Hey all,
I’ve been running a Hackintosh machine for years, but I am now at the point where I can no longer update my OS from High Sierra without new hardware, and I’d really like to update LR and PS from 2020 to 2022.
At the time I built my Hackintosh, I was doing a lot of freelance video editing from home. My career as an editor has gotten to the point where the vast majority of the time, the studio provides my equipment, so video editing is less of a concern for me than it used to be, but it’s still something I will need to do occasionally with my own machine on smaller projects. I also record music in Ableton Live and Logic Pro. At the moment I shoot a 24 MP a7iii but will probably get a new camera within 2 years.
LR starts to lag a lot with more than 4 local adjustments, at which point it becomes borderline unusable. C1 runs pretty smoothly even when I use all of the layers, so I do more detailed raw work in C1.
I do a lot of my heavy editing in Photoshop with dozens of layers and smart objects. Most of my files wind up being too big to save as a PSD or TIFF so I use PSBs. I work in 16 bit.
The most time consuming work that I do in PS involves dodging and burning by hand with my Wacom, often in conjunction with luminosity mask selections via Lumenzia. This works fine and acceptably quickly for the most part. I also use frequently separation for certain kinds of skin retouching, fly away hair removal and complex object removal. Sometimes I will also do some local color correction with gradient maps and selective color to fix color casts in preparation for grading. After I am done with dodging and burning, frequency separation, and color correction, I turn all of my retouch layers into a smart object so that I can apply filters nondestructively but go back and edit my retouch within the smart object as needed, save the retouch layers in the smart object and then have them update in the master doc. This is a big part of my workflow but creating and updating the smart object is very slow. After I create the smart object, I use camera raw and liquify as smart filters and then I stack a bunch of adjustment layers and luminosity masks on top of that to color grade. Ultimately, I use Lumenzia to apply local sharpening and then send the finished edit to Greg Benz’s web sharpener for output sharpening and grain. That’s the workflow for 95% of my images.
In PS, select and mask is also slow and very buggy at times, saving large documents takes a very long time, content aware fill is very slow, using Lumenzia for sharpening is slow, and sending edits to web sharpener is pretty slow as well. Being able to create luminosity selections with Lumenzia could certainly be faster and would save me a chunk of time. As mentioned, working with smart objects is excruciatingly slow, and I would really like to see some meaningful improvement there since they are so crucial in my workflow. I also want access to some of the new masking features in PS and LR, lens profiles for my newer lenses, better local adjustment responsiveness in raw, and the improved color grading features in Camera Raw. I am thinking about purchasing Topaz denoise, but I shoot at lower ISOs most of the time.
If I do get a laptop, it will be used as a desktop with a bunch of stuff plugged into it the vast majority of the time. I have thought about just moving to Windows, but even when I’ve had to use PCs for work every day for months and months, I still can’t really get used to the OS.
These are the specs of my current machine.
Internals
i4770k processor
GTX 770 4GB graphics card
32GB Ram
Samsung 512 GB SSD system drive
3x 4TB internal spinning SATA drives
Externals
2x 8TB external USB 3 drives
1x 5TB USB 3 drive
Focusrite 18i20 USB audio interface
1440p primary monitor that uses a dual DVI connection
Cheap ancient 1080p monitor that I just use for bins, folders, etc. to clear screen real estate.
Wacom small tablet for dodging and burning
Logitech gaming mouse that requires a powered USB connection
Macally keyboard
So, do you think an M1 pro with 32GB ram would be a significant performance boost for LR, C1 and Photoshop? Should I spring for the max? Should I just hang in there and see what the new iMacs look like? I assume I am going to need a bunch of dongles to plug everything in.
I’ve been running a Hackintosh machine for years, but I am now at the point where I can no longer update my OS from High Sierra without new hardware, and I’d really like to update LR and PS from 2020 to 2022.
At the time I built my Hackintosh, I was doing a lot of freelance video editing from home. My career as an editor has gotten to the point where the vast majority of the time, the studio provides my equipment, so video editing is less of a concern for me than it used to be, but it’s still something I will need to do occasionally with my own machine on smaller projects. I also record music in Ableton Live and Logic Pro. At the moment I shoot a 24 MP a7iii but will probably get a new camera within 2 years.
LR starts to lag a lot with more than 4 local adjustments, at which point it becomes borderline unusable. C1 runs pretty smoothly even when I use all of the layers, so I do more detailed raw work in C1.
I do a lot of my heavy editing in Photoshop with dozens of layers and smart objects. Most of my files wind up being too big to save as a PSD or TIFF so I use PSBs. I work in 16 bit.
The most time consuming work that I do in PS involves dodging and burning by hand with my Wacom, often in conjunction with luminosity mask selections via Lumenzia. This works fine and acceptably quickly for the most part. I also use frequently separation for certain kinds of skin retouching, fly away hair removal and complex object removal. Sometimes I will also do some local color correction with gradient maps and selective color to fix color casts in preparation for grading. After I am done with dodging and burning, frequency separation, and color correction, I turn all of my retouch layers into a smart object so that I can apply filters nondestructively but go back and edit my retouch within the smart object as needed, save the retouch layers in the smart object and then have them update in the master doc. This is a big part of my workflow but creating and updating the smart object is very slow. After I create the smart object, I use camera raw and liquify as smart filters and then I stack a bunch of adjustment layers and luminosity masks on top of that to color grade. Ultimately, I use Lumenzia to apply local sharpening and then send the finished edit to Greg Benz’s web sharpener for output sharpening and grain. That’s the workflow for 95% of my images.
In PS, select and mask is also slow and very buggy at times, saving large documents takes a very long time, content aware fill is very slow, using Lumenzia for sharpening is slow, and sending edits to web sharpener is pretty slow as well. Being able to create luminosity selections with Lumenzia could certainly be faster and would save me a chunk of time. As mentioned, working with smart objects is excruciatingly slow, and I would really like to see some meaningful improvement there since they are so crucial in my workflow. I also want access to some of the new masking features in PS and LR, lens profiles for my newer lenses, better local adjustment responsiveness in raw, and the improved color grading features in Camera Raw. I am thinking about purchasing Topaz denoise, but I shoot at lower ISOs most of the time.
If I do get a laptop, it will be used as a desktop with a bunch of stuff plugged into it the vast majority of the time. I have thought about just moving to Windows, but even when I’ve had to use PCs for work every day for months and months, I still can’t really get used to the OS.
These are the specs of my current machine.
Internals
i4770k processor
GTX 770 4GB graphics card
32GB Ram
Samsung 512 GB SSD system drive
3x 4TB internal spinning SATA drives
Externals
2x 8TB external USB 3 drives
1x 5TB USB 3 drive
Focusrite 18i20 USB audio interface
1440p primary monitor that uses a dual DVI connection
Cheap ancient 1080p monitor that I just use for bins, folders, etc. to clear screen real estate.
Wacom small tablet for dodging and burning
Logitech gaming mouse that requires a powered USB connection
Macally keyboard
So, do you think an M1 pro with 32GB ram would be a significant performance boost for LR, C1 and Photoshop? Should I spring for the max? Should I just hang in there and see what the new iMacs look like? I assume I am going to need a bunch of dongles to plug everything in.
