Crack The Sky
Posts: 264
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Hey guys,
I have been on the waiting list for my d800 for two months now so surely its going to turn up anyday now lol...
One thing i'm having a hard time anticipating is how much going from working on 18mp files to 36mp files is going to slow me down?
I'm looking at it from a point of how much longer will dodge and burning take on the skin and will the extra resolution make things like hair more time consuming to get looking good.
If anyone has any experience with this i would love to hear your opinions.
Robert LC
Posts: 944
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Can I ask; why did you buy it? I mean where are you going to use it for where the extra detail and resolution is important for you?
Crack The Sky wrote: One thing i'm having a hard time anticipating is how much going from working on 18mp files to 36mp files is going to slow me down?
As others mentioned, it depends on the output criteria.
But also keep in mind hardware. For the same relative size brush strokes, you will need bigger brushes.
Highpass, blurs (especially surface), dust&scratches, saving files etc will take considerably longer.
If you had a killer machine, ssd drives and dozens GB of ram already, it wont be that noticeable, but else..
Crack The Sky wrote: I'm looking at it from a point of how much longer will dodge and burning take on the skin and will the extra resolution make things like hair more time consuming to get looking good.
If anyone has any experience with this i would love to hear your opinions.
Thanks
So yeah, what you mention is only part of the story.
I recently had to retouch some sneakers from a H4D-40 and the output was for web so after the raw conversion I scaled it down 50% or so and still you could see every tiny hair, and those were dust and hairs of the shoe fabric o_O
Zooming in and out (or using a separate duplicate window) is more important than ever, with such files.
Too much working on 100% and you'll end up spending time on things that wont show up on the final resolution anyways.
You need lots of RAM and HD space will get eaten up a lot quicker.
14bit raws average 75megs a piece, if you use 14bit lossless compressed they are about 42 megs a piece.
A typical tiff file for me and my workflow is averaging around 700 megs and I have had quite a few go over 1 gig.
A typical beauty shot if I don't use compression on the tiff file I had seen 2.5 gigs! Resaving it with zip compression on both the layers and the whole file brought it down to 900 megs.
As far as brush sizes, pixel #'s if I'm doing a frequency split, etc is all irrelevant because I'd always use different sizes and numbers depending on what I'm doing.
dave phoenix wrote: no reason to work on a 36mp file if the end result is a web-size file, in my opinion.
Although I have MFDB experience, I don't have much with the 40mp and over backs as I was using backs in the 18-25mp range (P21, 25, Valeo 17, etc) so you can take me with a grain of salt if you'd like...
I can see the difference in web sized files, it can possibly be because the camera is recording finer detail in the original file.
It's overkill for most shoots though, this I'm going to put out there... I foresee a lot of D800/e's hitting the used market this summer.
AAPicture
Posts: 1
Sunderland, England, United Kingdom
I just upgraded from a D7000 to a D800 and whilst the files are bigger and more detailed it doesn't seem to tax my five year old Mac Pro any more than the previous camera. The photos do have a lot more detail but I find that retouching doesn't take any more time. As someone suggested if you just want a web sized file you could probably speed things up by working on a lower res version but then if you later want a full size version you'll have to redo the retouching. Having had the camera for a few weeks I have to say the image quality is startling and a big step up from the D7000 which was itself really good. Whilst I didn't buy it for the resolution I don't think I could easily go back to a regular 16-18 MPixel camera.
AdamPhillips
Posts: 158
London, England, United Kingdom
It's quite normal to work on medium format files of up to 80mp - on average I get image files of around 111MB when processed as 8bit files. When I'm asked to keep everything at 16bit everything slows a little bit so extra RAM is always a plus. To be honest CS6 is a big bonus and seems to cope very well with large files despite one or two glitches i've notice.
I don't own a D800 (Canon guy here!) but I do remember the shock when I switched from a Canon Rebel XT to a 5D Mk. II. Depending on your subject matter, the changes could be minor or great. If you shoot studio/modely stuff, the extra resolution is awesome. Retouching should be comparable if you have a decent machine. What hit me was when doing events. I shot a wedding a week after I got my 5Duece and I was utterly unprepared for the memory card situation. Going from 8 MP to 21 MP raw files meant I was eating memory cards alive. Not only will you need more, but you'll need FASTER cards! I've never had an issue with CF cards, but when I bought my 60D, I realized that some of my old (re: cheap) SD cards couldn't write fast enough to keep up with a brisk shooting schedule.
In short, get fast cards and more of them. If you're doing events, you may want to think about changing your resolution. My Canons have the option to choose capture formats. During weddings, I use 21/18 MP for important family images or "Wow" shots, 10 MP for most stuff and I'll even sometimes drop it to 5 MP for candid dancing shots!
Daniel Ecoff
Posts: 400
SHERMAN OAKS, California, US
Its all relative to your computing power. If you have a newer Mac Pro and a decent amount of Ram, you should be fine. Ways to improve performance, albeit, if you have the pocket book for it. Desktops with fast Bus speeds, High ghz (over 3ghz), Ram and HD connectivity and speed. (ie:Drobo or Pegasus with Raid 5,6 or 10) Also, thunderbolt will help tremendously, over USB2.0 or FW800 or eSATA. These all play a roll in maximizing your workflow time coefficient.
I'm not sure this will help, but I work on VERY LARGE files all the time. (upwards of 18GB) yes thats GIGABYTE !!! I recently upgraded from a Mac Pro Quad Core 3ghz w/16gb of Ram (which happens to be for sale) to a Westmere 3.33GHz 6-Core with 16gb Ram. I ran a benchmark in Photoshop CS5.5 and CS6 on some simple operations and was pleasantly surprised on the performance increase.
Example:
1) 8GB file rotated 90degrees went from 15:30 to 4:45.
2) Stamping a 10GB file went from 3:34 to :20.
Proof illustrated.
The single 6-Core is FASTER than the Quad or even 12 Core workstations. This is because of the code in Photoshop and the way it accesses the processors.
I have been on the waiting list for my d800 for two months now so surely its going to turn up anyday now lol...
One thing i'm having a hard time anticipating is how much going from working on 18mp files to 36mp files is going to slow me down?
I'm looking at it from a point of how much longer will dodge and burning take on the skin and will the extra resolution make things like hair more time consuming to get looking good.
If anyone has any experience with this i would love to hear your opinions.
Thanks
My local store called Saturday that my D800 was in, spent the rest of the day and next testing the new baby. OK, now to your question. Running Photoshop CS6 with ACR 7.1 Beta on my XP machine with 4 GB of memory the performance was hopeless. But in anticipation of my new camera I had invested in a new machine, i7 intel @3.4 GHz processor with 16GB of memory and those 200MB files once they get loaded into CS6 64 bit just fly. Surface bur which used to take forever to render now happens in seconds, and even images where I have multiple layers which gets the file size to over a GB is handled with ease; and I now save as PSB by default as some of my images are over 2GB
PSB seems to be the new Adobe Standard for CS6 as they use that format for their Autorecover feature. Also CS6 is more efficient than CS5. My prep worked seems to have paid off, CS6 and Lightroom 4 upgrades along with a new machine and I am loving the D800's images.
So your mileage will vary depending on the power of your machine, but having sufficient memory will really help out....
I'm working with the new d800 files on my 1333 mhz MacBook Pro with 4 gig ram and CS4 and it's working really well -- can hardly tell the difference from crunching d700 raw files -- but, haven't done any batch processing yet...
When I bring images into Photoshop to work on, they start at about 100MB in 16-bit to begin with, and the final master file size often ends around 1-1.5GB, so I don't see a 32MB initial file changing anything. I built a high-performance desktop specifically for retouching and tethered shooting back in February (3.8ghz Quad Core, 16GB DDR3 memory, OCZ SSD 240GB hard drive for the OS and Creative Suite, files saved to a separate SATA 6gbps 2TB HD). I was planning to up the memory to 32GB, but haven't seen the need yet. The new system makes all the difference in the world, IMHO.
I don't have one ( I am a Nikon and Canon user though) but I would do your "general" (generic less important less paying) work to a downsized (by camera selection) 18 mp and use your new wonderful 36 mp for special assignments that are higher pay or profile. In six months, a year or two the current 15-21 mp range most work utilizes will be upped and then I'm sure you will go towards the leading edge of camera'S RANGE.
Best Wishes and take some awesome 36 mp images with your new camera!
Comparing my workflow between the 24MP D3X and the D800, I see very little change - only that Lightroom exports take a bit longer (typically 100 - 400 images at a time).
Largely I would say this depends on your specific workflow and hardware.
I've seen no difference at all in behavior in CS5.5 or now CS6
One thing I never see posted but use occasionally is, if you know what size output you want is to resise your file to the size you need keeping the full resolution and settings.
This using photoshop
Make a copy of your file so you can keep the original, then keeping all your settings intact, go to image size, then uncheck resample image, change the size of the photo to the size you want, then recheck resample image, notice the resolution will change.
Basically you will have gone from (just an example) a 36X48 at 200 resolution to a 4X6 at 800 resolution (numbers here are just an example).
So you still have the same resolution but on a smaller print.
I haven't done any work on a file from a D800, but from,
a D3x I made a half size proxy file to make all the adjustment
layers, including D & B, then scale it up and drag over.
The batch resizing I do takes slightly longer, but the biggest difference I noticed was the time it takes to transfer from the card. I want a true USB3.0 interface for that.
Daniel Ecoff wrote: Its all relative to your computing power. If you have a newer Mac Pro and a decent amount of Ram, you should be fine. Ways to improve performance, albeit, if you have the pocket book for it. Desktops with fast Bus speeds, High ghz (over 3ghz), Ram and HD connectivity and speed......................
This. Plus.... CS5 (and presumably above) needs lots of RAM. RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM. I just upgraded my Mac Pro Quadcore to 32GB (all it will take). Another thing, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap large files in a single bound......... SSD!! The new SSD's are SMOKIN' FAST. I put one in my iMac and it outperforms the desktop. So, next upgrade for the MacPro will be a 480GB SSD OWC has one that is particularly suited for Photoshop files.
Simon Mittag
Posts: 129
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Every time I think that computers have finally caught up with processing speed, something like the D800 happens. To be honest, I can't imagine curating a library of 36MP raw files on today's hardware, it would probably mean a large investment in a SSD based workstation that I am not interested in making (for a while).
D800 files have slowed my iMac down considerably. I have 8 mb Ram which is max on my model and the response in things like healing brush is noticeable. A 40 mb raw file with one layer of healing and Portraiture applied goes to 800 mb. I am now seriously considering an upgrade to a MacPro, which would end up costing twice the price of the D800.
I am doing things on a mac Pro, but an older model (from 2009 or something), and I have no idea whether the file is 100mpix or 10mpix, only time I notice the difference is when saving it to the hard drive, and/or sending it). One thing you will notice is that Feather and Blur, Sharpen and other filters now no longer have the radius you might need, but CS6 fixes that.
I have a macbook pro 17" its fully loaded with a solid state drive, forget what all is in it but im running lightroom 4 and I also have a d800. raw files take a bit longer to process if you shot with the camera on vivid, monochrome etc...
The files from the D800 are fantastic and even though I am using older macs I haven't seen that much difference. And even if I had the files are worth it.
I am a little surprised that so many people are concerned or whine about file size. The hardware today is perfectly capable of handling these images. 40,50, 60mb 16 bit medium format files have been around for years in commercial and advertising.
The bottom line is the right tool for the right job. If 36mb files don't fit your need then stick to lower resolution cameras. But as a commercial photographer the D800 has allowed me to use 35mm format when in the past I had to reach for a Hasselblad.
The D800 files are a dream to retouch and the ability to crop and not even see the difference. Not to mention the amazing dynamic range.
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