Hi all,
My partner currently has a old MacBook Pro which she uses for photo editing (Lightroom) which is now obsolete and needs replacing (which she wants to replace with a desktop pc).
Budget is probably around $1500-1700 (including a monitor if possible).
Has anyone got any recommendations? It'll be solely used for photo editing, no gaming etc.
Thanks all!
Is it a hobby or pro?
I would suggest if it if just a hobby, why not an iPad? Cheap card reader, edit photos in Snapseed or Lightroom & upload to the cloud, perfect..
I have used this system with clients for quick turnaround, all have been happy. Can show them photos that pop in minutes without effort, super speedy….
Portable, easy & convenient.
There is little need for high end desktops unless you only shoot RAW photos hi res for corporate use… Even then..??
A few points:
Photoshop and Lightroom are rather lightly threaded, so this is one of the workflows an Intel CPU might be a better option than Ryzen right now.
At that price range probably 32 GB memory should be considered (dependent on file and library sizes)
Those apps do offer some GPU acceleration, so a low-mid tier discrete graphics card will be beneficial. If not for the above, Ryzen APUs could be a cheaper option.
Like gamers spending most of their budget on graphic cards, I'd argue for photography a quality monitor will make the biggest difference. High resolution and colour gamut + accuracy are important. So at minimum say a 27" 4K IPS panel. Models should quote level of support for gamuts like AdobeRGB and DCI P3.
Storage: I'd probably say NVMe SSD, Lightroom is slow at the best of times - but potentially the actual photos could be stored on a SATA SSD. I assume there's already a decent backup solution in place.
Main question is do you want to buy from a system integrator or build it yourself? You can try putting something together on pcpartpicker if the latter. Otherwise focus on most of the mainstream desktop systems companies offer, then spec and shop accordingly. Either way purchase the monitor separately since that is a more specialised item in this case.