Why do photographers need workstations?

[bloowolf4562]

Don't photographers just need a color accurate display and a gpu that supports 10 bit color. Besides a gpu why do they need workstation grade hardware?

[thekeemo]

My guess would be for EXTREME effects?

[dadasmithywinkle]

Don't photographers just need a color accurate display and a gpu that supports 10 bit color. Besides a gpu why do they need workstation grade hardware?

Some editing suites require a ton of power to compile large projects. Also, effects and edits load faster on quicker machines, saving time and money.

[QueenDemetria]

Don't photographers just need a color accurate display and a gpu that supports 10 bit color. Besides a gpu why do they need workstation grade hardware?

Bunch of RAM, projects can get big quick. ECC RAM ensures that no work is lost(but stability isn't that much of an issue anymore).

[Hans Christian | Teri]

Photoshop can be a reeeeaaaaal hog, speaking from personal experience here. It chews up RAM like a stoner in a room full of cereal. Tons of big files and you need a snappy work experience to not go insane when looking through and editing 3000 pictures.

[Guest]

Because professional apps like Photoshop can really benefit from more RAM and more L3 cache; they're professional apps, being able to run on a netbook all the way to a server-grade workstation.

[Prastupok]

Let's talk Hasselblad. We have several of the H5D-60s at my firm... 60MP raw images can be 250 megabytes before even opening them in PS or any application.

 

That's a lot of data to mess with, and waiting in a time-sensitive environment isn't good.

[wyattzx]

Photo editing and video editing are two in the same up to the point of rendering. You're working on images that are at a resolution typically higher than 4K. When you're color-grading over 8 million pixels, your work can get very.. intensive. Using a lot of CPU, GPU, and RAM resources just to compute it. 

[Guest Kloaked]

My guess would be for EXTREME effects?

 

Not really all the time. The photographers with nice cameras (not your "like omg my instagram haz 1000 follwers!!11" photographers) that shoot .raw photos in a stupid high resolution need a decent amount of power to work with that file, otherwise the system will chug along slowly with processing the image.

[Bsmith]

since photoshop is a bitch when you are on a i3 laptop with 4GB ram, a workstation as in quadro, 64gb ram, etc might sound overkill but if you work on a high level and need to push alot of content fast and at a high lvl quality it helps out alot, because even high quality can become lower once you system is slowing down under the workload.

[davidvu396]

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Adobe-Photoshop-Software-78680/Specials/PC-fuer-Photoshop-1151096/

[Scruffy90]

Depends on the projects. Working with large 1+ gig tiff files isnt easy on the system, especially if I have multiple layers of work of edits on it already. Even if you're not working with files that big, simply having a ton of layers (50+)in Photoshop will run a regular system into the ground.

 

I would say it's not needed for most folks, but it sure does make life easier when doing serious work.

[Scruffy90]

Photoshop can be a reeeeaaaaal hog, speaking from personal experience here. It chews up RAM like a stoner in a room full of cereal. Tons of big files and you need a snappy work experience to not go insane when looking through and editing 3000 pictures.

Its bad. I had to turn down the ram reserve a bit in photoshop because the default was almost 85% of ram or some ridiculously high number.

[Victorious Secret]

My PSD files can reach over 2GB in size by the time I'm done, off an originally 18MP RAW file. You need raw grunt to manipulate that many pixels (lets not even get into D810 or higher levels of pixels). More RAM is key, more cores is key; more everything. 

Colour accuracy is a big thing (its why I went Mac). The less you need to fiddle with in post is best, one way to help is to make sure your monitor is calibrated. I don't do print that much, so sRGB colorspace works over AdobeRGB for me. My panel is calibrated so its bang on for sRGB, so I know that for 99% of the viewers who see my shots, the colours are more or less "right". If I did print work, AdobeRGB because its a little different. 

[omniomi]

People are right about Photoshop being a resource hog but even PS is nothing compared to loading folders into Adobe Bridge and batch processing in Lightroom... I had a photographer friend come over to work on some photos together one day and he was blown away by how fast my computer could handle batches in Lightroom. Having a powerful machine makes you faster and time is money.

[Scruffy90]

People are right about Photoshop being a resource hog but even PS is nothing compared to loading folders into Adobe Bridge and batch processing in Lightroom... I had a photographer friend come over to work on some photos together one day and he was blown away by how fast my computer could handle batches in Lightroom. Having a powerful machine makes you faster and time is money.

Lightroom batch edits have been the bane of my existance, at least during the transfer process.