kallewille

Holy crap! That was quick! Thanks for all the feedback. You guys/gals brought up a point I came across but didn't mention: Xeon vs the "i" series. I'm not sure what cs6 is optimized for. Some guys that do modeling in another division of our research institute have some Xeon based work stations, but our IT guy said they've had lots of problems with them. Not sure what to make of that. Any thoughts? Also, anyone know about dedicated scratch disks for photoshop or the like? Benefits and costs, pros and cons? Thanks again for all the feedback. You guys/gals rock!

Any camera can make an 800 megapixel image if you stitch them together I shot a cross-section of a kevlar reinforced component at 100x on my lab's metallograph. I'm shooting at ~1920x1530 resolution, and I shot 21x13 images which were stitched together. The resulting color image is ~1.5GB as a .tif. The largest image I've shot to date was over 36,000 pictures: 30x30x40.

I work with large images at work (I just shot an ~800 megapixel image today, for example). Just opening these images can be time consuming, let alone manipulating them or analyzing them. The computer I use at work is a relic, and gets bogged down, and when I can, sometimes I just take the work home and do it on my much faster computer there. I mainly use photoshop cs6, some Nikon microscopic software NIS (can't remember which build off the top of my head), Image Pro Plus, ImageJ occasionally, and Helicon Focus. I don't do any video work (yet anyways). But I shoot a great number of images through microscopes and then stitch them together, or a lot of z-stacking with macro lenses and then focus stack them. I also do a fair amount of time lapse photography with a D800, which shoots 36 megapixel images. Much of the time I don't need that resolution, but sometimes I do, and applying color corrections to thousands of pictures just seems to break my computer's back. What would I most benefit from in a new pc? I've read photoshop makes use of multi-cores, but diminishing returns appear to be at 6 cores. I've crammed as much RAM into my old machine as I can (16GB) but it's the processor that's the bottleneck I think. I don't know how well the other software takes advantage of multi-cores or video/graphics cards. If I were to build a monster workstation for dealing with massive image files and/or numerous image files at once to do batch commands on (color correction for example), what would I need, and almost as importantly, what would I NOT need? Time is money, and opening a hundred RAW files from the D800 takes forever...I might as well wait until my lunch break to try anything like that. It would be great to multi-task with the machine as well, so while it's chugging away at opening or processing the images, if I could do some other work on the side, that'd be great too. The machine would have to be reliable. Noise isn't too big of an issue, just something reliable and powerful. If I could get it at $5k or less, that'd be good too. I'm fairly computer ignorant as far as components goes, I just use them a lot to get my work done, and that's all I care about. A lot of what I could find online had more to do with smaller images (36 puny mega pixels!) or video editing. I'm in research, and I'm not finding a lot of people with the same types of work tasks I'm doing daily. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks. P.S. I've looked at getting a pre-built system (don't hate me!). I think I could sell the idea of getting something with a warranty much better to my boss than buying parts and getting an IT guy to help me put it together, but that's not completely out of the question. I just don't know what I do and don't need in the machine. Addendum: I also would like to know about storage and cache drives. We store all our images to a network drive that gets backed up frequently (daily?). Would I benefit from having a couple SSD drives? One for programs, and another for a cache for photoshop and other programs, and then maybe a spinning HD for local storage?