Processor speed vs. more cores for Photoshop CS6?

[DennisD]

Intel I7-980x @ 3.3Ghz
12 GB RAM
ASUS motherboard
Video GE Force 9800GTX+ (rather modest) works well with dual monitors.
Windows 7 - 64 bit
Intel SSD 160 Gb for OS only
Intel SSD for scratch
Data drives 2TB in RAID 1 array, additional data storage swapable 2TB, backup swapable 3TB

I built the above system myself and could not be happier. Speed is phenomenal !

It is used only for photography applications, e.g. PS CS5, LR, PTGUI, HFocus, et. al.

Frequently my file sizes grow to 4 Gb and some stitched files as high as 8 Gb.
Never any problem and PS efficiency consistently at 100%.

- The only drag is saving files to disk. Large files can take several minutes to write, although reading from disk is much faster.

[paulr]

The only drag is saving files to disk. Large files can take several minutes to write, although reading from disk is much faster.

What format are you saving in? Opening and saving layered PSD files is always a bottleneck. You're down to one core doing all that work ... it's just about the only time your disks will be waiting for the processor to finish. If you can spare the disk space, saving uncompressed layered tifs is much faster. Some of the compression options for tif files are also quite a bit faster than PSD, although obviously slower than uncompressed. You can choose the compression for the file itself and for the layers. In other words, an annoying number of options to consider. If I remember right, zip for the file and RLE for the layers is fastest, but gives the least compression.

[Greg Miller]

With CS6, saving files is much less of an annoyance. CS6 saves in the background so you can continue to work (on the same file or another file) while saving the file. CS6 also auto-saves in the background so if the computer or Photoshop crashes unexpectedly you do not lose all of your work. When you re-open Photoshop, it re-opens the files that you had open.

[DennisD]

What format are you saving in? Opening and saving layered PSD files is always a bottleneck.

Hi Paulr. I was referring specifically to PSD files which I frequently save while I'm working. I tend to work non destructively and my files often accumulate many layers, etc. Such files can grow very large very quickly. Therefore the slow saving with large PSDs.

TIFFs save fast on my machine, but there's a 4Gb size limit to TIFF files, as I recall, and I often exceed that. PS-CS6, on the other hand, resolves these issues with background saves, etc. as pointed out by Greg Miller in his post following yours. I just have not upgraded yet.

[Scott Perry]

I have much the same question as the start of the thread, but with an additional specific.

I plan to focus on macro photography using focus stacking with a bit of HDR thrown in. Each RAW file from my D800 is about 36 meg. I will occasionally use as many as 100 shots and use either Photoshop CS6 or Zerene stacker to process them into a single image. While Photoshop may support multi-core I haven't a clue as to whether or not this processing takes place in a single thread or is distributed across multiple threads. Having a slight inkling of the processing algorithm I suspect it is a single thread. It doesn't seem worth the investment for a company like Adobe to invest in the R&D to figure out how to multi-thread it. Anyone know for sure?

Any recommendations or thoughts on a workstation given this task. I would guess that a system optimized for video processing is probably a decent fit for this task. I speced a Mac Pro for the job to give me the ability to choose Windows and Mac OSs. The problem is that the system costs about $6K which is a lot for a hobby. Guidance?

[Scott Perry]

I'd like to apologize in advance for asking the preceding macro question in a large format forum. I feel a bit like an infidel. In some ways macro is the opposite of large format.

However, the file sizes I am dealing with are more like large format files than your run of the mill DSLR file tasks for photoshop. I'm a brother from another planet.