lightroom Archives - Pick Notebook

Finding the best laptop for photo and video editing requires balancing a lot of power-hungry components with a top-notch screen while keeping a personal budget in the equation.

And it gets even more complicated.

When you need a lightweight machine that can run for hours on its battery alone while still being able to provide the smoothest workflow.

In this post, I will describe what you need to look for EXACTLY in a notebook for creative work and what you should expect at your price range to the dollar.

Finally, I’ll list out 7 best options when it comes to best laptops for video and photo editing. To pick them out, I went over a 100 hottest laptops and evaluated them using specs and benchmarks that took me days to find and collect.

What are we looking for in a photo and video editing laptop?

What is essential for the best laptop for photo and video editing?

Major requirement SSD

How much storage do I need?

You need to decide on the total amount of storage that you’ll need. A basic starting point should be 500 GB. But if I were you, I would advise going up to 1 TB or more.

Do I need an SSD?

Yes. I recommend getting at least a small 250 GB SSD for OS, Photoshop, Lightroom or your favorite photo editing app and several “hot” photo folders. It will make a world of difference. When I edit photos, I notice a measurable difference between my files on SSD and HDD. And I don’t have to work with super high-resolution uncompressed RAW images that would benefit the most from an SSD.

But the main issue with laptop SSDs is that there aren’t many laptops that come with 1 TB SSD built-in. That’s why sometimes you’ll need to limit yourself to 500 GB + 1 TB setup or you’ll need to spend ~$320 for 1 TB SSD.

What should be my target?

At the end of the day, everything revolves around two variables:

Size of a desired laptop
Your spending budget

That’s what I would recommend and what you should optimistically expect:

13-inch	15-inch	17-inch
Under $1000	250 GB SSD + external storage	250 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD	250 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD
Under $1500	500 GB SSD	500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD	500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD
Over $1500	500 GB SSD + external storage	500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD	1 TB SSD + 1 TB HDD

The good part with 15.6″ and 17.3″ laptops is that they often have 2 or 3 slots for storage. That allows easy upgrades in the future.

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Choosing a laptop for Adobe Lightroom is not particularly hard – having a high-end graphics card is not necessary, laptops with larger and faster hard drives and memory are now commonplace. But it gets problematic when you have to take into consideration screen and upgrade potential.

Surely no sane man would go through all new, well-received and best selling laptops to find out what is the best one for Lightroom. But you’d be making a mistake if you call me sane.

So I compiled a list of 244 laptops (most of them are outdated, but they are always down in the list when comparing metrics). Then I compared them to their performance (using real benchmarks), storage, screen quality and weight. I have weighed all of these metrics according to what’s important to Lightroom – so you know these laptops are the best for their purpose.

In this post I’ll cover 8 best laptops for Lightroom and what’s so great AND what’s not so perfect about them. Also, I will make sure that anything above budget options will also be a viable option for other software you might end up using (khm khm.. Photoshop).

This time, unlike any other, I’ll start off with the laptops and then I’ll write about how did I end up choosing them. Finally, at the bottom of the article, I’ll give you the link to the spreadsheet covering all the quantified comparisons of these 240 laptops ranging from $370 to $3700!

Here we go!

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Pick Notebook

Choosing a laptop shouldn't be that hard