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My guess is that the next wave will be Pro. And they will have significantly upgraded CPU/GPUs to match the memory.

by threeseed 6y ago

dylan604 6y ago
But it's right there in the name: 13" MacBook Pro
- stevenisageek 6y ago
  The 13" 'pro' has never really been a 'real' pro. They were/are always spec'd with less cores than the 15"/16" and never had dedicated graphics.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- threeseed 6y ago
  Entry level 13" MacBook Pro is for prosumers. Think web developers, photographers, bloggers etc.
  - pvg 6y ago
    Web developers and photographers are the opposite of 'prosumers', kind of by definition. Plus, think of the size of a full res photo coming out of a high-end phone, never mind a DSLR.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    You must not rate photographers very highly if you are mentioning them in the same sentence as "bloggers, etc".
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    Most of the professional photographers that I work with have PC workstations with 64gb to 256gb of RAM. Retouching a 48MP HDR file in Photoshop needs roughly 800MB of RAM per layer and per undo step.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Old undo steps could be dumped to SSD pretty easily. And while I understand that many people are stuck on photoshop, I bet it would be easy to beat 800MB by a whole lot. But so I can grasp the situation better, how many non-adjustment layers do those professional photographer use? And of those layers, how many have pixel data that covers more than 10% of the image?
      - fxtentacle 6y ago
        From what I've seen, quite a lot of layers are effectively copies of the original image with global processing applied, e.g. different color temperature, blur, bloom, flare, hdr tone mapping, high-pass filter, local contrast equalization. And then those layers are being blended together using opacity masks. For a model photo shoot retouch, you'd usually have copy layers with fine skin details (to be overlaid on top) and below that you have layers with more rough skin texture which you blur. Also, quite a lot of them have rim lighting pointed on by using a copy of the image with remapped colors. Then there's fake bokeh, local glow for warmth, liquify, etc. So I would assume that the final file has 10 layers, all of which are roughly 8000x6000px, stored in RGB as float (cause you need negative values) and blended together with alpha masks. And I'd estimate that the average layer affects 80%+ of all pixels. So you effectively need to keep all of that in memory, because once you modify one of the lower layers (e.g. blur a wrinkle out of the skin) you'll need all the higher layers for compositing the final visible pixel value.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        Huh, so a lot of data that could be stored in a compact way but probably won't be for various reasons. Still, an 8k by 6k layer with 16 bit floats (which are plenty), stored in full, is less than 400MB. You can fit at least eleven into 4GB of memory. I'll easily believe that those huge amounts of RAM make things go more smoothly, but it's probably more of a "photoshop doesn't try very hard to optimize memory use" problem than something inherent to photo editing.
        6y ago
- bydo 6y ago
  There are two lines of 13" MacBook Pro, the two-port and four-port versions. The two-port always lagged behind the four-port, with older CPUs, less RAM, etc. The four-port (which has not yet been replaced) is configurable to 32GB of RAM.

My guess is that the next wave will be Pro. And they will have significantly upgraded CPU/GPUs to match the memory.

dylan604 6y ago

But it's right there in the name: 13" MacBook Pro

stevenisageek 6y ago
The 13" 'pro' has never really been a 'real' pro. They were/are always spec'd with less cores than the 15"/16" and never had dedicated graphics.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
threeseed 6y ago
Entry level 13" MacBook Pro is for prosumers. Think web developers, photographers, bloggers etc.
- pvg 6y ago
  Web developers and photographers are the opposite of 'prosumers', kind of by definition. Plus, think of the size of a full res photo coming out of a high-end phone, never mind a DSLR.
- dylan604 6y ago
  You must not rate photographers very highly if you are mentioning them in the same sentence as "bloggers, etc".
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  Most of the professional photographers that I work with have PC workstations with 64gb to 256gb of RAM. Retouching a 48MP HDR file in Photoshop needs roughly 800MB of RAM per layer and per undo step.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Old undo steps could be dumped to SSD pretty easily. And while I understand that many people are stuck on photoshop, I bet it would be easy to beat 800MB by a whole lot. But so I can grasp the situation better, how many non-adjustment layers do those professional photographer use? And of those layers, how many have pixel data that covers more than 10% of the image?
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
      From what I've seen, quite a lot of layers are effectively copies of the original image with global processing applied, e.g. different color temperature, blur, bloom, flare, hdr tone mapping, high-pass filter, local contrast equalization. And then those layers are being blended together using opacity masks. For a model photo shoot retouch, you'd usually have copy layers with fine skin details (to be overlaid on top) and below that you have layers with more rough skin texture which you blur. Also, quite a lot of them have rim lighting pointed on by using a copy of the image with remapped colors. Then there's fake bokeh, local glow for warmth, liquify, etc. So I would assume that the final file has 10 layers, all of which are roughly 8000x6000px, stored in RGB as float (cause you need negative values) and blended together with alpha masks. And I'd estimate that the average layer affects 80%+ of all pixels. So you effectively need to keep all of that in memory, because once you modify one of the lower layers (e.g. blur a wrinkle out of the skin) you'll need all the higher layers for compositing the final visible pixel value.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        Huh, so a lot of data that could be stored in a compact way but probably won't be for various reasons. Still, an 8k by 6k layer with 16 bit floats (which are plenty), stored in full, is less than 400MB. You can fit at least eleven into 4GB of memory. I'll easily believe that those huge amounts of RAM make things go more smoothly, but it's probably more of a "photoshop doesn't try very hard to optimize memory use" problem than something inherent to photo editing.
        6y ago
bydo 6y ago
There are two lines of 13" MacBook Pro, the two-port and four-port versions. The two-port always lagged behind the four-port, with older CPUs, less RAM, etc. The four-port (which has not yet been replaced) is configurable to 32GB of RAM.