07-14-2007, 03:40 PM

I'm considering my first Mac after years of PC use. I've used several different Macs at school friends house etc, but I've never owned one. I'm a hobbiest level photographer and I'm wondering if a Macbook will be powerful enough to run CS3 and Lightroom. That is my current workflow on a my PC and I would hate to lose performance just because I was to cheap to spring for the MBP. Does anyone have experience running these 2 programs on a Macbook. (I'm looking at getting the black version maxed out in Ram)

Thanks,

MB

07-14-2007, 08:51 PM

i'm a hobbyist photographer as well and use lightroom and cs3 on my macbook with no problems what so ever, they run flawlessly.

07-14-2007, 09:42 PM

I sometimes use both lightroom and Photoshop CS2 (I suspect CS3 would run similar) on my white Macbook with 256 RAM (or whatever it came with in the box)

Anyways, from my experience, Lightroom worked great and did not hog all that much CPU power. Photoshop worked well however, if you forget an external mouse it can be a big pain. Render time took about 1.5 - 2 times longer than it does on my iMac G5 which, is expected considering the difference in specs.

07-15-2007, 02:56 AM

cs3 runs better on the macbooks than cs2 because cs3 has implemented the intel processors into it.

07-15-2007, 03:08 AM

Lets imagine, performancewise you are ok with the MB. How about the colours? Recently I have seen people comparing same colours in MB, MBP and Apple display. The outcome was pretty shocking. If you are planning to do something serious with Photoshop, MB is probably the wrong choice.

07-15-2007, 07:53 AM

The new 15" MacBook Pro screens are a lot better than the MacBook one (the MacBook screens are fine for most people, but if you start to take photography seriously then the screen quality/colour fidelity will be very important).

07-16-2007, 10:39 AM

Thanks for the great advice. I hadn't even considered the difference in screens. I thought that screen quality would be the same across the Apple family, at least in laptops. I guess that color management becomes even more important. Have any of you worked with calibration software on any of the macs? I currently have most of my printing done from online labs, but I'd like to move to doing more printing at home.

07-16-2007, 11:55 AM

Depends on what your used too.

I have an older G5 desktop with a lot of RAM, processes with lightroom, Photoshop CS3 and Bridge CS3 without any real slow downs (along with other aps running)

The Macbook Pro with 2 gig RAM works well and pretty quick with Lightroom and Photoshop open, but if you have lightroom performing an action in photoshop at the same time there is lag.