When choosing the OS, the Mac v/s Windows question is inevitable. Best laptop for photographers and artists buying guide Best Overall: MacBook Pro with M1 Chip(2020, 13 inch). To help you find the best laptop for photographers, we have compiled a list of the things to consider and the top laptops in the market.I was a little blown away! The same game rules apply!Hopefully, our selection of the best free programs for photo editing on Mac will help you choose the right app to suit all your creative needs. I noted that although my MacBook Pro fared quite well against the Mac Pro for common “photography workflow” tasks, that an iMac would probably do even better! Well now I have a NEW iMac Retina 5k Mac to test/review and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results. I ran all my tests using my high-end Mid 2012 MacBook Pro Retina Display. I didn’t actually have an iMac to compare.
![]() Best For Photographers Software Such AsOtherwise I was quite happy just using my MacBook Pro simply because I could use it in any room at any time. Sure I appreciate the faster performance, but I found myself only using my Mac Pro when I knew a process was going to take a long time to complete. As I stated above, I realized with my last Mac Pro that I wasn’t really a Mac Pro customer. I’m doing this review/comparison simply to answer the question, “as a photographer would I be better off spending my money on the NEW iMac Retina 5K Display or a Mac Pro?” If you’re a videographer and you’re a Mac user then you probably already have the new Mac Pro because you demanded the fastest Mac you could get to render your videos on a daily basis.When I saw the rumors that Apple was going to release a radically different design for the Mac Pro, to be quite honest I was only mildly interested. It is best used in workflows involving other free software such as Scribus.If you’re reading the rest of this post then I’ll assume that you’re a Mac user or thinking of becoming one.The next thing I’d like to get out of the way is that if you’re looking for a Mac Pro review that tells you this new Mac Pro is better than the previous Mac Pro with all the benchmarks to back it up, then you’d probably be better served by other reviewers who have targeted the performance of the new model vs. If you can build your own PC cheaper, that’s awesome!Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist.I loaded the latest version of my Adobe Creative Cloud applications on it as well as a few utilities that I use such as ScreenFlow. I got the opportunity to test a Mac Pro standard configuration in my studio for a few weeks. Well we know the latter didn’t happen, so now it was time to test the performance. However, I said to myself perhaps if the performance (for what I do) is significantly better and the price point for an entry model was $2,500 or less, I’d consider getting one.At the time I did the tests back in May, I really wasn’t expecting to run these tests again. Actually I was wrong! Now fast forward to November and I have brand new iMac Retina 5k here to review and test. My assumption was that the Mac Pro would certainly be at least twice as fast at everything I threw at it than my 2012 MacBook Pro Retina Display Mac. Even then, the iMac and MacBook Pro are no slouch. This is when I realized that in order to see significant speed improvements the software you’re testing not only needs to be optimized for the faster processors, but also it would need to take advantage of the multiple cores. With the new iMac Retina 5k there was even less of a difference. On every test I threw at it the Mac Pro outperformed my now two-year-old MacBook Pro, but in some cases it was only slightly faster. Actually it is faster at (almost) everything! Just not by a margin of two. Luckily I was able to reassemble most of them with a couple minor exceptions that I will outline below:When will a Mac Pro significantly outperform any other Mac?As I said above, I was wrong in my assumption that the Mac Pro would be at least twice as fast at everything. Photoshop CC definitely takes advantage of multiple cores and now has Open CL support. However, I not only now have a new Mid 2014 MacBook Pro Retina that is faster than my old one, but I also have a base model iMac Retina 5k to compare too.UPDATED TEST RESULTS What I do as a photographerAs a photographer I spend most of my time in Adobe Lightroom 5 and Adobe Photoshop CC. However, even doing video tasks the iMac held its own and really started bringing into question “when would I ever want a Mac Pro?” When I ran the tests in May the Mac Pro was significantly faster at video tasks than my two year old MacBook Pro. The differences in speed were less dramatic as I expected. At this point I now have a new iMac Retina 5K Display to compare as well. Where I saw the biggest differences was in (no surprise) video rendering and processes that take longer than a minute or so anyway. This is one of the few times that I see a progress bar in Lightroom because it does take time to do it. DNG (Digital Negative) format. I convert my RAW files into. All of these applications are 64bit native and that means that they’ll take advantage of additional RAM.My first test was one of the things I do after every shoot. What was the best processor for mac book pro in 2011Yes I converted 435 16.2 MP files from my Nikon D4, but they weren’t the same exact images. The only caveat as I mentioned in the introduction was that I didn’t have all the same exact files from the May test. First off this is 6 months later and we’re on a newer operating system, Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, which in theory could be faster than Mavericks. This of course left me scratching my head, but I have a couple of caveats to bring up. Huh! What? Wait a minute! It was actually slightly (less than a second) faster than the Mac Pro. NEF RAW files into DNG format.First on the MacBook Pro it took 14 minutes 35 secondsOn the Mac Pro the same conversion took 12 minutes 12 seconds.OK, ready for this? On the NEW iMac Retina 5K a 435 16MP conversion took 11 minutes 39 seconds. The first part is simply combining the three (or more) images together and aligning them. This is a two-part process. Since they aren’t the same exact images, let’s move on to the other test where the files ARE THE SAME! HDR TestThe next test was a simple HDR (High Dynamic Range) conversion in Photoshop CC using three RAW files. This we can probably say is faster on the MacBook Pro over the iMac because it’s a faster processor and faster drive, but it doesn’t really explain why it would be faster than the Mac Pro. We can argue this one more, but just for kicks I ran the same test on my NEW Mid 2014 MacBook Pro Retina with a Core i7 Haswell processor and SSD drive (the iMac has a Fusion drive) and it was even faster at 9 minutes 56 seconds. They are from the same camera and a similar portrait shoot, just not the same exact images as before. As you can see from the results above, the Mac Pro wins on every test as you would expect it to, but the results (even if it was twice as fast in every case) may not justify the difference in cost. If it was faster at something that I rarely do, then I really don’t care as much. This makes it only 1.5 seconds slower than the Mac Pro for this test.The next test was stitching a Panorama together using Photoshop CC and 10 RAW filesOn the 2012 MacBook Pro this process took 1 minute 12 secondsOn the Mac Pro this process took 51 seconds.On the iMac Retina 5K Display this process took 1 minute (9 seconds slower than the Mac Pro)I could have gone on running other tests and other filters, but these are the things I do on a regular basis. The next way that I use video and probably the way that I use video the most often is to record my Creative Cloud TV video podcasts. I use Adobe Premiere Pro CC to assemble those videos and then output them to share (usually on YouTube). This means capturing video with my DLSR, GoPro, iPhone, etc. The first as a photographer is to tell my story. Next it was time to look at what I do as a Photographer when it comes to videoI use video in a couple of different ways. ![]()
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