MBA performance with Lightroom + 21.1 Megapixel RAW images.

[rogerh]

Any thoughts or comments? I am a photographer, shoot with a 5D Mark II.

Note: I currently have a stock 13" 2.4 ghz 2010 Macbook Pro. it's fine for this purpose but I would greatly appreciate the higher screen resolution, flash storage, and size/weight of the Macbook Air.

I am wondering how the performance on the slower CPU would be.

I mainly just want to use it to store photos and make quick adjustments, levels, exposures, color balancing, recropping, etc.. when I am out or travelling.

This is NOT my main work station.. I'll export the catalogue and import to my desktop.

 

[gloss]

Any thoughts or comments? I am a photographer, shoot with a 5D Mark II.

Note: I currently have a stock 13" 2.4 ghz 2010 Macbook Pro. it's fine for this purpose but I would greatly appreciate the higher screen resolution, flash storage, and size/weight of the Macbook Air.

I am wondering how the performance on the slower CPU would be.

I mainly just want to use it to store photos and make quick adjustments, levels, exposures, color balancing, recropping, etc.. when I am out or travelling.

This is NOT my main work station.. I'll export the catalogue and import to my desktop.

Working with RAW tends to be CPU-bound, unless Adobe's added GPU acceleration that I don't know about. You're going to feel the difference with general manipulation, though for all I know the photos might actually load more quickly. But I'd imagine that 21.1 MP images would be pretty rough for a ULV processor.

 

[HelloMikee]

I'd like to know thoughts on this as well.

I have a 13 macbook pro too and though it fits the bill well, the MBA still seems appetizing considering it's weight and size.

As it stands now, I rarely want to take my macbook pro out in the field with me because it's just too darn heavy with all my other photog gear.

I think the MBA might be a nice adjustment for small edits, blogging, portfolio images and surfing the net.

 

[ippikiokami]

The fact is, it's slower. As a photographer I feel there are only a few factors you need to judge considering we all usually have a bigger monitor we can connect with at home

1) Is the weight difference enough that you would really bring the new laptop more?

2) Is it being slower really change much?

For me speed matters. I take and sort through over 100k+ pictures a year. If I just saved 1 second of loading for each of those pictures (not including exporting, editing etc). I would already save 27 hours of my life a year just in sorting.

However, all the speed in the world doesn't matter if the extra weight causes me to not bring my laptop at all (which could be days lost that I could be sorting / editing every gig)

 

[niuniu]

I struggle with RAW on my old 15 inch MBP (2.17Ghz), even loading 20 to 30 RAW photos can take relatively 'ages'.