Mac Mini/Studio for Lightroom/Photoshop

[8bit]

I recently acquired a Mac Mini M1. It's not high-spec, 8GB RAM only but I put Lightroom and Photoshop on it to play with and am currently editing a set of images I shot last weekend at a sports event. It's fine, other than doing any AI-powered functions, currently it's crawling through applying a basic denoise setting to 80 photos.

I do have a Windows PC with a fast GPU which I am sure is much quicker but I'd like to switch fully to Mac so am wondering, is it the lack of a GPU that is causing the poor performance here or lack of RAM? Am wondering whether a later/better spec Mac Mini would improve things, or if I'd need to go for a Studio.

[GetCarter]

I would say this but Mac is always the way to go (I use both Mac and PC, so am not a fanboy), but you'll need absolute minimum 16 ram, and 32 for it to run smoothly. M4 chip and min 1TB HD and you'll fly.

Matters not that much what box it comes in.

For my photography I use a very fast MacPro laptop, and connect it to an external monitor. Also connects permanently to an external Sandisk to store all the raw files, rather than fill up the HD.

[bcr5784]

I was looking into this. A you tube video compared a top end Mac Studio with a top end PC at the same price (over $4000) and the PC basically was significantly faster and wiped the floor with the Mac for some operations. Sure the Mac was far more compact, much quieter and consumed only a fraction of the power - but if bang per buck in video editing is your criterion, the PC easily wins. PCs are much easier to upgrade when the next generation of graphics cards come along. I can certainly see the appeal of something as discrete as the Mac but...

[eltawater]

I can only offer a Windows PC perspective on Lightroom classic but fwiw:

Ancient Intel i5-9500T (no GPU)
- 8GB: uncomfortable
- 16GB: good balance
- 32GB: comfortable overkill, about 15-18GB free most of the time, suspect windows cache expanded rather than Lightroom using it

Denoise times
- No GPU: 2-3 minutes per image
- Nvidia 8GB 4060 running externally using a 1x PCI-E motherboard connector: 15 seconds per image

After upgrading to an AMD Ryzen 7 255 mini PC with a built in 780M GPU, I've actually found it performs comparably to the Nvidia 4060 when denoising using pureRaw so I've not needed to turn on the Nvidia at all. If I turn off the GPU acceleration, we're back to minutes per image for denoise.

I would expect the Mac to benefit in a similar way.

tl;dr more RAM always helpful but GPU will very likely be the bottleneck for denoise. Also helps for offload when exporting.

[Fordo]

Dont forget, modern mac's with Apple chips - the Ram is shared between the processor and the GPU. So you do need a good chunk of it, as its also your graphics memory. I have a 16gb mac mini M2, and have occasionally run out, just doing some basic video editing.


Before investing in something, might be worth installing an app like "istat menus". - that'll give you stats for memory, CPU, RAM usage, GPU usage. etc - so you can see what your bottleneck actually is.

Ive known people who've upgraded and been disappointed..... then i find out they are working off an old slow 2.5" hard drive, for example!

But i wouldn't be surprised if 8gb is holding you back a bit - Apple really shouldn't offer any computer with just 8gb of ram these days!

Also, Apple quirk ive noticed - a previous gen max chip, will usually out perform a current gen pro chip., when it comes to video / graphics / photo work. So its not always worth getting the latest say m5 pro chip, if for the same price or less you can find a simialr spec m4 max. the max will end up being better, in my view

Edited by Fordo on Wednesday 4th March 11:01

[tog]

The AI Denoise in Lightroom likes a lot of processor. My newest Mac is a M2 MacBook Air that takes about a minute for each frame, but even my older Studio M1 Max takes about 20 seconds per image. (This is with 45MP Canon R5 files.)

[GetCarter]

I'm really surprised at all these figures, Mine always says the same (10 secs) and usually does it in half that.

[tog]

Well I knew a low spec MBA M2 with 8GB ram wasn't going to fly through them, but I do most of my editing at home on the Studio. If your high spec M4 does it in 10 sec then 20 secs for an older M1 Max seems fair. What res files are you working on?

[GetCarter]

tog said:

Well I knew a low spec MBA M2 with 8GB ram wasn't going to fly through them, but I do most of my editing at home on the Studio. If your high spec M4 does it in 10 sec then 20 secs for an older M1 Max seems fair. What res files are you working on?

Varies... Sony7R so 36mb mb... down to Canon GX5 and DJI Drone (smaller!). Seems to make no difference. Always says 10 secs and finishes WAY before that.

[8bit]

Thanks all, really useful.

I'm only doing stills, no video so just Lightroom and Photoshop. The PC I'm comparing it to is an 12th generation Intel i5, 32GB DDR5 and a nVidia 4070 Super GPU so it's absoutely not a fair fight Other than the AI noise reduction the Mac Mini seems to do OK, despite "only" 8GB of RAM.

I've just installed System Monitor Panel to see what the machine is doing as it's running some denoise just now and it seems to be hammering the GPU. CPU usage is about 20%, RAM about 80% so it looks like a better GPU will probably help.

[GetCarter]

Always worth mentioning, We all pay over the odds for Mac, but personally I far prefer them and will always take the hit. SO much more sexy.

Bit like Caterhams over Westfied

[StevieBee]

My feeling is that the capability of software is advancing a rate greater than the capacity of hardware needed to run it.

I'm running a very high spec Mac Studio for pro level image and video work. Even that struggles at times, particularly with processing like denoising.

[eltawater]

I think this is where some of the capabilities of third party software like PureRaw really come into their own. I can have it running batch denoise / processing on a large queue of images on a separate machine to generate the DNG files whilst I'm working on editing the images I've already imported on the main machine.

What I'd really, really, really like to see is some sort of "render farm" capability in lightroom where I can do the same thing and offload final file export work to a dedicated machine rather than have it tie up my main editing machine. There are ways and means around it with shared catalogs etc but it's a bit of a faff. I see some people have been asking for this for over a decade though.

So far I've gone as far as set my main launch shortcut for lightroom classic to only use three quarters of the cpu cores in the editing machine so that I may at least listen to youtube without stuttering in the background!

[Russet Grange]

I chucked a modest-ish RTX 3060 12Gb into my system. Previously a 4GB 1060i (I think). Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and 32 Gb RAM

LR denoise on a 25Mb RAW file dropped from a number of minutes to a number of seconds.

[8bit]

StevieBee said:

My feeling is that the capability of software is advancing a rate greater than the capacity of hardware needed to run it.

I'm running a very high spec Mac Studio for pro level image and video work. Even that struggles at times, particularly with processing like denoising.

What model/spec is your Mac, please?