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Creating a lightroom/photoshop workstation off the laptop


redridinghood

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Hey, guys. I am a amature photo enthusiast and I am planning to "step up" on my setup -- buy/create a workstation for photo editing -- with laptop at the heart of it. I understand that a laptop display does not render colors accurately -- I plan to use external displays. Reasonable? So before I dive in, I need advice on the overall layout of the workflow -- what catalogs/photos you keep where --- on the system or on the external drives.

So lets back up a bit. Here is what I am thinking..... These days, you can get a laptop with SSD drives, i7, tons of RAM, super graphics cards, etc. --- this is not an issue. You can also hook up a tablet to a laptop the same way you can hook it up to a desktop system. The benefit of a laptop is that, well, you can pick it up off the table and go watch a movie in a soft chair somewhere -- you dont need to be bound to your desk and chair.

So here are my questions:
1) I have read that its preferrable to have 2 monitors. I have not seen it in person, but I imagine that you would have floating palettes and tools on one screen, and the image you are working on on another display. Correct? So how do you do this with a laptop? Do you need a laptop with 2 physical display outputs -- like 2 HDMI ports? How does this work?
2) I have seen monitor calibration devices --- do you use it just once to calibrate your monitor and thats it? Or does your monitor need to be re-calibrated periodically? How often?
3) Is any monitor "calibratable"? Or just the expensive ones?
4) Can someone please share their catalog/images layout? What I mean is: how many disk drives do you have? Whats internal, whats external? Do you keep catalogs on one drive and images on another? Whats on a regular drive and whats on SSD dirve? Do you periodically archive a catalog and start a new one? Essentially, please explain what are the "pieces" involved?

Sorry, Its a lot of questions. Thank you very much
 

gedstar

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Hi and Welcome to PSG

First thing you need to consider is the version of Photoshop you have, scaling can be an issue on high DPI Displays take a look here
http://www.danantonielli.com/adobe-app-scaling-on-high-dpi-displays-fix/
and here
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cs6-hidpi-retina-display.html
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1705046


Here's some info about setting up multiple monitors on a Laptop
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/07/how-can-i-add-two-external-monitors-to-my-laptop
http://www.alphr.com/features/389164/how-to-connect-a-second-screen-to-your-laptop-1

Info on Monitor Calibration, I recalibrate my 2 monitors every 2 months but that's just my preference
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/monitor-calibration.htm

I don't use Lightroom so won't be of much help with that.

Here's my setup
Although I'm on a PC

2 * 22 inch Dell Monitors
Intel i7 3770k processor
Nvidia GTX660 2GB Graphics Card
32 GB DDR3 memory
1 * 250 GB SSD for OS and Apps
1 * 120 GB SSD for PS Scratch Disk
1 * 1TB WD drive for Storage
1 * 3TB WD drive for backups
30 GB partition for the OS Pagefile
120 GB partition for OS images

Untitled.jpg

Plus 4TB of external drives for backing up my backup :thumbsup:

P.S. depending what I'm doing I mainly have PS on one Monitor and use the other for Bridge or other software apps I may have opened
 
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