# Selecting laptop for lightroom cc



## alaios (Sep 7, 2018)

Hi all,
I need your experience on picking the right laptop for using lightroom cc.
the idea will be to mostly using lightroom for picking the right pictures (star rating). It will be nice that the colors are not super off but for a laptop/notebook one has to be realistic. Budget wise I am looking up to 500 euros.

Ideally I wanted to go for 17.3 screen for the image processing (basic stuff but still) but these tend to be much more expensive than the 15.6 laptops.
For disk I will defninitely go for an ssd, small one is enough, since I do not put a lot of photos in the laptop.

What do you recommend for resolutions, screen size, models, and cpus for lightroom cc ?

Thanks a lot.
Alex


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## PhilBurton (Sep 8, 2018)

alaios said:


> Hi all,
> I need your experience on picking the right laptop for using lightroom cc.
> the idea will be to mostly using lightroom for picking the right pictures (star rating). It will be nice that the colors are not super off but for a laptop/notebook one has to be realistic. Budget wise I am looking up to 500 euros.
> 
> ...


Alex,

Assuming that pricing is roughly the same between the EU and the US, you might have to settle for a system with  a regular HDD, not an SSD.  Someting like this system:  New 15.6" Lenovo 320 Laptop, AMD Quad-Core A12-9720P 2.7GHz, 8G, 1TB, DVD. HDMI - Newegg.com.  Considering the overall system specifications, you might find even basic Lightroom operations very slow.

One way to keep overall costs down is to get a laptop with a 256 GB SSD, for Windows and programs.  Get a separate external HDD, 1 or 2 TB or more, to hold photos.

Phil Burton


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## alaios (Sep 8, 2018)

Thanks for the reply. What about display?


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## alaios (Sep 8, 2018)

I am just coming back from a typical large European laptop store. I use the laptop for rating albums that I have over internet with lightroom cc. For backups putting an external disk on the camera backpack is more than okay (so a fast and small ssd, should do the work). 
I only need a decent display with a reasonably good srgb coverage for laptop for viewing pictures, very light editing and rating. After this phase I will be doing the normal editing on my pc and monitor at home.

Any ideas on how to focus on better displays for notebooks?
Thanks
Alex


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## Replytoken (Sep 8, 2018)

Hi Alex,

There are a lot of choices, but all involve compromise of one sort or another.  One budget machine that I picked up recently that I have been happy with is a Lenovo Yoga 730.  I bought the 13.3" model, but they also make a 15" version (that has the same 1080 resolution).  The 13.3" model had a very fast NVMe SSD, 8GB of RAM and an i5-8250U CPU.  I found it to be a reasonable compromise for the money (as I really wanted a machine with 16GB), and battery life is not too bad at around 7.5-8 hours.  The screen calibrated to 99% sRGB (but is glossy as the machine is a 2-in-1), but I am adjusting to it.  And, my model had two Thunderbolt 3 ports so my Samsung T5  external SSD just flies (and I highly recommend one of these regardless of what machine you buy).  I know that Acer had the Spin 5 (also a 13" machine), but I believe they may have a 15" version as well that might be good value for the money.

Good luck,

--Ken


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## alaios (Sep 8, 2018)

Are there any laptops with a screenm that you can also use for editing the pictures with a pen?
I am thinking about this laptop
If you're after a mid-price portable laptop, you'll struggle to find better than the ZenBook UX310UA
that will give me a bit more about 90% srgb coverage

Alex


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## Replytoken (Sep 8, 2018)

The Lenovo that I mentioned works with a pen.  Lenovo has a version of the Wacom pen and Wacom also sells their version that is supposed to  be compatible.  I am not familiar with that specific Asus machine, but I did consider some other models from them.  I eventually went with the Lenovo because of support and better cooling (some Asus machines had reputations for running quite hot, and that can throttle the CPU).

I really like the reviews at this site:  Notebook / Laptop Reviews and News .  They are quite comprehensive.  See what they have to say as you find models you are interested in purchasing.  Their review partially led me to the Yoga 730.

--Ken


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## alaios (Sep 12, 2018)

Thanks a lot again for the reply. Does anyone have experience running this software on small laptops with celeron cores, 8GB of ram and 64 gb hard disk (EMMC implementation)? 
It is higher than the specs but I was just wondering if such low spec machine can be used to rate pictures in lightroom cc and do some basic editing (Exposure, white balance)


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## Replytoken (Sep 13, 2018)

I can hardly imagine trying to run something like LR on a machine with a 64GB EMMC drive.  I would either look for a machine with a spinning drive or seek out other software with a lighter footprint.  FastStone is a good option for culling, and FastRawViewer might also be an option for some simple tasks.  I cannot say that I have tried on a machine with an EMMC drive, but I have used it on my ThinkPad T420 with a Samsung SSD and i5-2410 processor, and it was not exactly a speed demon (although it was OK for basic tasks).  I really think there must be better options than a Celeron-based machine with an EMMC drive within your budget.

Good luck,

--Ken


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## alaios (Sep 15, 2018)

btw how I can find how much space my lightroom cc is currently using?


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 15, 2018)

Go to Preferences > Local Storage and it'll tell you.


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## alaios (Sep 16, 2018)

great I found it!


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