card. If you use embeded graphics or the like, you may suffer.
Second, get the fastest memory interface possible. You actually do not need much memory, probably anything over 64MB is overkill for Lightroom since it does not process on the graphics card, just redraw a lot.
Third, there is no third ;) Other graphics card ...
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