Editing/Storing Photographs!

Sony_SoFar · 18 Jun 2011

I currently use an Acer 5742g laptop i3 processor 4 gb RAM, 500GB HDD and a dedicated HD 5470 Graphics card at 512MB.

It does what I wanted it to do, internet, football manager, music storage, word docs, excel etc. But as im now getting into photography more i'm thinking I may be better to look to get a Macbook/ Macbook pro to store and edit photos on. I have seen them on ebay with cs4/cs5 and other photo editing software which I keep watching in MyeBay! And Macbooks also have iphoto for basic editing. But would this be a better option than to have my current laptop running the web, music, games, and editing photos?

Sony_SoFar

jd.smith · 18 Jun 2011

why do you want to learn a new operating system? Why complicate it if you need to split the work another pc solution makes sense in my opinion you can run all the same software cs4/5 picasa for basic editing and all in an environment you know without having to learn how to squeeze pinch or whatever it is mac people do for a left click!

Stratman · 19 Jun 2011

Download the trial version of Lightroom from Adobe's website. It's a superb catalogue and editing package. It'll work with Windows, and if you don't want to clog up your hard drive with pictures, external drives are very cheap these days.

neil_g · 19 Jun 2011

Try lightroom, your acer should handle the job easily

arad85 · 19 Jun 2011

The 5742g will probably be fine. Yes you can go quicker (I'm just about to get a quad core i7 laptop for editing).

If you are hell bent on upgrading, you can get a faster notebook for less money than a MBP. Photoshop/Photoshop Elements/Lightroom are exactly the same on both Macs and notebooks and a MBP is basically just PC hardware in a snazzy design (nice keyboards/screens/trackpads evidently but still expensive).

awp · 19 Jun 2011

Laptop screens are not good for editing pictures on - if you want to spend money buy a desktop - a decent monitor - and Lightroom.

realspeed · 19 Jun 2011

Why not put the photos on disc? you can access them anytime with no risk of deletion. just add an editing suite on the computer like photoshop Elements 9.

Realspeed

KC Leblanc · 19 Jun 2011

awp said:
Laptop screens are not good for editing pictures on - if you want to spend money buy a desktop - a decent monitor - and Lightroom.

You can always plug an external monitor into the laptop.

I'm agreeing with the rest of the gang, no point in going over to the dark side just to edit photos.

Sony_SoFar · 19 Jun 2011

KC Leblanc said:
You can always plug an external monitor into the laptop.

I'm agreeing with the rest of the gang, no point in going over to the dark side just to edit photos.

I have got Picasa 3 from google and am giving that a go and its seems to be working well. I was just thinking of more adding quirky extras to photos e.g. adding/removing a street light from a picture. But I think will stick with my laptop them!!

Thanks for the advice!

arad85 · 19 Jun 2011

Try Photoshop elements 9. Relatively cheap and has both cataloguing and a pretty decent version of Photoshop for when you want to do something a bit more whizzy...