What PC for editing

Conchurl

Hey All

I recently bought a second hand canon 250d I'm looking to get into photography as a hobby, I also need a new desk top computer so I might as well spend a bit extra and get one that can handle editing photos.

Do ye have any recommendations I don't want a laptop, and I would prefer a all in one PC but I'm open to suggestions

manna452121

Whatever you get PC or Laptop you will have to get software,such as Lightroom,Photoshop etc to work on your pictures.Have a look on Youtube to get some info.Best of luck,I would go for a good laptop with plenty of memory power.

gzoladz

I'd say nearly any PC can handle photo editing, in particular if you are starting (mine is nearly 10 years old and it still does fine). There are even Android/iPad versions of many photo editing apps that can handle raw fairly well.

Adrian.Sadlier

It depends on how serious you want to get. And how much money you have.

I always prefer a desktop PC to a laptop. Laptop screens tend to be lower quality that standalone screens, unless you buy a very high end laptop. It is harder to get a good colour match on a lot of low-end laptops. The Canon 250D has a 24MP sensor and uses 14-bit RAW format. The files will be big. If you use Photoshop, the files will be massive, especially if you use layers.

A minimum spec I would recommend is

Intel i5 (i7 preferred)

8Gb RAM (16Gb+ preferred)

SSD Drive (PCIe/NVMe, as big as you can afford

Dedicated Graphics card but it doesn't have to be a high end one

(unless you want to process video)

An old fashioned Hard Disk drive. 7,200RPM 4Tb+

Another old fashioned Hard Disk drive. 7,200RPM 4Tb+ for backups - external will do, but make sure its USB 3 or eSATA for an external drive or

you will grow old waiting!

A 24"+ screen, minimum 1080p (bigger and higher res is better)

A decent, comfortable mouse.

Photoshop and lightroom come together in a "Photography" bundle (€12.29 a month, inc VAT).

My personal rig, which I got 3 years ago and will last me until I upgrade my camera in a couple of years time (I have a 36Mp Nikon D810 and want a 47Mp one) is as follows:

Dell XPS 8930

Intel i7-8700K @ 3.7GHz

32GB RAM

NVIDIA 1080 Graphics Card

24" 1920x1200 Samsung Monito

28" 3840x2160 Samsun Monitor

1/2 TB Boot PCIe SSD

1TB PCIe SSD

4 TB 7,200RPM Hard Drive

2 x 8TB Hard Drive

But then, I drive a 13 year old car. Plus, my daughters have grown up, and I have a good job!

JMcL

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118738637#Comment_118738637

All good advice here, so just to add a few cents and throw in a few more options:

For sure, make sure the monitor you choose has an IPS panel - cheaper monitors don't have great colour fidelity and worse, very narrow viewing angles

As an alternative to getting into the ongoing payment circus of the Adobe ecosystem, you could look at open source alternatives. Lightroom is superb for cataloguing content, and is a very able raw developer, but can be replaced with digiKam (https://www.digikam.org/) for organising images, and a raw processor of which there are several very capable options. I personally use ART (https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art/wiki/Home) which I find easy to use, and which gives good results quickly. Other options are Darktable (https://www.darktable.org/) - a lot of people like this, though I've never gotten on with it personally, and RawTherapee (http://rawtherapee.com/) which is similar to ART, but has more complexity. GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/) can do a lot of what Photoshop does, though ignoring cost, I would give Photoshop the nod for adjustment layers which are great. That said, I very rarely find myself going further than the raw processor these days (I used to do a lot of blended exposures so used Photoshop a lot).

Just for context, I'm a long time Linux user and have been into digital photography for the guts of 20 years. For a long time I had to run Windows JUST to run the Adobe suite - I'd check every couple of years and just felt the open source options weren't up to scratch. That's changed in the last couple of years (I was forced to bite the bullet as I upgraded to a camera not supported by my - paid for - standalone Lightroom), and I think they're now very capable. They're not necessarily better or worse than Adobe, just different. If you're happy with the asking price, there're a lot of resources and howtos for the Adobe suite on the web, though bear in mind that SAAS prices usually only go in the one direction