What laptop/notebook

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villain1973uk

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Name
Lee
Edit My Images
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I've recently got Lightroom and photoshop but the trouble is my laptop isn't hd, when I look at pictures through my hd tv they look sharp and bright but when I look at them on my laptop they look dull, I'm guessing I can't really work on photos in Lightroom etc if I'm not seeing a sharp view in the first place, so I'm thinking of getting a laptop/notebook just for my photography but don't really want to spend a lot as already spent loads on this hobby already!!, so any recommendations on a good hd laptop/notebook?

Cheers
 
IMO you are trying to compare apples & oranges!

Your HDTV I surmise is (post) processing the images and they look good because that is the way that either you have set the TV up or it's default settings are making it/them "look good".

Viewing and working on (using LR and/or PS) your images on a PC or laptop requires that you setup and ideally calibrate (by eye using a software tool something like Adobe Gamma) or better yet a monitor calibration device like the Spyder. Then you need at the very least to start to learn about Post Processing and colour management..................one thing for sure you do not need an HD laptop but it does need a decent screen or monitor to truly get the best out of the images. You will have control of the finished picture not some preset algorithm in the TV and within that controlled process you will output images suitable for viewing screen, print and HDTV ;)

All the above is just my 2p's worth but to use your HDTV as the arbiter of what is a good image compared to whatever default your laptop is set to is not a good starting point.

Oh, are shooting JPEG? If so have you set the camera to shoot in aRGB rather than sRGB? If so that is one prime reason your laptop images look dull.......because the screen cannot show the aRGB gamut, if you convert or change to sRGB you might see a difference straight away. And as for "how sharp", most SOOC files need some level of sharpening!
 
What he said. :)

TV's aren't a better alternative they're actually a worse one.

Not to say you don't need a new laptop or monitor, but you should start by measuring it properly first.
 
That really. TVs are generally designed to be bright & punchy, and might make a dull image look exciting or an exciting image look gaudy. A screen that has been set up for editing photos and calibrated may seem a little dark & dull at first.
 
Focus on IPS Panel laptops- That helps with viewing angles and general performance. also look for colour space with regards to SRGB and AdobeRGB coverage. The higher the number (SRGB should be ideally 100%, Adobe as near as you can afford) the more chance you have of seeing something that resembles reality! Also agree with the above as modern TV's have ridiculous contrast and gamma depending on whether you're in cinema mode etc!!

I wouldnt personally recommend run Lightroom on anything under a quad core laptop or desktop, if the images are over about 16mp! For reference: my laptop is a 2 year old Gigabyte P34W laptop with 1080p IPS (100%sRGB), I7 4720 Quad CPU, 16Gb, 512SSD, Nvidia 970m. Still flies fairly speedily with LR.
 
rich_ said:
I wouldnt personally recommend run Lightroom on anything under a quad core laptop or desktop, if the images are over about 16mp! For reference: my laptop is a 2 year old Gigabyte P34W laptop with 1080p IPS (100%sRGB), I7 4720 Quad CPU, 16Gb, 512SSD, Nvidia 970m. Still flies fairly speedily with LR.
Click to expand...

Whereas my experience is different, I run LR on a Macbook with a crappy weak mobile processor with weak graphics chip and it runs LR fine, even pushing the very high res (and lovely) screen. It takes a while to export or do bulk actions but in usage whilst editing it is fine.

I also run LR on a Retina iMac (3.3ghz quad core) which is much much much more powerful and it is faster running LR and PS but not by as much as you might think.

edit: in fact I barely use the iMac any more as the Macbook is capable enough for general usage. The iMac only gets fired up after a long trip or to edit some video. So much so that I'm actually wondering that if the upcoming Macbook pro is svelte enough I might sell the Macbook and iMac and just run the one computer.
 
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Yes it's very much down to your own personal performance expectations and work flow.
I'm a techie guy, working in Fintech, with the associated (reasonably new) hardware to underpin our solutions, so my acceptable performance baseline is probably not reflective of the general photographer population!
 
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Another vote for older Macbooks here - I'm using a standard 2012 unibody, and while exporting larger files can be slow, the tweaking itself runs along quite happily. It struggles with video processing though - I'm considering upgrading to a new(er) Air. The screens on Macbooks are lovely - nice colours, sharp, hardly ever suffer from dead pixels in my experience.
 
The screen on the older MacBooks and Airs are not that high res, so I would say whatever you get (if it's a mac) get a retina screen.

A 2014 MacBook Pro would be a good place to start, still plenty powerful.
 
But don't go back to the core 2 duos - absolutely not enough grunt to manage a 20MP file in lightroom *comfortably* (you can edit, but bushwork is painful).

Personally I wouldn't want another Macbook unless budgets were unlimited, and I'd not really want a used one for image editing unless it were unexpectedly cheap.
 
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