According to what I read the macbook pro can support an external monitor up to 6k.
What is the ideal computer setup for photography
- Thread starter wotan1
- Start date
If you would like to post, you'll need to register. Note that if you have a BCG store account, you'll need a new, separate account here (we keep the two sites separate for security purposes).
The M1 Macs are just fine for Lightroom. You will be pleased.
thankyou everyone
I just took delivery of a macbook pro 16. This was a reconditioned M1 model with 1 tb hard drive but otherwise entry level configuration.
I was able to get it set up and running without too much difficulty. Downloaded and installed Adobe Creative Cloud photo plan software. I even successfully installed Microsoft Office and got my email configured and working.
I added the 5k studio display and it worked fine.
I then copied all of my current Lightroom photos out of the pc onto a 6 tb USB drive, plugged that drive into the Mac and proceeded to import everything. It all worked.
My initial impressions are very favorable. Everything in Lightroom seems to work reasonably smoothly and the screens are gorgeous.
I will probably get someone over here to look at what I did and do some more tweaking, set up backup, etc.
I think this is going to be a good move.
I was able to get it set up and running without too much difficulty. Downloaded and installed Adobe Creative Cloud photo plan software. I even successfully installed Microsoft Office and got my email configured and working.
I added the 5k studio display and it worked fine.
I then copied all of my current Lightroom photos out of the pc onto a 6 tb USB drive, plugged that drive into the Mac and proceeded to import everything. It all worked.
My initial impressions are very favorable. Everything in Lightroom seems to work reasonably smoothly and the screens are gorgeous.
I will probably get someone over here to look at what I did and do some more tweaking, set up backup, etc.
I think this is going to be a good move.
Congrats ! I would expect that you as long as you don't get into high end video editing, this should be a really good choice.
All the best with your testing phase
.Regarding the monitor you have multiple options and if you need just one external monitor you have a number of choices.
However, there is one thing that might be worthwhile keeping in mind for the future:
Many people using a notebook as their primary computer at home, in office and while travelling like to have a single cable setup, i.e. the notebook gets connected with just one Thunderbolt cable for everything from power supply to the connection to the external peripherals including one or more external displays.
If you decide to keep your Macbook, you want this kind of setup and you expect to remain happy with one external 5k display, there are some (USB-C) monitors on the market that are more or less a display with integrated dock, providing additional connectivity and sufficient charging power for the notebook at the same time and this might be the way to go.
However, if you would like to go for more than one external display, there's a hidden caveat to be kept in mind. Not every dock/hub is able to operate two 5K displays connected to it. In my case I am using a CalDigit Element Hub only because it allows operating two 5k displays connected to it in such a single cable setup, ... but only because these are Studio Displays. With third party displays like e.g. two LG Ultrafine 5k this wouldn't work. To get to a single cable setup up with two 5K displays other than Apple a different apporach will be needed.
That said, although you are talking of a 5K display, I just recently saw something that might be interesting.
Going 6K with genuine Apple is far too expensive, but while researching around Passkey I got the 01/24 issue of a magazine called "Mac & i" and found a report of the DELL Ultrasharp U3224KBA, which is less 50% of the Pro XDR display a little more than the Studio Diaplay with the proper foot while providing much better connectivity including a native Thunderbolt upstream connection with enough charging output to feed a Macbook Pro. Might be worth a closer look ...
I added a base level Mac Studio with m2 max with 1 tb drive to the mix.
I have two 4k monitors already and plan to move one of those 4k's to the Studio setup so I will have a 4k and 5k screen to work with for the mac studio for now. I am keeping my pc setup with one external 4k running at least until I am sure I can do everything I want with the mac.
The studio will be my desktop and I plan to bring the macbook pro on trips. The screen on that is more than adequate for processing images while on a trip.
I currently have an OWC four bay RAID 5 thunderbolt drive. I am planning on moving that to the MAC next week. That will house my photos and catalogs.
So far I have been able to do everything myself. I am going to meet with a consultant next week to review things and help with the OWC turnover.
QUESTION what do you recommend for a BACKUP?
Think long and hard before giving your money to that CCP made, anti right-to-repair, vanity brand.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
I did, and cheerfully bought a Mac Studio to replace/upgrade the iMAC I had. To go along with my Mac laptop and various other hardware in the same ecosystem.
Seriously, I did want to push back a bit on "vanity brand." A computer is a tool. Pick the tool that works for you.
I worked in the software industry and among technical people in my last company, many were quite happy with Windows as a primary desktop/laptop. A very substantial minority liked Apple, and a few diehards liked to use one of the various flavors of Linux as their desktop. None of the very technical people who used Macs did it to proudly flash the Apple logo. It was just ... the best solution for them.
There are certainly things I don't like about Macs. Or the Windows OS. And linux ... just too painful for me as an everyday tool (too many apps I like don't run on Linux).
But photographers seeking a good solution for their photo-processing (and other computing) needs should rest assured that technically sophisticated users will not look down upon their choice.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
For local backups, is Time Machine not sufficient? One big HDD might be good enough. Running RAID 5, you of course already have some protection against a single disk failure.
For cloud backups, there are several choices. You need a decent upload speed, and even if you have it, it takes a while to get TBs of data up.
Nice word salid.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
Okay, I'll simplify. There is no reason to avoid buying Apple hardware.
I use to use time machine when it first was introduced. I reduced the backup increment times to once a day by utilizing a free utility software. It may be more forgiving now but whenever i had an issue with it you had to redo a complete backup. I switched to CarbonCopy Cloner. Much more flexible.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
The only issue I've had with Time Machine is when I moved a bunch of files from one external drive to another, I couldn't find a way to tell TM to forget about the files on the old external drive. And I had space issues on the backup drive, so had to restart the entire backup because it didn't have space for both the copies of the files on the old drive and the new drive.
Otherwise it's been okay. I haven't used CarbonCopy. Would it handle the case I had?
You can set it up to keep the older versions or not as you prefer. Time Machine is pretty reliable for a locally attached destination…but Time Machine to a network destination is problematic, frequently fails for no apparent reason…and despite being a long long time Mac guy I was unable to get it to consistently work. My solution was to use CCC with the "remote Macintosh" destination and set up Time Machine like backups for our laptops that way and it's been bulletproof. I still have TM set up on the laptops but the destination is never actually connected…so it just backs up locally every hour…that allows easy recovery of the accidentally deleted file.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
The problem I had was slightly different. I copied say 400 GB of photos from drive A to drive B. Okay, TM starts backing up the files from drive B. But the TM backup drive did not have space for 400 GBs of those files in two places; a backup of drive A and a backup of those same files from drive B. And I could not find a way to tell TM "forget about those files on drive A, so you can reuse the space." Possibly I missed it. So I had to wipe the TM drive and redo the backup. Which wasn't a tragedy; I had a cloud backup as a safety net while the TM backup was redone.
Calson
Well-known member
When I was processing thousands of images from wedding shoots the Mac Pro with the Xenon processor was twice as fast as my Wintel machine with its Xeon processor. The Mac OS was more efficient in CPU usage and in memory management. Today the testing using Photoshop benchmarking applications puts the Nvidia 4090 on a Intel machine to be much faster than the Studio boxes with M2 or M3 chips for image processing.
Photoshop performance depends more on CPU processing than the number of cores available and the CPU may be said to replace a dedicated GPU but that does not appear to be true. Photoshop also uses a great deal of RAM and VRAM. The advantage of the Nvidia 4090 board is that is has 24GB of fast VRAM on it for direct access by the GPU. This is more important if doing 4K video processing than image files.
The problem I am seeing is with file I/O performance and so I need to have the image files on an internal storage device directly attached to the motherboard backplane using M.2 memory modules. With an external data device the performance drops dramatically so I have working files on internal devices and use a NAS on a 10GB connection to archive files.
What was interesting in researching Photoshop performance was how good the laptops with an internal 4090 GPU were compared to desktop computers, usually equaling them in overall performance. The only limitation is the amount of internal storage available on laptops and concerns about redundancy with a mirrored pair of drives. Along these lines the Windows "mobile workstations" often provide a good alternative to a desktop or tower computer.
A key problem with tower computers at this point in time is not having enough space for a 3-slot RTX 4090 board and any additional PCIe cards to add functionality as with 10GB Ethernet card. The only one I found that might work was the Lenovo Legion 7 gaming workstation (if you can get past the gaudy LED displays on the case).
Photoshop performance depends more on CPU processing than the number of cores available and the CPU may be said to replace a dedicated GPU but that does not appear to be true. Photoshop also uses a great deal of RAM and VRAM. The advantage of the Nvidia 4090 board is that is has 24GB of fast VRAM on it for direct access by the GPU. This is more important if doing 4K video processing than image files.
The problem I am seeing is with file I/O performance and so I need to have the image files on an internal storage device directly attached to the motherboard backplane using M.2 memory modules. With an external data device the performance drops dramatically so I have working files on internal devices and use a NAS on a 10GB connection to archive files.
What was interesting in researching Photoshop performance was how good the laptops with an internal 4090 GPU were compared to desktop computers, usually equaling them in overall performance. The only limitation is the amount of internal storage available on laptops and concerns about redundancy with a mirrored pair of drives. Along these lines the Windows "mobile workstations" often provide a good alternative to a desktop or tower computer.
A key problem with tower computers at this point in time is not having enough space for a 3-slot RTX 4090 board and any additional PCIe cards to add functionality as with 10GB Ethernet card. The only one I found that might work was the Lenovo Legion 7 gaming workstation (if you can get past the gaudy LED displays on the case).
Mac Studio FTW, load it up with RAM and the extra graphics cores. Mine's an M1 and it smokes through complex renders, M2 will be even smokier.
I so far am pleased with how Lightroom works with the Studio M2.
I know I have heard a lot about Apple prices. But I spent $4k for a top of the line PC gaming laptop about two years ago. I needed a laptop for work and with COVID the demands for reliable video conferencing became much more critical. The laptop did what it was supposed to do for work and it earned its keep.
Turns out even though I bought the latest and greatest it had limitations in Lightroom. I lived with those limitations and was able to make it work. I felt like I ws bogged down a. lot and had particular problems with Onedrive.
Despite buying top of the line, I was not able to work with a 5k monitor. I needed to get a better graphics card which meant the laptop was not upgradeable so I was going to have to buy a new desktop. If I wanted a 5k monitor I was going to have to buy the RTX 4080 or 4090 to get that done. By the time I specced it out it was not going to be a cheap desktop. I would need to go for a gaming unit with plenty of room for cards and extra internal drives.
I ended up paying a flat $2 grand for the entry level Studio M2 with 1 tb hard drive. I added the Studio Monitor so now I have my 5k monitor and was also able to use my Dell 4k as a second monitor. I am sure I would have to pay a lot more for the specced out PC gaming desktop.
The entry level Studio M2 is working just fine for me. Much faster than the I9 gaming PC laptop. It feels like Apple understands photographers and is able to deliver what they need without having to deal with the particular demands of gaming.
I am finding the 5k monitor great for post processing. I am revisiting some of my old images and am finding things I did not spot when going through before on the 4k monitor.
I am even adjusting to the Apple universe.
Next stop is to dig out my Datacolor Spyder and play around with calibration, then get my Epson 900 into the new system.
I know I have heard a lot about Apple prices. But I spent $4k for a top of the line PC gaming laptop about two years ago. I needed a laptop for work and with COVID the demands for reliable video conferencing became much more critical. The laptop did what it was supposed to do for work and it earned its keep.
Turns out even though I bought the latest and greatest it had limitations in Lightroom. I lived with those limitations and was able to make it work. I felt like I ws bogged down a. lot and had particular problems with Onedrive.
Despite buying top of the line, I was not able to work with a 5k monitor. I needed to get a better graphics card which meant the laptop was not upgradeable so I was going to have to buy a new desktop. If I wanted a 5k monitor I was going to have to buy the RTX 4080 or 4090 to get that done. By the time I specced it out it was not going to be a cheap desktop. I would need to go for a gaming unit with plenty of room for cards and extra internal drives.
I ended up paying a flat $2 grand for the entry level Studio M2 with 1 tb hard drive. I added the Studio Monitor so now I have my 5k monitor and was also able to use my Dell 4k as a second monitor. I am sure I would have to pay a lot more for the specced out PC gaming desktop.
The entry level Studio M2 is working just fine for me. Much faster than the I9 gaming PC laptop. It feels like Apple understands photographers and is able to deliver what they need without having to deal with the particular demands of gaming.
I am finding the 5k monitor great for post processing. I am revisiting some of my old images and am finding things I did not spot when going through before on the 4k monitor.
I am even adjusting to the Apple universe.
Next stop is to dig out my Datacolor Spyder and play around with calibration, then get my Epson 900 into the new system.
Ah…but then since you copied the files there are now 2 copies of them and TM is going to back up the copy on both drives unless you exclude the drive. But even if you set CCC not to keep versions there would still be 2 copies and TM will try and back both of them up. Personally…I only have TM backup the boot drive and ignore everything else because everything else is either original photos on the RAID o2r backup drives and I have a bunch of assorted CCC jobs to back up everything from the boot drive and RAID to various locations as well as BackBlaze to back them up to the cloud. I also have a 2TB DropBox account that gets backup copies of everything on the RAID except the original images (the RAID has both original images and a folder shared to the house network for consolidated data file location). I have TM run on the boot drive on my Mac Studio which is the main LR and fileserver machine…on the laptops I have TM running but to a never connected drive so that it will do hourly snapshots locally, these are useful only for the rare occasions when I accidentally delete something. And I'm running my own CCC TM like clone jobs on both laptops to a completely different folder on the RAID on the Studio which then gets backed up to a 20TB spinning external on the Studio.
I have a consultant coming tomorrow and we will figure out something that makes sense without ending up in the mess I got into with Onedrive.
Right now Onedrive refuses to let go of the Pictures folder on the main hard drive. It keeps backing things up all the time and ties my system into knots. I hate that system, it has driven me away from Windows.
Right now Onedrive refuses to let go of the Pictures folder on the main hard drive. It keeps backing things up all the time and ties my system into knots. I hate that system, it has driven me away from Windows.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
My above description was incorrect, I moved via lightroom the 400 GB of photos from one drive to another (I said copied above but that was wrong, they were actually moved). TM thought there were two copies ... TM kept the 400 GB backups of the files on the old drive, and now needed to back up 400 GB on the drive they were moved to. The backup drive didn't have enough space for both. I couldn't exclude the old drive entirely, as it still had files on it that needed to be backed up.
And there appears to be no way to tell TM to throw away backups of specific files (you can find some suggestions on the web to delete this or that under the hood, but I think that corrupts the TM database). At least I couldn't find a way.
I prefer having a local backup of the non-boot drive data along with the cloud backup. I actually care less about the boot drive than the data. If the boot drive is trashed, I'll reinstall everything from scratch.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
I'm really surprised you can't just throttle OneDrive (but I've never used it myself). You must have a very high speed internet connection. Something mundane, like the 20 Mbits I have up, is so little that the CPU is loafing along backing up to the cloud as fast as it can.
The problem is my Onedrive was set up for the whole office so it is copying a lot of stuff all the time for work. It did not get in the way until I got the Z9 and started shooting all these high megapixel RAW files. Now it won't let go of the Pictures folder. I try to remove things from the Pictures folder and it keeps putting them back.
Sounds line TM is working as designed…ypu moved the files so TM backed them up in the new location and stopped backing them up at the old…but since it keeps old versions of the drives the6 didn’t get deleted. CCC…assuming you were using the Safety Net Disabled option…would delete the old copies from the backup.