looking to start my photography business once I'm done with school. Looking for a good computer to work on but could use some direction, thanks!
What is your budget? Do you want a laptop? Are you going to run PhotoShop?
Almost any higher end mac will be fine, but the new MacPro would be the cadillac.
The key is diskspace, diskspace and more diskspace, and even then some diskspace.
hopefully under $2000 and I'm looking into getting the Adobe Lightroom V5
The key is diskspace, diskspace and more diskspace, and even then some diskspace.
And all connected to a very fast port.
Consider if you will be working with video and photographs or just photographs.
In order to have enough RAM to work in photoshop - layers/colorization/ can be 250MB for a photo easy - and working with Tech at Apple Store (when it was still on-line or by phone only) purchasing MacPro - traded one of the processors in order to double the memory and stay within my budget. Also was able to purchase equipment to hook my mac flat monitor that did not have a power source(old mac powered it) - much cheaper than shelling out more for a new one.
http://www.macperformanceguide.com
The D300/500/700 are not suitable for Adobe at this time.
32-128GB RAM though is.
And PCIe-SSD are great.
The old Mac Pro was better suited. 6-core 3.4GHz - a top end iMac will blow your budget by 2x but would be fine.
Since you're a pro photographer, DO NOT get a laptop of any kind, max your computer out with RAM, get a the best monitor you can afford and drive it with a good graphics card with at least 1 GB of VRAM. A physically separate, dedicated HD for Photoshop scratch is essential.
I know you're contemplating Adobe Lightroom, and some folks love it especially for the sorting of files and such (personally I absolutely hated it), but in any case I guarantee that you're eventually going to have to add Photoshop eventually as well.
There's absolutely nothing that Lr can do to a single image file that Photoshop can't do (often better), but there are a gazillion things you can do to it in Photoshop that Lr cannot do.
Currently Adobe has a an offer for photographers, consisting of Photoshop bundled with Lightroom for $9,99 per month.
In any event, you should plan your machine around Photoshop from the get go.
As far as the size of the scratch goes:
The rule of thumb I follow to figure out scratch space says to figure on 50 to 100 times the size of your largest file ever multiplied by the number of files you have open. I have seen the scratch file exceed 800 GB once, an admittedly rare occurrence, but it often exceeds 200 GB when stitching large panoramas and the like.
As an example—and stressing that I'm aware that others have even more scratch space than I do—I keep two dedicated, physically separate hard drives as my primary and secondary Photoshop scratch disks and a lot of GB free on my boot drive for the OS. I also have 16 GB of RAM installed.
Additionally, if you only have a single HD, i.e. your boot drive, you'd need it to be large enough to accommodate both the swap files of the OS as well as Photoshop's scratch.
Except, of course, he never mentioned Photoshop, I did.
Keith Barkley wrote:
Except, of course, he never mentioned Photoshop, I did.
I know you did. So I jumped at the chance to comment. It's a conditioned reflex with me—I practically live inside Photoshop. 😀
…besides, the OP does mention photography as a business, which is unthinkable without Photoshop. 🙂
Zea,
You are gonna have to to work your way into a real Pro System. If I had to start where you are, I would budget like this
CCC
Best computer for photo editing and why
