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What mac hardware do you use for your Photography?
- Thread starter Donka
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This is a setup I’ve been looking at and I use the same two apps. A lot. Can you tell if the eGPU is making a decent difference in PS and LR? Do you have a dedicated scratch?
Coming from a film background, I don't take a lot of photos during a session, I try to get things right in the camera and I don't bother with trying to salvage problematic photos. This means that I do very basic editing in Photoshop/Lightroom. I don't use a lot of layers and I don't do batch processing. For my purposes, and having tested it, I think that an i5 mini and the integrated graphics work just fine.
I don't use a scratch disk because I've yet to see a need for one, especially since I have flash drives on both the mini and my iMac.
If have an i7 mini and an external video card for reasons that have nothing to do with still photography.
That said, there are people who are using an external video card with photo editing software whose needs are more demanding than mine and who find it useful. Have a look at post #149 in this thread, in which @stillcrazyman talks about the benefit that he's getting from an external card.
Adobe has published support documents on how Photoshop/Lightroom use a GPU. Maybe have a look at these to help you decide whether an external GPU is worth the investment.
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After selling my old 2010 iMac, clearing out the space, I just received a 34" LG Ultrawide display to go with my 2014 13" MacBook Pro. The plan is to use it in clam-shell mode when I'm at home. The ultrawide display really works well for me, as you can have two applications open side by side in decent size. I'm still trying to figure out the best workflow with my new setup. Mostly working in Lightroom and just started to dive into Photoshop a little.
Down the road, I'm thinking maybe a mini to replace the rMBP, once it starts showing it's age.
Down the road, I'm thinking maybe a mini to replace the rMBP, once it starts showing it's age.
Will be interesting to see how you progress with the 34" LG. My plan is to switch to a similar ultrawide in place of my 1440p monitor once the time comes to upgrade my existing 2012 quad mini for a new one. I know the 2012 mini technically can drive an ultrawide but that resolution is really pushing the 2012 integrated gpu.
I was surprised, my MacBook seemes faster with the ultrawide in clam-shell mode. I guess it's easier to rive it versus the retina display.
I think you'll love the ultrawide! Some people say the curve is distracting, but I didn't think so for my use case...
I just got my first mac after 25+ years with DOS/Windows. I also purchased FCP for video editing old digital film videos. As I’m moving all my junk from the Windows machine to the 2018 Mac mini I thought I should do something with the thousands of photos, so I started putting them in Photos. Well now I needed editing software but no way am I paying a subscription so I found both Affinity and Luminar (love em). I’m a hack with my cameras so currently I only have 8gb on the mac but have two external 10tb spinning drives to hold and back up said junk (hubby calls it digital hording :/ ) I use a Samsung 40” 4k monitor that I’m fond of and a Magic Trackpad 2 which is surprisingly great.