# D800 owners experiences with LR.



## clee01l (May 15, 2012)

I'm on at least one waiting list for a Nikon D800.   For those few privileged souls that managed to get one since they were released,  what have your experiences been with the 36mp images in LR?  How has this affected you post processing workflow?  Are there any downsides?


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## BigIronCruiser (May 15, 2012)

You're going to love the camera, but LR?  Maybe not so much.  I've completed one wedding with a D800, and it took me at least 50% longer to process the images.  That doesn't include the extra time to get them imported, rendered and exported.  I'm using LR4.1 RC2, and in addition to being slow, it suffered numerous temporary hangs in the Develop module.  Two of the hangs were permanent, requiring LR to be terminated.  I've experienced similar hangs when working with D700 images in LR3.x, but the larger RAW files have made the hangs more frequent and problematic.  

In the Develop module, it takes 7-8 seconds to completely "Load" a D800 image, compared to 3 seconds for D700 images.  The good news is that the sliders are enabled after 2-3 seconds.  A few seconds here and there might seem trivial, but they really add up when you're processing hundreds of images.  

PC with a Core i7 920 & 8gb RAM.  Perhaps your Mac experience will be better.


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## Linwood Ferguson (May 20, 2012)

What BigIronCruiser said.  My normal process has always been to import, build 1:1 previews (often this gives time for a drink), then cull heavily before I start making any adjustments.  

The 1:1 previews now are so slow that if I have a few hundred shots I need to go either to dinner or maybe let it run overnight.  And that's on a pretty beefy PC.  This is the worst part for me.

Develop is slow, but tolerable.  Barely.  Since I fixed a couple things (see the thread here on changing the preview size and dual monitors).   4.0 was intolerable.   4.1RC2 is slow enough I will probably put together a faster PC this summer, whereas otherwise I woudl wait a year or two.

Adobe really, really needs to work on performance.  But it is tolerable.

PS. Movie Extracts are VERY slow.


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## happycranker (May 28, 2012)

Cletus, I have just come back from a trip to China via Hong Kong and I took both my new D800 and also the D700, about 1400 images in all and about half were taken with the new camera, including some video. Although I import with minimal rendering, I have found that LR4.1RC works fine, obviously the larger files take longer to render in the develop module. The video files runs quickly although I had to upgrade QuickTime on my machine. I had quite a few multiple bracketed shots for HDR processing and these also take longer to process, I use HDR EFEX Pro and Photomatix again not surprising really. The panorama multiple shots seem to have a bit of a problem stitching, but this could be due to the higher bit resolution, for the program I use?


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## robosolo (Aug 16, 2012)

You will of course love the camera. I upgraded from a D700 to the D800E and it just blew me away. There is a long learning curve so get a good D800/E book - such as the one David Bosch is writing - and one of those laminated Cheat Sheets.
Now for the Lightroom shock you're probably in for. Others have stated how slow importing and rendering can be which is completely understandable considering the file sizes of NEF RAW images (around 40-MB for NEF lossless compressed). It's all sadly true. There are plenty of tricks for improving LR's speed, but it will still run more slowly than you're used to. The problem was so bothersome for me that I actually bought another PC with more RAM and a faster processor, just to edit D800 RAW files in LR and PS.
    On the bright side, you'll also have to get used to being able to crop and print at 100%, 200% or even more. I regularly print such crops enlarged to 13"X19" and you can still see extreme detail.


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## clee01l (Aug 17, 2012)

robosolo said:


> ...Now for the Lightroom shock you're probably in for. Others have stated how slow importing and rendering can be which is completely understandable considering the file sizes of NEF RAW images (around 40-MB for NEF lossless compressed).


 I've had my D800 since Mid June, I have not been disappointed in the importing speed. Perhaps it is because I upgraded to a 4 core, 16GB iMac in February but the import times are only slightly slower the the 14.6 mp DNG files from my old camera.  The only change I made to my workflow was to generate 1:1 previews on import instead of waiting the 15-or so seconds to generate individual loupe view images during my culling process.


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## robosolo (Aug 17, 2012)

*Big files and slow LR*



clee01l said:


> I've had my D800 since Mid June, I have not been disappointed in the importing speed. Perhaps it is because I upgraded to a 4 core, 16GB iMac in February but the import times are only slightly slower the the 14.6 mp DNG files from my old camera.  The only change I made to my workflow was to generate 1:1 previews on import instead of waiting the 15-or so seconds to generate individual loupe view images during my culling process.


***************************************************************************************************************
It's fast because you upgraded. That's the same thing that happened to me. When I bought a new PC with 16-GB of ram, an X79 MB, an Intel Core i7 3930K overclocked processor and an SSD, LR again processed as fast as when I had those tiny  D700 files.

I also render 1:1 previews on import for the same reason you do, though it only takes 4 or 5 seconds on my machine to go to 1:1 even if I didn't do this.

Another approach to speed things along is to render previews on import at standard or lower. Then make picks and discards in Library. After that just select the picks and render 1:1 in LR. That's what I used to do with my former slower PC.

The problem with LR's speed and very large files has been growing as more and more photographers purchase high MP cameras. Adobe is working big-time on this issue. 

A possible approach that I've heard that they're exploring is to design LR so that it will handle large RAW and DNG files differently. A lossy DNG copy would be made of the original and all edits would be made on that lossy DNG copy. Then those edits would be synced back to the original RAW or DNG. All this would take place in the background so the user would just experience an increase in speed.

The question with this potential approach is would those edits (made to a lossy DNG inter-copy and then synced to the original) look any different from doing edits directly to an original RAW or DNG.  I've actually converted a DNG file to a lossy DNG in LR. Then I re-imported the original so I had the two files side by side. I tried doing all kinds of edits on the lossy copy and syncing them back to the original. I then compared the results to directly doing the exact same edits on the original (a virtual copy). I couldn't detect any differences in the two files at all. So, maybe Adobe can do this and pull LR out of the molasses for all these new really big file cameras that will be coming soon -at least until everyone outgrows their computers and upgrades to faster machines .


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## Mark Sirota (Aug 17, 2012)

robosolo said:


> The problem with LR's speed and very large files has been growing as more and more photographers purchase high MP cameras. Adobe is working big-time on this issue.
> 
> A possible approach that I've heard that they're exploring is to design LR so that it will handle large RAW and DNG files differently. A lossy DNG copy would be made of the original and all edits would be made on that lossy DNG copy. Then those edits would be synced back to the original RAW or DNG. All this would take place in the background so the user would just experience an increase in speed.



Where are you hearing these rumors?


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## herb (Aug 17, 2012)

I have had a D800E for a couple of months, I found the files a fair amount slower, doubled the RAM on my Mac to 12 G and have been happy since.


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## Victoria Bampton (Aug 17, 2012)

Mark Sirota said:


> Where are you hearing these rumors?



It's in my book that the new lossy DNG format can be useful for speeding up workflow for those with supersize files, working on a low res lossy DNG and then swapping it for the full size.  I'm sure I've probably said in public discussions that Adobe may be able to make use of that same idea behind the scenes one day.


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## clee01l (Aug 17, 2012)

herb said:


> I have had a D800E for a couple of months, I found the files a fair amount slower, doubled the RAM on my Mac to 12 G and have been happy since.


That seems to run contrary to your tag line 





> there is more to life than increasing its speed (Ghandi)


  :shock:


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## robosolo (Aug 17, 2012)

Mark Sirota said:


> Where are you hearing these rumors?



It's a bit stronger than just a rumor. I got this directly from Victoria Bampton - the author of "Lightroom 4 - the missing FAQ". She e-mailed it to me during a discussion on the merits and drawbacks of using lossy DNGs. She was the one who suggested I try the technique manually, which I did. 

The large file/slow LR issue is apparently of major concern at Adobe and this is supposed to be one of their proposed solutions.


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## Brad Snyder (Aug 17, 2012)

Well now, that's just amusing.....


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## clee01l (Aug 17, 2012)

Brad Snyder said:


> Well now, that's just amusing.....


The Lightroom Rumour Queen!


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## Victoria Bampton (Aug 18, 2012)

LOL  Cheeky!!!  

My email said:


> If you were to do it manually, you'd convert to lossless DNG on import, copy those to a safe location and then convert to low res lossy files for your working files. When you'd finished your interactive work, you'd copy the lossless (full res) DNG back to the same locations, and LR would just apply the same settings to that full res data automatically. When you then exported, it would be slower because it would be back to processing the full resolution data, but you wouldn't have lost any quality or pixels.
> 
> What I'd like to see happen is for Adobe to implement all of that automatically - perhaps keeping lossy data cached, like they do for the ACR cache, so you would never ever know what was happening behind the scenes. Whether, or how, or when that will happen, I don't know yet.
> 
> ...


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