Digital BW, The Print

I agree with Jimbo on this to a point. If you have a 4 drive raid 0 for the work-a-day drive (as long as it's backed up), LR will speed along at 8gb. If you're dealing with drum-scans, 16gb is really nice to have because  LR starts holding 2 renders all in RAM instead of off-loading to the raid. That means you can pull two images up or flip between different dev modes and everything just flys along like butter. It's like having a 3000MB/s raid at your fingertips.

ps: When dealing with drumscans, LR does some pretty amazing things around not destroying one's histogram and also really good color noise reduction.

Best,
Walker

On Jan 25, 2012, at 9:56 PM, mrjimbo wrote:

> Hey Bill,
> Light room is a hungry resource application that's for sure. But we should not confuse processing needs or horsepower with ram.. Lightroom's real work... preview rendering , loading images into the Develop module and making corrections like luminance noise , color noise or lens correction etc are all done by the processor.. not ram.. It's just needs enough ram to function in partnership with the work requests... So I think , constructively a conversation about what processor makes a difference and how much ram along with that.. I think we get deceived a lot on what ram does.. what it is not is an answer for a lesser processor. The later versions of Photoshop and also Lightroom take full advantage of the latest in processing horsepower.....their resource hogs as far as we see.. Anyway, to have access to 8gb of ram we must have a 64 bit OS but if were really looking to bump up we need to also look at the processor.. We run both macs and PC's here.. While in lots of ways were running behind many of you guys out there as were late typically to step up to the latest hardware.. We did just recently add a couple of Dell Precisions that are off lease. One was two dual core the other two quad cores.. both started 8gb of ram.. With Lightroom the quad is hands down the winner.. It was also bumped to 20gb of ram and I didn't really notice a performance increase with LR .. as compared to the very apparent processor difference between the two machines. I guess if were using LR to process huge files then of course more is better.. no argument there.. The only thing I'm trying to say is that ram is not a substitute for a better processor. So we need to look at both sides of it. 
> 
> jimbo
> 



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