Help on choose laptop for D800/D850 RAW

Obviously desktop machines, especially high clocked "K" processors, will be better. But equally obviously less portable.

Note that there is, after many years of dual core "U" mobile processors and quad core "H" mobile processors, another option has arrived of quad core "U" mobile processors - e.g. i7-8550U - which in many circumstances may be as good or better than "H" due to very high turbo frequencies on single core. And these come in even lighter form factors.

Similarly, GTX 1050 in a laptop isn't as low as you can go with an external discrete GPU - there are NVidia MX150 dGPUs below that. Or wait until you can get the core i7 with Radeon Vega (e.g. i7-8809G). Both options again penetrate to lighter form factors.

Sophie

I had a very pleasant experience when I ordered my HP Omen gaming 15" laptop directly from HP. It arrived packed in a huge protective box and came in 4 days. It is fast and sweet. I got the 4K display which some don't like on that small of a screen but I am not having any scaling issues at all.

You should not load a hundred RAWs in Camera Raw at a time to do batch processing. Choose "File/Scripts/Image Processor" and check "Open first image to apply settings". Hit "Run", edit the first image and go drink some coffee.

Hi,

my experience with my "classic" PC is that 8 Gbytes is not enough to process D850 files. In this configurarion lightroom uses 90 % of memory alone and the system began swapping. I suggets to provide 12 GB at leats. This is confirmed by Adobe annonuncement that performane will be improved in 7.2 version on computers with at least 12 GB of memory

Regards

I would short list by how much wider than sRGB gamut can the monitor display.

mitsosmitsou said:

Hello forum,

Please help me to the following query since I don't want to through money without

achieving wanted results.

I have an old i7/8GB RAM/1GB Nvidia/SSD 256GB laptop of 2010 which is my main computer

to process RAW photos. Generally it is slow to process D800 files and especially

slow when I open 50-100 RAWs in Adobe CameraRaw to do batch processing.

Especially annoying is, the slow rendering when I jump from one picture to the

next and the save to jpg takes around 20 second per RAW.

I wonder if I buy a new laptop e.g with i7-7700HQ/8GB RAM/GTX 1050 4GB @1000euro,

will it significantly improve my workflow time? Especially the jumping from

one image to the other in ACR and have no lag when applying settings in the photo

to see the result in the monitor, or I should move to desktop solution?

Is gaming laptops appropriate for this type of work?

Is D850 files much heavier to process than D800 ones?

Thanks a lot

Click to expand...

A desktop will work better, I have a pretty good one, the D850 produces big files but the overhead is really most felt with video.

A laptop can work pretty well I can process D850 raws and the occasional 4K video on a Surface pro. (I7 16gb of Ram).

But for heavy duty on the road stuff I have a Lenovo P51 I7 7820 4k 64Gb ram and 8gb Video card, If I wanted one machine for home and laptop then this would be the one.

--
Instagram @vinnypimages

mitsosmitsou said:

to see the result in the monitor, or I should move to desktop solution?

Is gaming laptops appropriate for this type of work?

Click to expand...

Something to be careful with in that space is that gaming laptops tend to pick screens which emphasis high refresh rate, rather than color accuracy or stability over wide viewing angles. You'll have to be picky about this if you intend to use a laptop without connecting it to an external monitor of some sort.

That's not to say that you can't get one with a 4K matte AHVA or IPS panel that covers 100% of Adobe RGB space... but most won't have that sort of thing unless you're specifically asking for it.

Leejay Wu said:

mitsosmitsou said:

to see the result in the monitor, or I should move to desktop solution?

Is gaming laptops appropriate for this type of work?

Click to expand...

Something to be careful with in that space is that gaming laptops tend to pick screens which emphasis high refresh rate, rather than color accuracy or stability over wide viewing angles. You'll have to be picky about this if you intend to use a laptop without connecting it to an external monitor of some sort.

That's not to say that you can't get one with a 4K matte AHVA or IPS panel that covers 100% of Adobe RGB space... but most won't have that sort of thing unless you're specifically asking for it.

Click to expand...

I use a very good 2K external monitor calibrated, so monitor is not an issue.

My RAW workflow is like this:

1) Download lets say 1000 RAW images of a wedding in internal SSD

2) Open PS CS 2015 and open 50-200 images of the wedding (depends on the

subject) in ACR.

3) Process them in ACR (WB/exposure/contrast etc) one by one or small batches if photos are similar.

4) Press 'Done' and ACR closes saving the settings in xml for each photo.

5) Repeat the same with rest photos of the wedding.

6) When all done, I open all of them in ACR and save them as jpg.

I spend around 5 hours for this job-except saving. If I had a faster computer I assume that I would spend around 2 hours and have more fun. My main delay, is when I jump from one photo to the next. Also, thumbnails on the left are slow to load.Also the reaction when I change a slider eg exposure or WB takes 2-4 secs to show.Not to mention if I magnify to 100% it takes 10 seconds to render. I assume for this workflow the most important part is the graphics card power, that's why I mention gaming laptops. Lightroom is even slower that ACR on this flow. Thanks.

mitsosmitsou said:

Hello forum,

Please help me to the following query since I don't want to through money without

achieving wanted results.

I have an old i7/8GB RAM/1GB Nvidia/SSD 256GB laptop of 2010 which is my main computer

to process RAW photos. Generally it is slow to process D800 files and especially

slow when I open 50-100 RAWs in Adobe CameraRaw to do batch processing.

Especially annoying is, the slow rendering when I jump from one picture to the

next and the save to jpg takes around 20 second per RAW.

I wonder if I buy a new laptop e.g with i7-7700HQ/8GB RAM/GTX 1050 4GB @1000euro,

will it significantly improve my workflow time? Especially the jumping from

one image to the other in ACR and have no lag when applying settings in the photo

to see the result in the monitor, or I should move to desktop solution?

Is gaming laptops appropriate for this type of work?

Is D850 files much heavier to process than D800 ones?

Thanks a lot

Click to expand...

Having upgraded my desktop several years ago to I7, + 1TBSSD, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 760 2GB GRAM, 2+ 2 internal and 3 external HDD. My desk top OS Win 7Pro 64Bit is sufficiently fast for the latest D850 files running LR cc2015.14....My Laptop is only running an I5 CPU with a 250GB SSD and 8GB Ram and a slow internal Video card is not sufficient for large scale image processing.

What ever you decide with your New Laptop choose one with a Solid State Disk Drive which will have the most significant speed increase with your overall systems speed. One caution is that when I changed from a 500Gb SSD to 1TB SSD my desktop actually got slightly slower (From a 7.8 Windows Experience Index to a 7.5 WEI), a 500 GB SSD should be just right....

Slightly over one year old.

IPS display. Calibrates with Spyder5 Elite beautifully

32GB RAM

1TB SSD

NVDIA 960M Graphics Card (as I recall)

Can't remember the Intel chip model, but it eats D810 files like eating popcorn. Easy.

Very fast.

Paid $880 USD December 2016 Amazon special price + cost of having local computer shop install the Samsung 1TB SSD. Total cost about $1050 USD.

Cheapest laptop I've ever owned, and the best I've ever owned.

I agree with the other posters that 8GB is not enough RAM. I process D850 files on an i7 6820HK with 32GB RAM and 980M SLI video cards. I need to updrade my drive to SSD, but otherwise the processing is fast. RAM is likely going to be your bottleneck in the laptop you describe. Yes, desktops are faster, but only because for the same price you can get "more" computer than on a laptop. Spec for spec, other things equal they will be the same.