It’s time to replace my Surface Book 1. Would love some feedback on what I should be looking for in a laptop I will use for processing photographs using Lightroom, Photoshop, and Luminar.
Most of the time it is connected to a 34" 4K monitor, but I do travel and want to bring my hobby with me. Nothing better on a rainy day camping than processing photos.
I prefer a 13" monitor. 15" is too big.
What kind of specs and machines would you recommend? Graphics speed is important. Anything to speed up the Lightroom Import function would be wonderful. Need at least a 1TB of storage. I’d like to keep the cost under $3,000 or so.
Back in May, Wirecutter recommended the Surface Book 2. Not sure I want to go there again.
actually, yes. But they’re usually 15’’. I don’t think i’ve seen a 13’’ that has the storage you want and the horsepower. At least not off the top of my head. I’ll look this evening after the gym.
That razr looks good. I’ve reviewed this 15’’ and really liked it for performance. I like to see how laptops handle After Effects and Photoshop files. In my experience, if it can handle that, it can handle Lightroom. https://amzn.to/2KdqZpK (affiliate) I’m still searching for a < 15’’ though
I’ll be talking about this on HOT, soon. It is not gonna be a machine to run After Effects, but it does work well with Lightroom. And it’s a light ultrabook. https://amzn.to/3d0a4bP
Grade photos fast - roughly speaking it’s 0 - reject/ 1- keep for personal albums/ 2 - keep for sharing on flickr/ 3 - good enough for smugmug/portfolio
Move rejects to _Rejected folder for eventual disposal (no hurry)
Import the rest into Lightroom
Edit with Lightroom and, if needed Luminar/Aurora/Nik plugins
Import the keepers into Photos and Google Photos
Post the gems
All of this is pretty fast on the MacBook and I trust the true-tone screen.
Thanks for the workflow and FastRawViewer - glad to see it has a Windows version.
I’m still trying to decide what laptop to get. Just not sure I want to jump into MacOS.
Any thoughts on a Lenovo Thinkpad P53 with OLED screen?
When you import into Lightroom, where are you storing them? On the Mac?
Is your entire RAW photo library on the Mac?
How about the Lightroom library?
Thanks for the workflow and FastRawViewer - glad to see it has a Windows version.
I’m still trying to decide what laptop to get. Just not sure I want to jump into MacOS.
Any thoughts on a Lenovo Thinkpad P53 with OLED screen?
When you import into Lightroom, where are you storing them? On the Mac?
Is your entire RAW photo library on the Mac?
How about the Lightroom library?
We used to issue P50 ThinkPads to staff who moaned about the performance of the standard-issue T Series ones. We usually got them back after a few days
They’re big and heavy machines - just thinking about your original post saying you liked to travel with it.
Colors pop, blacks are really black, contrast is astronomically higher
That doesn’t sound like an accurate screen to me. Great to look at but for photography accuracy is paramount. I’d look to see what the Dell does on that score.
Having said that I love Dells, and the XPS 15 is a great machine. I just don’t want to use Windows.
Don’t confuse gamut with color accuracy. Just because something can reproduce all the colors within the P3 or sRGB range doesn’t mean it’s doing so accurately.
Those are both gamut standards (range of colours). I’ve had zero experience of OLED laptops (I use an IPS MBP), but it does make sense an OLED may cause issues if you are doing colour sensitive work, as you’ll be working with very saturated colours.
I processed a bunch of photos last night with night shift on Wondered why they looked a bit weird this morning!
Wondered why they looked a bit weird this morning!