I've recently started buying gear to get into the hobby of SLR photography, and I'm finding that my current system makes the post shoot a real pain. Last weekend I was out doing what I would like to consider 'light' action shooting at my local paintball field, and produced 860 RAW photos from only a handful of games. I'm expecting to be taking several thousand on a good day of action shooting. (You know, after spare batteries, extra SDHC cards. Wonder why I can never find a cheap hobby to be interested in.)


My current system looks like this:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750, 2.66ghz (dual core)
Gigabyte P35-DS3L
6 GB Ram
Radeon HD 5770
~300 GB system drive
~500 GB "Steam Drive"

I'm still trying to figure out where I'll really get the most benefits for reviewing and processing. I'm expecting I'll end up using Adobe Lightroom, which might make things a little faster than Canon's software.

Right now I'm considering gutting my case, keeping the power supply, graphics card, and the hard drives (For programs). Then new motherboard, processor (i5 likely), 16GB of ram, and 2-4 1TB hard drives. I figure that should do me for awhile, then throw in a networked drive enclosure later in the fall. Next summer I'll consider reusing the old gear from the system to make a file server.

Ideas, thoughts, comments?

Why raw images?

Raw images are huge. Assuming you have a high megapixel camera, such as 18MP cameras that are now common, that is a huge number of pixels. Most cameras encode to jpeg with great quality. Most cameras can be set to use minimal compression, some support lossless compression.

Generally all you get with raw compression is extra sensor noise. If your camera has lossless compression or "very large" jpeg image formats, you won't lose anything significant.


The slight compression artifacts you will have with such a huge image are difficult to notice unless you are highly zoomed in a computer screen. 12MP cameras were the 'magic number', where it generates a 1:1 true photo-quality 9"x14" image when printed. If you want a larger 1:1 shot like a 16"x20" you will need a 31MP camera. Obviously any smaller print will have so much extra detail that it needs to lose information in order to print.

Generally you use software to produce large wall-size pictures because they can remove artifacts.

Do you have some particular reason you are using raw images?

RAW isn't compression, raw is the 'raw' sensor data, unprocessed, and contains more data per pixel. Converting directly to jpeg can cause white/black clipping which can be avoided by doing post shoot processing on the images when you have more time to worry about things like perfect white balance. When you're shooting a fast sport like Paintball you don't really have time to go back and fiddle with camera settings because cloud density has changed and is now blocking more or less light. You set white balance to a general average, keep shooting as fast as the hardware allows, and fix it after.

Space is cheap these days, so why toss out data before you need to?

I'd go with an SSD system drive and a much larger data drive. If all you want is storage space hard drives are cheap as balls. I'd go with something like a 40 GB system SSD for windows and photoshop, then a decent 1+TB data drive. If you want to take it a step further get a small ~20GB system SSD, then a 100GB fast HD for your programs, and a 1TB+ HD for data. I haven't done the price breakdown on which of these options would be more or less expensive, but most of the data I've seen says a >10000RPM harddrive will be just as fast in programs, but an SSD has huge performance increases for the OS with similar performance to the 10000RPM drive inside programs.


I definitely wouldn't make a new computer without putting my operating system on a SSD though. The performance increase is supposed to be pretty awesome.

RAW isn't compression, raw is the 'raw' sensor data, unprocessed, and contains more data per pixel. Converting directly to jpeg can cause white/black clipping which can be avoided by doing post shoot processing on the images when you have more time to worry about things like perfect white balance. When you're shooting a fast sport like Paintball you don't really have time to go back and fiddle with camera settings because cloud density has changed and is now blocking more or less light. You set white balance to a general average, keep shooting as fast as the hardware allows, and fix it after.

Space is cheap these days, so why toss out data before you need to?

Okay, just making sure you have a reason for doing it.

"Several days worth of images" can mean different things to different people. I generally fill one 32GB class 10 SDHC card when I'm doing anything serious (I carry 2 32GB and a 16GB), so I understand the pain of storage space.



It depends on how much of an issue money is, and what you are doing for your processing.

For your machine, I'd go with 16GB of RAM instead of 6. The 64-bit version can support it, and it will be faster than going out to a swap drive, even an SSD swap drive.

With that in mind, if you are working with the images enough to require a swap drive, or processing images in batch, an SSD is definitely the way to go. Even a much cheaper small SSD drive can improve Photoshop's endless craving for memory.


What are you doing with processing? If you only have one image at a time it generally isn't too bad. When you have batch processing or working with many images you'll want more.

The big thing is the data throughput. You want a big CPU cache, you want a fast bus, you want lots of memory, and you want a fast data swap drive.

I'd take the i7 instead of the i5. They have more CPU cache so it keeps the CPU better fed with data. Or if you can afford it comfortably, get one of the newer Xeons with a 12MB (or more) CPU cache and fast bus (preferably 1333), plus get the good memory to go with it. The extra cache and bus speed again keeps Photoshop happier with its data processing. It is very data-centric. But it is still slow because .. well, Photoshop is always slow.

I agree with your use of external drives for long-term storage; I've got two attached to my machine. Before working with the images copy them to the local SSD before use. Make sure you have a good HDD controller to take advantage of the speed.

I'd also add a tablet if you don't have one. Even the fairly cheap Bamboo Pen ($50 or less) can help improve retouching of images. Pressure sensitivity is such a wonderful thing you'll never go back to a mouse for it.



You're right, it is a very expensive hobby. I've probably got $10,000 worth of lenses and equipment on my Amazon cart just watching how the prices change.

I was debating if I should go with an SSD for my system drive, or spend the extra on 16 gigs of ram vs 8, and extra storage/backup space.

With a goal of around $800 CAD, I'm currently planning to go with:

Intel Core i5 2500K Quad Core
Gigabyte P67X-UD3-B3 mother board
4x4GB DDR3 ram
and 3-4 WD Green 1.5 TB drives. I'll use one for games, at least two for photos.

I would keep a 0.5 TB drive from my current build for a system/programs drive, and likely keep my smaller old drive in there for now as an extra local backup for the favourite shots.
Radeon 5770 that I have now will do till I upgrade in crossfire or a whole new card. (I'll wait and see which is more cost effective this fall.)


I should likely get a new set of fans and a fan controller for the case. My Antec P180 is getting a little old now, and I'm starting to hear a few odd rattles from the case from time to time during a boot, but I really don't know what to get for that. I want quiet fans, and a simple controller that lets me easily switch fans up for games and heavy processing. I'm willing to up the budget a bit for these, as if I don't replace them now then I know I'll get a failure in a few months, and would be nice to just redo all the wiring in the case.



I had been planning on just leaving the SSD for another system cycle, as I figure they're still rather new and there will likely be a nice little price drop/capacity jump coming sooner or later. Plus getting one represents a crap load of research time. But if someone can convince me on the benefits of a given model, ideally from NCIX where I'm planning to order, then I'll likely break easily.


I also want to set up a data server by next summer, likely a semi-custom case with a boat load of drives, ideally RAID 5/6, but I really don't know what is worth it, and most of the articles I'm finding on the topic of RAIDs are 2-5 years old. I would want this more as a primary in house backup/archive server, so the write speeds aren't actually all that critical and the only thing the box would be running is a light linux build, so maybe a software raid would work well enough?



For my image editing, it is more the issue of review and minor level bumping/light corrections, more than a full blown Photoshop workup. Ideally I won't even load photoshop, but rather use Lightroom's workflow. The big issue has been simply processing and sorting the huge amount of photos I take into Best, Good, Decent, and tosser groups. (I hope to do a lot of paintball photography, which often means you can find yourself with 20 nearly identical shots. If you're lucky you'll get one that will be perfect with an explosion of paint off the guy's mask, two or three will be interesting shots with balls bouncing off the air bunker, and the rest will be ok, but not overly interesting. And then I'll often get that one where the autofocus picked up on a fly or something right in front of the lens and the rest is a dull blur, but that is what rapid shooting is for.)

I had been planning on just leaving the SSD for another system cycle, as I figure they're still rather new and there will likely be a nice little price drop/capacity jump coming sooner or later. Plus getting one represents a crap load of research time. But if someone can convince me on the benefits of a given model, ideally from NCIX where I'm planning to order, then I'll likely break easily.

Practically any SSD at this point will give you huge performance benefits. Going from a mechanical hard drive to any modern SSD is the most noticeable upgrade you can make. Once my new laptop gets in, I plan on putting in an OCZ Vertex 3 which is the fastest thing out there at this point. Based on your budget however... I don't know that an SSD is in the cards.

Firstly, shoot RAW, why because you will regret not shooting it at some point :-) I only shoot RAW, sure it takes up more space but space is cheap.

But back to your computer...

I do a lot of photography...

My rig is:
Core I7 920
12gb RAM
3 tb storage
2x 24 monitors

Win7 64bit and lightroom 3.

this is about 1.5 years old now, and still is going strong.

Plus I borrowed a Spyder and colour calibrated the monitors as well.

I can understand wanting more and faster storage space, but I'm sort of wondering what you could possibly be doing with these photographs that would render your current processor and RAM insufficient.

I can understand wanting more and faster storage space, but I'm sort of wondering what you could possibly be doing with these photographs that would render your current processor and RAM insufficient.

The answer to your wondering is Photoshop.

Even the smaller editions like Lightroom are incredibly data-heavy programs.

The program itself is huge, even without images loaded.

Then add the decompressed images themselves, an 18MP image is roughly 72MB if completely uncompressed, so I imagine they have ways to handle it. This giant image needs to be processed to the resolution and zoom level shown on your screen; the do it by making multiple copies of the data in smaller and more manageable chunks. That's just the beginning.

As an example, I just opened a 4 layer 18MP composition I've been working on and watched Resource Manager as it grew by a full gigabyte of ram. That's just opening the one file.

As the app spends time to combine multiple layers, combine alpha channels in each image, and constantly re-compositing as you make changes in one layer that needs to get mixed with the other layers with various layer operations such as 'multiply', and other image processing. Then add all the "undo" information for each operation ... it adds up quickly for both processing time and storage space.