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You might need to use photo manipulation programs to edit your real estate photos and make them aesthetically pleasing or meet the MLS requirements. The best laptop for photo editing on a budget should be able to run popular editing programs without lag or overheating.
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The best laptop for photo editing on a budget comes with at least 8GB RAM, allowing it to multitask or handle heavy photo editing applications without freezing. The following laptops are high-quality and display the true image colors, preventing possible color misjudgments when editing.
The Apple MacBook Air might be the best laptop if you want to make color corrections, such as contrast and vibrance adjustments, on your real estate photos.
Unlike the other laptops on my list, this laptop comes with a Liquid Retina Display that boosts color saturating, improving the contrast and viewing experience by around 44 percent compared to other displays. This allows you to make color corrections and get truer results, regardless of the color space.
Keeping in mind that editing photos can be time-consuming and you might need to sit by your laptop for a prolonged time, the Retina display causes minimal eye strain and fatigue, allowing you to edit the photos for hours without eye irritations.
However, unlike the Lenovo Ideapad 3i, this laptop comes with a smaller 13.6-inch screen, and you might need to keep on zooming in on the images to clearly view the smaller details.
The Apple MacBook Air offers a good battery life of up to 8 hours, allowing you to shoot tethered in remote places when using applications such as Lightroom.
If you are looking for a laptop with a large display that allows you to view even the tiny details in your photos, you can’t go wrong with the Lenovo Ideapad 3i.
Like the HP Pavilion 15, this laptop comes with a 15.6 inches screen, which allows you to clearly view the image and make precise adjustments such as subject selections without zooming in.
Although the display can’t match the liquid Retina Display of the Apple MackBook Air, it’s a full HD IPS display and allows you to view the true colors of the image, minimizing the chances of misjudging the colors and ending up with oversaturated or undersaturated images.
Generally, most photo editing applications such as Photoshop and Lightroom are heavyweight and tend to consume computer resources. This laptop comes with 8GB RAM, which allows it to handle heavy applications with minimal lag.
However, the lithium polymer battery that comes with this laptop usually offers a battery life of less than three hours under intense use and might inconvenience you if working from remote areas.
If you have a large collection of real estate images in RAW format and want to process them with a RAW editor such as Lightroom, consider going for the Acer Aspire 5 laptop. This laptop comes with 512GB SSD storage, large enough to hold thousands of RAW images.
The SSD storage is also fast enough, and you can transfer the photos from your camera’s SD card to the laptop’s hard drive, load them in the editing application and export them with minimal lag.
The laptop also comes with the Intel Iris Xe graphics card, which allows you to open and edit high-resolution images much more smoothly. Also, this allows you to apply different filters and effects without glitches.
However, the Intel Core i5 processor in this laptop can’t handle heavy tasks like the top Intel Core i7 processor in the HP Pavilion 15. This makes the laptop overheat when running heavy applications.
Like the Acer Nitro 5, this laptop comes with 8GB DDR4 RAM that makes it boot faster and run heavy applications smoothly.
In case you want to run heavy photo editing applications such as Lightroom and Photoshop simultaneously, you might need a laptop that is designed to handle heavy tasks, such as the Acer Nitro 5.
Unlike the Acer Aspire 5, this laptop is designed as a gaming laptop and comes with the advanced NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, which allows it to switch windows of simultaneously running applications without lags, freezing, or black screens. The display comes with a refresh rate of 144Hz.
The high refresh rate allows the display to update the edits you are making almost instantly, making it suitable for edits that require you to monitor the effect on the image, such as increasing the color saturation using the saturation slider.
The laptop comes with a backlit keyboard that allows you to view the keys even in bad lighting, making it easier to edit the photos using the shortcut keys.
However, with a weight of 5.07 pounds, it’s the second heaviest laptop on my list, making it unsuitable for shooting tethered where you might need to carry the laptop around in a laptop bag or backpack.
The Asus Zenbook 13 is a portable laptop you can carry in a laptop bag if you want to go around shooting, editing, and sharing real estate photos.
Typically, this laptop is the slimmest and most lightweight on my list, with a physical dimension of 12 x 8 x 0.5 inches and a weight of 2.51 pounds.
The laptop comes with an OLED NanoEdge display that enhances the brightness and contrast, allowing you to see and edit the finer details in an image.
However, the laptop comes with a smaller 13.3 inches screen, and you might need to hide some panels from the workspace or zoom the image to avoid straining the eyes.
Also, the laptop comes with 256GB SSD storage, which might not store a large collection of RAW images compared to the 512GB storage of the HP Pavilion 15.
Although the laptop comes with 8GB RAM like the Acer Aspire 5, you can expand the RAM up to 32GB if you want to boost its multitasking capabilities.
If you want a laptop you can use to manage a large collection of photos using a photo management program like Lightroom; then the HP Pavilion 15 might be the best laptop for you.
This laptop comes equipped with a large 512GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD storage that can store thousands of both processed and unprocessed image files. The storage is fast enough and offers a transfer speed almost 15x faster than the traditional hard drive.
Unlike the other laptops on my list, this laptop comes equipped with 16GB RAM that allows you to run several photo editing programs simultaneously without lag.
Like the Lenovo Ideapad 3i, this laptop comes with a large 15.6 inches display that allows you to view the application's panels and tools without straining your eyes.
The laptop comes with a good battery life of around 7.45 hours, which allows you to shoot tethered and share photos from remote places without worries about the battery dying in the midst of the photo shoot.
However, the keyboard is not backlit, and you might have problems using shortcut keys in poor lighting.
Laptops come in a wide range of sizes and specifications depending on the brand and model. If you are on a tight budget and want a laptop that can handle heavy image manipulation programs, the following features can help you choose one that meets your needs.
Additionally, the following table breaks down the essential features to look out for.
| Laptop | Screen Size (Inches) | Weight (Pounds) | SSD Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple MacBook Air | 13.6 inches | 2.7 | 256 GB |
| Lenovo Ideapad 3i | 15.6 inches | 5.49 | 512 GB |
| Acer Aspire 5 | 15.6 inches | 3.88 | 512 GB |
| Acer Nitro 5 | 15.6 inches | 5.07 | 256 GB |
| Asus Zenbook 13 | 13.3 inches | 2.51 | 256 GB |
| HP Pavilion 15 | 15.6 inches | 3.86 | 512 GB |
Usually, you need to use the laptop screen to view the image you are editing. Laptop screens come with different display technologies, such as LED, FHD ISP, OLED, and Retina. In most cases, the difference between these technologies is how the screen illuminates the image pixels.
For instance, the LED LCD display uses backlights to illuminate the image pixels, while the pixels in the OLED display produce the light themselves instead of being illuminated. On the other hand, the Retina display is an improvement of the OLED display, usually used in Apple products.
As a result, a laptop display that uses the Retina display, such as the Apple MacBook Air, can reproduce images with better color accuracy and higher contrast, allowing you to adjust the image colors and get accurate results depending on the color space you are using.
A graphics card, also known as a graphics adapter, display card, video card, or GPU, is an expansion card in your laptop that helps to render the images on the monitor. Since your photo editing program will be rendering images on the screen, the graphics card is an important feature to consider.
The GPU works like the CPU, only that it receives the image information from the CPU and decides how to recreate the image on display using pixels. That means the graphics card is responsible for the clarity and overall appearance of the image on the screen.
A laptop with a poor graphics card can make you misjudge the colors and make the wrong color corrections and edits. It’s therefore advisable to go for a laptop with a high-end graphics card, such as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 GPU in the Acer Nitro 5.
The computer processor or CPU can be considered to be the brain of the computer. Generally, this is the piece of hardware that executes the instructions on behalf of the photo manipulation program. Like the RAM, computer processors come in a wide range of speeds, usually indicated in GHz.
Generally, this speed affects how fast the program can apply effects and filters on the photos, especially when batch editing. The processor also tends to produce heat during operation and overloading it might make the laptop overheat.
For the best performance, consider going for a laptop with the latest generation high-end processor, such as the 12th generation Intel Core i7 processor in the HP Pavilion 15.
In most cases, the size and weight of a laptop vary depending on how slim the laptop is, the size of the display, and its overall construction quality. If you are shooting tethered and want a laptop you can carry around with you, consider going for a lightweight laptop such as the Asus Zenbook 13.
Keep in mind that you might need to make a trade-off between portability and build quality. For instance, the Apple MacBook Air sacrifices the cooling fan to maintain a slim form factor, making it unsuitable for heavy editing jobs.
On the other hand, the Acer Nitro 5 comes with a large cooling fan that helps it remain cool even under intense use. This makes the laptop bulky and heavy. It’s therefore advisable to check other factors and disregard the weight if you will be operating from an office.
Just like smartphones, laptops come in a wide range of screen sizes, mostly ranging from 13 inches to 15.6 inches. Generally, a larger screen gives a better viewing experience as you can clearly see the image details even without zooming the image in.
Since most modern laptops come with narrow bezels, the size of the display also affects the size of the keyboard.
For instance, the larger 15.6 inches screen in the Lenovo Ideapad 3i means a correspondingly larger keyboard. This gives room for a numeric keypad which makes it more convenient to use the shortcut keys.
Most laptops come with internal storage, usually indicated as hard drive type and size in GB. The hard drive type can be a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or Solid State Drive (SSD). The SSD storage is the latest and offers faster read and write speeds.
The higher speed allows you to import, process, and export large collections of images much faster. In most cases, you will want to shoot the real estate photos in RAW format so you can have more data to manipulate during post-processing editing.
Although RAW files depend on the camera you are using, most have larger sizes, and a single image can be over 40MB. If you are working with a large collection of RAW images, it’s advisable to go for a laptop with bigger SSD storage, such as the Acer Aspire 5.
RAM stands for Random Access Memory, a type of memory in a computer that temporarily stores the data the computer processor needs for processing. The RAM is faster than the primary SSD storage and ensures the data is available on time for the processor to process.
Computer RAMs vary in clock speed and size. For instance, DDR3 has a speed of around 400 to 1066 MHz, and DDR4 has a speed of around 1066 to 2133 MHz. The size mostly varies from 1 GB to 16 GB.
Even if the laptop has a high-end processor, slow or small RAM can affect its booting time and multitasking performance. For the best performance when using heavy editing programs, consider going for a laptop with 16GB DDR4 RAM, such as the HP Pavilion 15.
The screen refresh rate refers to the number of times the screen captures new data and updates it on display. The refresh rate is measured as the number of times per second, usually indicated as frequency. In most cases, the refresh rate ranges from 60Hz to 240Hz.
Keeping in mind that most image editing programs have a preview window that lets you see the effect of the edits on the image, you want a screen that can update the changes almost instantly.
For instance, if you are using a slider to reduce contrast, you want a laptop that reflects the changes on the preview almost simultaneously as you drag the slider. Fortunately, you can get this responsiveness from a laptop with a higher refresh rate, such as the Acer Nitro 5.
A backlit keyboard comes with light underneath the keys that help to illuminate the symbols and letters. If your office is poorly lit, you can consider getting a laptop with a backlit keyboard, such as the Acer Aspire 5.
Although not a must, a photo editing laptop needs to have Bluetooth support, as it can help you with wireless connections. For instance, you can send the photos wirelessly from your camera to the laptop, saving you the hassle of removing the SD card from the camera.
A laptop is better than a desktop for photo editing due to its portability. For instance, you can pack even the bulkiest laptop in a backpack when going out for photoshoots. This gives you the flexibility of shooting tethered or transferring the files and freeing up space if the SD storage fills up during the photoshoot.
You don't need an external keyboard because a laptop keyboard is capable of performing the editing commands. However, you can use an external keyboard that has short pre-travel and light-to-press keys. An external keyboard also comes with a number pad, which most laptop keyboards don't have.
The best laptop for photo editing on a budget should run smoothly without black screens, even if you run Photoshop and Lightroom at the same time. The above laptops are designed for heavy computing jobs and can run most editing programs without freezing.
