Computer upgrade for LR and possibly Topaz

Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
I'm running an older (5yrs) Lenovo with an I5 processor and 8 GB of RAM. After LR update last year, LR has often run slow and sometimes becomes unresponsive. Other than that, the computer suits my needs. I've thought about upgrading the RAM to hopefully solve this, and I'm also thinking about getting Topaz denoise and sharpen, which require an I5 or higher and 16GB of RAM.

Looks like I can upgrade the RAM for a little over $40. Is this a fools errand? It's not like I can't afford $40, I just don't want to throw money at an older machine and have to upgrade to a newer machine with an I7 and more RAM.
 
BF Hammer

BF Hammer

Senior Member
I cannot run Luminar on my vintage 2011 PC even with upgrade to 16GB RAM. I need a newer version of CPU for some extra command sets. Also need newer mainboard for Windows 11 update.

But I am still good with RawTherapee and GIMP so I stretch the life a while longer. Have to replace a furnace more than I want Luminar.
 
Fred Kingston

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
Just double checking you weren't upgrading RAM with a spinning hard drive... At this point, and insight with the direction that companies like Topaz are going, if I had to crack open a box to upgrade RAM, I'd most certainly consider loading the motherboard with whatever the max specs call for...
 
Needa

Needa

Senior Member
Challenge Team
If you upgrade the system ram you may be able to allocate more of it to graphics. May be a setting in the BIOS. I'm running a i7 with 32GB RAM the choke point in mine is the onboad graphics.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
A 16 GB stick plus the 4GB incorporated in the motherboard maxes this thing out at 20GB. I was going to have BB put it in this morning, but they said they didn't carry the RAM I need. I would have to order it off the internet and bring it in. I have Totaltech for another month, so I was going to have them do it, since I wouldn't have to pay for installation. I'm not wild about cracking open a laptop. He opened it up this morning, and brought it out to show me, looks pretty straightforward, once you get the case open.

After taking some early morning bird pictures this week, I'm thinking hard about Topaz. I used to shoot at lower ISOs, but have been shooting manual with auto ISO, and have been getting sharper results, but noisier pictures until the sun gets higher in the sky.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
Another question for you, Fred. Is there much advantage to getting Gigapixel. I can get Denoise, Sharpen and Gigapixel as a bundle for $200. I can get Sharpen and Denoise for $160, and I have PS, with Super Zoom filter to upscale a heavily cropped image. Is there a lot of advantage to Gigapixel? I have watched a number of videos on Topaz products, and it seems like most use Denoise and Sharpen. They also have Topaz AI for $200, but it looks to me that it has less flexibility than using the individual programs, and has higher system requirements. It does look simpler to use, but there doesn't seem to be a big learning curve to the individual programs.
 
Fred Kingston

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
I use Gigapixel a lot... especially after doing heavy cropping... Topaz's stated intention is to be the best at specific photography editing tools... At present they've staked out the 3 features of Denoise, Sharpening, and Upscaling as where they want to be... I think their Denoise and Sharpening are probably the best, from my perspective... They've been focusing on Photo AI for the last several months.... there's a new update pushed out every Thursday Evening, and they've published a Roadmap for that product so users can see exactly what's getting added and worked on as they push these updates out... Long range, they intend to combine the 3 other stand-alone products into Photo AI... Without going into too much chatter, it's a very complex process because they're doing RAW files, and there's a huge open universe in all the various RAW file formats... They're also trying to automate the process as much as possible so the user can simply click on a file and the system does everything... this includes batch processing... Imagine being able to click on a folder of 1,000 of your film scans from the '80s and producing perfectly denoised, sharpened, and upscaled, high resolution images comparable to today's digital camera images?
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
What would you recommend? The bundle of three, or Photo AI? My computer and my daughter's would meet the minimum requirements for Photo AI, after I get the RAM upgrade (ordered). I'm just afraid that it will run slow or have issues with minimum required hardware. The individual programs have lower minimum requirements.
 
Fred Kingston

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
I'd do the three programs... They're relatively "finished"... The Photo AI is not really finished... and has more than a few issues... sadly...
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
OK, bought and downloaded them today. Played around with them briefly. Not sure about Sharpen. Gigapixel did a great job on a couple old family photos. Denoise seems to do a better job than I can with Lightroom. I need to dig into the slider and other options to maximize denoise. I'm a little overloaded right now. I will reprocess a couple of noisy pics from last week and see how much difference there is. I'll wait on that til later tonight, or better yet, tomorrow.

This is a slightly underexposed, noisy picture I edited in LR last week with no sharpening, or noise reduction.

_DAB5817-2.jpg


Here it is with the same edit, but with noise reduction and sharpening.

_DAB5817.jpg


Here it is starting from scratch with Denoise editing before final cropping and editing in Lightroom, no additinal noise reduction or sharpening in LR. Note: some of the LR edits may be slightly different as I didn't copy the edits over. I just tried to replicate them as I remembered. Yes, the crop was a little bit different. The difference in noise is noticeably lower in the wings of the one run through DN. Not sure if the splotchy clouds were a result of noise, or just the way the clouds looked originally. Denoise did do a nice job a smoothing them.

_DAB5817-DeNoiseAI-low-light.jpg
 
Fred Kingston

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
A couple of notes...relative to your workflow... It's been a while since I did this... but examine your LR import process, and make sure that LR isn't applying ANY Noise reduction or Sharpening... I think it does some be default... I created a pre-set in LR that basically doesn't apply any settings on import... <-- that sounds goofy... but the only settings I want altered in Import is Lens correction...

My workflow is to use Denoise first before I do any other processing... then I do my processing in LR... and then after everything is done... my last step is Sharpening...

If I'm gonna crop an image ( a lot ) Ido it in LR... Cropping is usually the first thing I do in my workflow... depending on how much, I'll then go to Gigapixel...
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
Looks like the version I'm running assigns 25 out of 100 noise reduction. Of course, it won't allow any plugins, so I'm using Topaz as a stand alone. I have been just bringing the RAW unedited file into Denoise, or Sharpen, then saving it as a DNG file before bringing that file up in LR. It's a little clumsy, but needs must.

I looked at a DNG in LR that had been through DN, and didn't see any real difference between the noise at 0 and 25 with the noise reduction slider.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
A quick update. I had to order the RAM, and it came in Thurs. I got it installed Fri. Lightroom seems to run a little faster and smoother. I haven't had any slowdowns or crashes yet. It's still a little slow exporting files. That may be the i5 processor, or the onboard graphics, or both. I can live with that as long as I don't run into the lagging behind and locking up. On a side note, this week the Pup and I took a private lesson from the teacher from our digital photography class a while back. He recommended I get a stand alone monitor vs working off the laptop screen. I picked up a 27" the other day. It seems huge compared to my laptop, but I do like it when editing and viewing photos. I did some minimal adjustments, but will need to calibrate it to match the printer. It's also nice not to have to adjust the screen angle for decent viewing.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
I have the current LR/photoshop via per month payments. Is there even an option to actually purchase the software now?

I agree that the newer masking tools are great.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
I've had the RAM upgrade for over a month now. It has not substantially increased the speed of LR, but it has cured the issue with the intermittent running extremely slowly and locking up. I think I can live with it at this point, but when I next have to replace this computer, I will probably upgrade to at least an i7 and look at the graphics as well.
 
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