It should be noted that I use Canon Digital Photo Professional as my RAW batch processor. I have dabbled with Lightroom more than once or twice but never found the encouragement to switch especially when I had been computing on under powered hardware that would only make the whole experience excruciatingly painful. To cut a long story short, I got a new custom-built Windows 7 64-bit PC last December moving up from two generation old 32-bit processing platform — a project that began with me nearly committing to an Alienware Aurora gaming rig but something else much better persuaded me otherwise!
Machine Specs: ASUS Republic of Gamers Maximus V GENE, unlocked Intel Core i7-3770K 4.6GHz liquid cooled by Corsair H80 cooler, Corsair Vengeance™ DDR3 OC Edition 1866MHz 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB, Crucial M4 128GB + 256GB SSDs housed in a SilverStone Fortress FT03 chassis.
My photo-editing studio: Asus Maximus V Gene with dual Dell 27″ and 24″ UltraSharp monitors
Curious and better equipped than ever before I installed a trial copy of Lightroom 4.3 64-bit and imported 1,634 5D Mark II/III RAW files from the 2013 Lexus Golf Classic shoot. I first learnt of Lightroom’s parallel processing capability from ScottKelby.com who got the info from MacPerformanceGuide.com and that was enough of a push to see how my investment fared. What happened next blew my mind, and I quote from the observation I posted on Facebook. I also shared this post on DPreview.com and Flickr.com
In the interest of benchmarking, I exported 1,634 Large RAW files to JPEG (Quality: 100) in batches of 400 images per operation in 4 operations (pictured above) and timed how long it would take to complete. Note that this is purely an export with no adjustments made to the images. Estimating the time it took me to separate 4 batches of 400 images each to be 1 minute in total, the entire export processes completed in under 15 minutes – impressive! Batching the same number of images in a single process took twice as long. — Facebook, January 21 2013
I ran the tests several times and on one occasion I had Canon Digital Photo Professional export 296 images from the same batch of RAW files with Lightroom this time running not 4 but 5 parallel processes. The result was nothing short of amazing!
One hot weekend of Lexus Golf Classic shoot, 3 thousand images, several shades darker and 2 itchy sand fly bites later, this morning I decided there’s no better time to push the ASUS ROG 4.7GHz to export Cyril‘s 1600 RAW files in Lightroom and DPP simultaneously. The setup: Lightroom to handle 1600 files in 5 parallel operations and DPP exporting just 296 of the same RAW files (parallel tasking of DPP not tested here). The result is nothing short of mind blowing – my quick CPU tweak to 4.7GHz remained stable, LR finished exporting 1600 RAW to JPEGs in times I’ve never seen before (see top left image “5 operations in progress”. — Facebook, January 21, 2013
