laural

I thought I'd come back to this for some practice. I didn't mask precisely but is something like this how you would use colorize to make things a little more similar in color?

Maybe, I’m not sure, just exploring options. Would it just be a colorize layer?

The desired "look" is this: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/718wwRGGPtL._SL1072_.jpg I thought channel mixer but tried a gradient map with ~4 colors droppered from that above image (and masked off face). I'm mostly happy with it but wondering if there's a better way. He wants that painted look so I stamped everything and did the oil paint filter - applied below but I know that'll be my last step once I get everything else right, but just to give you an idea.

I got these ones: Western Digital 8TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD80EFAX . I probably would have gotten a Synology anyway - I love the smaller one I have, also older - about 7 years. And come to think of it, the plastic on that is much thicker. This is the black one you recommend, right? The Xbox/gaming kind? https://smile.amazon.com/Black-Performance-Desktop-Hard-Drive/dp/B0792GSD6N/ref=sr_1_12?dchild=1&keywords=WD%2BBlack%2B7200RPM%2BDrive&qid=1614621071&sr=8-12&th=1 As always, thank you for your help!!

Hey Brian! I got this DiskStation 920+ finally and set it up with two 8TB WD Red Plus drives for now. I have a question for you about expectations & noise... the thing is loud. The smaller Synology I have is so quiet, but it is a smaller unit. In your experience, does this sound like something is wrong? Link here, starts at second 0:17. I tried it on different surfaces. I played with the location of the disks cause I thought maybe it was a balance issue but it still sounds like that in all configurations. In some cases I can apply some light pressure on top to make it quieter, which lead me to believe something wasn't right with the unit. I contacted Synology and they had me boot it up without any disks - perfectly quiet. So they said it is the disks causing it. They are brand new so I find that hard to believe - especially since it happened when I tried each disk alone - what's the chance of getting one dud but two dud drives? I came across someone on YouTube saying higher end drives will be louder - are they this loud? I think they used the term Enterprise drive which seem to be higher quality than the Red Plus, so I'm deciding on what to do. In your experience, which seems most plausible?

Thanks a lot, I didn’t notice the new model, I’ll look at going for that instead. ?

Hey Brian, I'm looking at finally purchasing this with drives. I was curious if you ended up buying it and if you were satisfied with it's performance?

Nope ?

Yes, got it via Save as and JPEG

Huh? I’m exporting to upload for printing

Doh. Well, I was using a template I used for a card a long time ago, and I know that the final sizes are 2inx2in so I do my sharpening based on that. But either way, even when I export any other PSD file to jpg the dimensions and resolution are still changing when I reopen it. I was exporting a layered PSD for upload to my lab’s ordering software. I even tried exporting from a flattened file but I’m getting the same thing?

Hi Damien, When I start a PSD (I was making a collage out of full size exported JPGs) I have my dimensions set to the exact print size and 300dpi which is the resolution the lab requests. I export at quality 100, 100%, embed sRGB, etc. but then when I open the exported JPG in Photoshop again it has changed to 72dpi and the inches have been scaled up. I can re-enter 300dpi and then reset the inches so that it's still the same but I can't figure out why the files do not open with the same dimensions and dpi as I exported?

I know, I know, it's really bad ? Thank you soooooo much. ? I'm going to sit down over the weekend and make a decision on how much TB to get (and cull more); you saved me from almost going with those Seagate expansion drives which I know now would have been a very poor/wasteful choice. "Beer" sent your way via Damien's PP link. ? Happy New Year! ?

One last question... I know you're supposed to keep drives no fuller than, what, 70% full to protect against corruption. Let's say, purely hypothetically ?, that I only have 170GB left on my 4TB... if I clear up space on that, is the disk then "safe" or have I already put it at risk by filling it to near-capacity once even though I've made room again?

I think I misunderstood this on my first read. If I went this route, I would have to buy two additional drives identical in size to the ones I have, or would that not matter? Having the two RAID1 units would be akin to my thought of buying another diskstation and having the drives appear as two different drives but be in the same enclosure, is that right? So in that case, I'd really only be ditching the enclosure of my original diskstation but the disks I have wouldn't go to waste. If they are red, could the next two I buy be gold?

Thank you! Lots to chew on. A few questions... To clarify, do you mean I can't run two completely separately? Like I wouldn't be able to have two plugged into my router? If I go with a 4-bay unit I was thinking I could just keep the current set up and not migrate any data (and thus "save" an extra 4TB). I do have the WD red drives in my current diskstation, I see the gold come in 12TB whereas the red and black only come in 6TB so that's good to know. Oh man, that's so depressing. I bought into Macs long ago when I was in research and everyone developed analysis programs exclusively on Mac & Linux. But I would have definitely considered a Windows desktop, but that guy makes a good point. I was surprised to hear him say people said they used their Macbook with Premiere though. I worked on a 15 second promo clip for a business with less than 8GB of raw footage total, and both Adobe Premiere and Da Vinci Resolve kept crashing my Macbook. I spent 6 hours of installing and reinstalling, retrying etc. before I finally gave up and put it together in iMovie. ?‍♀️ I definitely have no delusions of doing video on my laptop. That guy is right, time is definitely money. I have a Mark 5D ii body which I'm itching to upgrade to the IV for many reasons, but the 4k video would be fun to play with. My videographer friend told me I'd go through a 16GB card in about 30 seconds of footage ? Oof. I'm leaning towards this DS918+ you recommended, the option of a future expansion unit sounds promising. They connect by eSata, right? Is that really fast enough if in the future I wanted to "add" the expansion unit drives to the NAS rather than just making it a simple backup? I have to think about the RAID configurations a little more to work out the math. Currently I use Synology's propriety hybrid RAID which to my understanding is essentially RAID1/mirrored. I wouldn't be averse to having more drives and working with a different configuration where it's 1 or 2 disk fault tolerance rather than mirrored. I see that the 4 bay unit is hot swappable so that would make it easier. What if as a temporary solution I bought a 4 bay station and only used two drives (RAID1) in it, until I purchased the extra, in the future. Assuming I could leave my current Diskstation in place and migrate that later on. Would that make sense? What is it that limits how many units I can have plugged into my router, what specs would I look for? I'm tempting to go this route. I wonder if I'm too OCD about backups and if I really need the redundancy... with Amazon cloud I'm not sure I need it, although I can only back up my personal photos there, not anything commercial, which I am starting to get into.

Great - Thanks, Brian! I have never heard of plex, so about to go Google that... ? With another Synology NAS, I thought I'd just set it right next to the other and leave both plugged into the router so I can connect to whichever I need. With the Thunderbolt, would it make any sense to partition it into two 6GB? I realize that wouldn't protect stuff from an overall mechanical failure of the drive, but would it provide any protection against corruption? And I assume with that I would just plug it in directly to my computer and work with the files on on there and then unmount it when I'm done, is that right?

Hi Brian, I was hoping you could help me think through my storage issue. I have a MacBook laptop and store/access my files from a Synology Diskstation with two drives mirrored (4TB useable space). I’m close to maxing out these drives. I upgraded them once when I had 2TB useable space and rather than keep installing bigger drives I’m trying to decide if I should get a whole other disk station or just start using an expansion drive. I have a budget of $500 but I was hoping to not spend all of that but running the numbers I think I’ll have to use most of that. This is my workflow: - Upload my cards to my laptop. Immediately backup the unedited/unculled raw files to Amazon cloud and then jpg copies to another online storage service. - I do my culling and editing, then copy them to a backup external hard drive. Then I move them onto my Synology Diskstation and consider them as the “master” files. Occasionally I do a backup of the entire disk station though not as much as I intend to in theory. - Sometimes I don’t get to edit the photos before I need to upload another card to my MacBook so I will either move them onto my disk station and later work with them across the network, or if I plan to be away from home I move the folder back onto my laptop and edit locally. The speed to access across the network seems fine to me, no complaints, and I don’t mind not having access when I’m away from home (in a pinch I could always download the files from Amazon cloud). When I copy from Diskstation through my laptop to online cloud services, that’s reasonably fast. The only thing that is slower is if I copy from Diskstation to an external HDD attached to my laptop, but that’s not really a problem as I can do backups when I’m doing other stuff around the house. I figure I should get an additional 6TB of useable space (so 12TB total because I like the idea of having my "master" files mirrored). I’m not sure if I should get another two-bay Synology Diskstation and two hard drives (~$560), or get an expansion drive or just the “naked” drives and a docking station. I bookmarked this 6TB expansion drive, which I’d need to get two of, so ~$214… so much cheaper than the whole disk station combination but I’m not sure what kind of speed that would give me working with my files on it. Plus I’d have to manually mirror it to the other every so often. I also saw this docking station which I imagined I’d get two of plus two drives (~$384 total). But same concern about speed and the added step of manually mirroring or scheduling backups. Does any of that seem like a good solution? For 2018 I used about 1.3TB including generated PSD files and expect to shoot/edit at about the same rate… although I would like to play with video/film at some point… but hoping for this next purchase to last me at least 2 years before I need to expand/upgrade more. Would love to hear your opinion and recommendations if you have any. Thanks in advance and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ? ~Laura

Gotcha! Thank you for the clarification. I don't suppose it is wise to mix a red and black drive together in RAID1? Haha. I'm going to shop around and may just let what is in stock and my wallet make the decision, but I definitely could make the change to just shutting everything down when I'm not using it because it's only for storage right now. Had no idea, very good to know! You likely saved me from pulling out my hair trying to account for the discrepancies Thanks for all the good info and help! Just sent some "beers" your & Damien's way. Not a beer person myself but heard the ABC brews from that area aren't bad

Thank you so much for your reply! Oh man, I wish I hadn't chosen the hybrid RAID now. I thought it was truly RAID1 but then with some proprietary extras. I'm going to go with your suggestion and go with RAID1 if I can. Having the same firmware on them didn't occur to me but they are the same drives, and same age. I never thought of testing the UPS, that they could have that short a lifespan was not even on my radar. The one I have now is an APC UPS 550VA BE550G, I have the Synology NAS and a Fios combined router/modem plugged into the back up+surge outlets, and in the surge only we have our TV, XBOX, cable box, and a DVD player. Do I leave the latter surge-only out when figuring if it's too much? I think what I'm leaning towards doing immediately is getting two new 4TB each drives for the NAS unit so I can increase the storage now (and resolve to go back and cull what's on there now... ). I've looked up WD Black Cavaiar on Amazon and wondering if I have the ones you mean, would this one work as NAS? I ask because it says Desktop/PC and I do tend to leave it on. Though I could easily make it a habit of powering it down. I found the Red ones in stock on B&H but I will go for the Black Caviar if they are in fact OK in NAS. I'm taking stock of my HDDs (I hadn't moved them into the garage yet but was thinking about it, so glad I asked!) and have enough room to dump a bunch to clear up space on my laptop and Phone to get me through until replacement hard drives come for the NAS unit. I'm going to re-read the fine print for Amazon Cloud Drive. When I subscribed the terms said raw files were okay, as well as video, as long as they were personal files and not from a business/clients. I don't have anything syncing and do everything manually and everything is still there that I've moved off my Macbook to NAS. When I'm re-checking backups I'll compare the # of files as a quick reference and Amazon has never deleted anything so far. I randomly download files to make sure they're uploaded properly and everything looks okay. But still seems too good to be true or else I must be the kind of customer they're losing money on because right now I have 650GB in dng photos and 105GB in video uploaded. Though my NAS says it's got 1.35TB used. So I must be missing something or my PSDs (which I don't upload to Amazon) are taking up a lot of space. Hmmm. One more question... I started an extended test on both drives ~48H ago and the drive I thought was fine passed, but the other has been stuck at 90% complete. I assume I shouldn't shut down the whole unit (through DiskStation, not the power button I mean) but I can't find a way to cancel the test or even any command line feature to xkill it or something. I'm trying to figure out if the drives can be hot swapped, but I don't think so, and have never done anything like that before anyway. Can you recommend a course of action? Thank you again! Laura PS - I checked out your Instagram and see you are from Central PA, I'm from near Lewisburg

Hi Brian, Thank you for all the knowledge that you share here, I'm learning so much browsing the forums. I wanted to ask a few questions about HDDs and get your feedback on my storage/backup setup. 1) I have a Synology disk station that I use as NAS to keep my "master/working" photos (dng/psds). It has two 2TB drives set up in RAID 1 (actually, upon setup it suggested it's own Synology Hybrid RAID which the manual describes as "SHR is an automated RAID management system that makes storage volume deployment easier than traditional RAID systems. Unlike Classic RAID, SHR divides each drive volume into smaller chunks and creates additional redundant storage. By using SHR, you can use the unavailable 4.5 TB volume (in the example) as smaller usable chunks, therefore maximizing storage capacity of each drive." I said OK but I assume since I initially used drives of equal size it didn't make a difference. Do you know anything about this proprietary RAID? Should I switch to classic RAID 1 at the next opportunity?). Anyway, a while ago I noticed one drive was reporting vague i/o errors but it supposedly was successful at self-repairing. Last night the unit got knocked a bit and the power button got hit. I wasn't connected or accessing any files but it was on and running (I usually leave it turned on and plugged into a UPS unit). So, that one disk is failing now and it is suggesting I replace it. I was going to buy an identical drive, although it is not in stock for 2-4 weeks. If I wait that long, aside from having no redundancy until then, is there any added risk of still moving files onto the volume (one working drive)? I'm worried somehow the other disk may be fragile, if that makes sense (a quick test said it was healthy but I’ve scheduled an extended test to run overnight). I'm inclined not to "rock the boat" until I get it replaced but I was *just* about to clear space on my Macbook which only has 10GB free (which I learned here is unwise to have that full, lol) and iPhone which only has free space on the order of MBs. The NAS volume is 75% full; I do have major culling to do but I'm afraid to do that right now. How much can these kind of drives (it's a WD "Red" NAS Harddrive FWIW) be safely filled? As I write this I wonder if I should get a larger capacity drive (4tb) while I'm at it... 2) I was also wondering if the way I access and change the files is OK. I have a Macbook and go to Connect to server and connect via AFP. If I want to access just one photo I usually open the file directly from ACR, leaving the dng file on the server, let it write the changes when I click open, and then I save my psd locally until I’m done working on it then move it over to the server. Sometimes though if I have a large folder of photos I haven’t culled (or if I’m going away) I drag the whole folder over to my laptop, generate 1:1 previews for culling, then edits to the dng and psds, and then drag the whole folder back over. I don’t do anything else on my computer while it’s moving the folder but I’m wondering if it’s “safe” to do it that way? I started doing that because trying to cull with 1:1 previews seemed very slow when they were on the server, and at the time I was doing edits in LR and I would always get error messages when LR would try to write to the metadata (I’ve since turned off that option and just backup the catalog instead, but I mostly use ACR/PS now anyway and have never gotten that error). 3) As backups I use two cloud services, one that saves jpgs + video files, and Amazon Cloud that I save dngs, psds, and videos. (Two is probably overkill but I started with the first and just kept it since it was cheap after Amazon Cloud started accepting raw files). I upload manually and then don’t touch the files or let my computer sync anything, so that if something on my NAS becomes corrupt or deleted that it doesn’t propagate. My other backup is a random assortment of HDDs that I currently keep inside the house with my computer but know I should probably move them off site somehow. I’m wondering if it’s safe to keep HDDs in the garage in a safe, or if winter weather would be too cold for the drives? And how reliable cloud services are? Thank you in advance for any insight/advice/suggestions. Sorry this post turned out long-winded, hopefully my questions make sense Signed, An OCD hobbyist photographer/digital pack rat