Photoshop CS6 RAW Conversion

Photographers shooting raw files need to convert them to TIF or JPEG for best quality (in-camera JPEG is low quality in virtually all digital cameras).

Conversion using Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS6 13.0.3.

Nikon D800E 14-bit RAW to 16-bit TIF uncompressed

The Mac Pro easily outpaces the iMac here, and surprisingly even the MacBook Pro with Retina display 2.7 GHz does so also.

These results were double-checked for the iMac including using the OWC Mercury Accelsior+ Helios to verify that I/O speed wasn’t the cause (a 7 second improvement was seen, e.g., 342 seconds).

Observation of CPU usage suggests that the extra cores of the Mac Pro systems was a factor here.

Photoshop CS6 convert 100 Nikon D800E 36MP 14-bit RAW to 16-bit uncompressed TIF
Late 2012 iMac 3.4 with GHz NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB *

Nikon D800E 14-bit RAW to max-quality JPEG

The iMac is about the same speed as the MBP Retina, faster than the 6-core Mac Pro, but slightly slower than the 12-core.

Photoshop CS6 convert 100 Nikon D800E 36MP 14-bit RAW to max-quality JPEG
Late 2012 iMac 3.4 with GHz NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB *