I'm a freelance photographer currently using a Surface Book. I'm interested in switching to a Mac Mini/iPad Pro set-up.
so you are liking the Lightroom CC workflow? Say you shoot 400 photos at an event. You come home, download the photos to your Mac, and then you can just go right to your iPad and edit on the couch? How is speed/editing on the iPad? Do you ever do batch processing on the iPad? Like you have 50 photos and you want to apply all the same edits from photo 1 across photos 2-50... you can easily do that?
and then once you make your edits, you can right back to the Mac and export the photos with edits pretty seamlessly?
Yes, I absolutely LOVE editing on the iPad (Pro 10.5) with LR Mobile / CC. I shoot about 40 weddings a year (plus portraits and some other stuff), with my wife and I both doing the editing.
When I get home after a wedding, the images are loaded into Lightroom Classic on my iMac Pro (I convert to compressed DNG), and I then designate the folder to be sync'd to CC. LR generates and uploads Smart Previews, which are then sync'd to the iPads (my wife also uses an iPad Pro, as well as an iMac running LR CC). From that point on, both of us are free to edit on the iPads or iMacs. There's no manual moving of files back and forth... for instance, I might sit at my desk and work for a few hours, then decide to kick back on the couch for a while. I grab the iPad, and pick up where I left off, with the edits I did on the Mac automatically syncing to the iPad. When I'm finished, I can go back to the Mac to export, and all the work I did on the iPad is there. Likewise for the weddings my wife works on.
It's really revolutionized how I work, as I often find myself in situations where I have "dead time", maybe waiting in a coffee shop between client meetings, or like this evening, when I'm bringing my kids to their violin lesson... I can sit in the room with them and get the enjoyment of listening to them play, while simultaneously getting work done. And, of course, in many instances I simply don't feel like sitting at my desk. The freedom to switch back and forth between devices is what makes it so great.
And the iPad version of LR is remarkably capable. I'd say the only thing I find lacking is what you mentioned about batch-applying adjustments across a group of images. On the Mac, I can make adjustments to an image, select the next 100 similar images, and "sync" all of those to the first one's adjustments. On the iPad, you can copy/paste settings, but it's a one-at-a-time kind of thing as opposed to applying to a group of images in one click. Hopefully they'll address that in the future, but in the meantime, what I usually do immediately after importing on the Mac is quickly scan through and look for large groupings of images that need a white balance adjustment, and do it there.
[doublepost=1541106073][/doublepost]Also, I should note that after my wife saw how great it was to be able to work on editing weddings anywhere, she wanted one too. At the time, one of our kids was in competitive dance, and attending those competitions involves LONG days of waiting around for hours, watching your kid dance for 3 minutes, then waiting around for several more hours for the next dance, etc. She loved being able to bring her iPad and use that time productively instead of just sitting there twiddling her thumbs.
The funny thing is, even though she originally intended to only use it for editing away from home, I often walk into her office to find her sitting at her desk (right in front of her iMac), editing on the iPad!
I personally am a bit more productive on the Mac (especially with Pfixer keyboard shortcuts), but still I'm surprisingly efficient on the iPad. I probably do about half my editing on the iPad.
