PC for photo editing

p00

I am going to do a course on photography and photo editing. Could anyone advise on a decent desk top pc or all in one. I can spend up to £1000 .
Thankyou

J_B

Many on here would suggest that you don't buy an 'all-in-one'

I galls me to say, but many photo types prefer apple products

photodgm

Do you have an existing monitor? Do you know what software the course will be using? Will you have to budget for purchasing this software to use at home? What camera or cameras will you be using? Will there be any video work involved?

MinuteNoodles

Any PC you can buy will do the job but you want one with a SSD hard drive and ideally 16GB RAM. More important than the PC is the monitor and you want one that has as accurate colour replication as possible. A decent one will cost you several hundred quid. Dell used to do Ultrasharps where every single monitor was calibrated so you got a perfect display. Not sure if they still do that today though. I'd be wary of anything sub £500-£600 for a monitor and you may want to invest in one of the X-rite monitor display calibration kits or similar from another maker.

The Apple Macbook Pro laptop, even the 13" ones, have excellent colour accuracy.

a

Its Money Saving, spend nothing. Go on the course and see what they require, before forking out your wad. You may even get by with putting a 3m hdmi cable onto your tv and laptop for a few quid?

If it is a normal college course where you spend a few hours a week for possibly 5 months, think the focus will be more on tools, effects and methods, probably much less on colour correction and pantone colours. Every general model monitor and printer has a different colour range, and it is often subjective too.

If you go into the industry and find employment, then spend your cash. Its very easy to fork our 2+k for an apple 27" with a 5k retina display, and realise your existing PC was good enough for your purposes. There are a fair few graphic designers out there that can't find a job in their profession.

Farway

a said:

Its Money Saving, spend nothing. Go on the course and see what they require, before forking out your wad. You may even get by with putting a 3m hdmi cable onto your tv and laptop for a few quid?

If it is a normal college course where you spend a few hours a week for possibly 5 months, think the focus will be more on tools, effects and methods, probably much less on colour correction and pantone colours. Every general model monitor and printer has a different colour range, and it is often subjective too.

If you go into the industry and find employment, then spend your cash. Its very easy to fork our 2+k for an apple 27" with a 5k retina display, and realise your existing PC was good enough for your purposes. There are a fair few graphic designers out there that can't find a job in their profession.

Fully agree with the above.

Years back I did both courses, I suspect the editing will be Photoshop as it's industry standard, most modern PC's will handle that

See how you do first you may well find you need nothing more than you already have

I did eventually get a PC with separate graphics card & a larger monitor but that was in XP days

My off the shelf refurbed Dell, with SSD, works just fine without any extras.

Still have the large monitor but that's just MSE, if it ain't broke etc

p00

Farway said:

a said:

Its Money Saving, spend nothing. Go on the course and see what they require, before forking out your wad. You may even get by with putting a 3m hdmi cable onto your tv and laptop for a few quid?

If it is a normal college course where you spend a few hours a week for possibly 5 months, think the focus will be more on tools, effects and methods, probably much less on colour correction and pantone colours. Every general model monitor and printer has a different colour range, and it is often subjective too.

If you go into the industry and find employment, then spend your cash. Its very easy to fork our 2+k for an apple 27" with a 5k retina display, and realise your existing PC was good enough for your purposes. There are a fair few graphic designers out there that can't find a job in their profession.

Fully agree with the above.

Years back I did both courses, I suspect the editing will be Photoshop as it's industry standard, most modern PC's will handle that

See how you do first you may well find you need nothing more than you already have

I did eventually get a PC with separate graphics card & a larger monitor but that was in XP days

My off the shelf refurbed Dell, with SSD, works just fine without any extras.

Still have the large monitor but that's just MSE, if it ain't broke etc

I only have an old laptop which takes 20 minutes to even open anything up. I will be online learning so would need a reasonable computer anyway and I have a large smart tv in the spare room which could be a monitor unless I get an all in one. I'm fairly sure this will be my last computer purchase.
This isn't for job prospects, I'm already a pensioner. It's my own personal learning addiction if I can put it that way.
It's just so confusing in the shops when you ask. They obviously want to sell the most expensive stuff anyway.
This will be money saving in the long run as I wont need to buy again and can dispose of my ancient laptop. 
I would prefer a desktop to a new laptop.
Xx

Neil_Jones

p00 said:

I only have an old laptop which takes 20 minutes to even open anything up. I will be online learning so would need a reasonable computer anyway and I have a large smart tv in the spare room which could be a monitor unless I get an all in one. I'm fairly sure this will be my last computer purchase.
This isn't for job prospects, I'm already a pensioner. It's my own personal learning addiction if I can put it that way.
It's just so confusing in the shops when you ask. They obviously want to sell the most expensive stuff anyway.
This will be money saving in the long run as I wont need to buy again and can dispose of my ancient laptop. 
I would prefer a desktop to a new laptop.
Xx

If you're au-fait with putting these things together you can probably build your own computer?

Although that being saidI don't think you need anything super powerful, I dare say even a semi-decent mid range laptop will do what you want.

Cisco001

Are you after pre-built desktop?
Is your £1000 for full set up or tower only?

TheRightOne

p00 said:

Farway said:

a said:

Its Money Saving, spend nothing. Go on the course and see what they require, before forking out your wad. You may even get by with putting a 3m hdmi cable onto your tv and laptop for a few quid?

If it is a normal college course where you spend a few hours a week for possibly 5 months, think the focus will be more on tools, effects and methods, probably much less on colour correction and pantone colours. Every general model monitor and printer has a different colour range, and it is often subjective too.

If you go into the industry and find employment, then spend your cash. Its very easy to fork our 2+k for an apple 27" with a 5k retina display, and realise your existing PC was good enough for your purposes. There are a fair few graphic designers out there that can't find a job in their profession.

Fully agree with the above.

Years back I did both courses, I suspect the editing will be Photoshop as it's industry standard, most modern PC's will handle that

See how you do first you may well find you need nothing more than you already have

I did eventually get a PC with separate graphics card & a larger monitor but that was in XP days

My off the shelf refurbed Dell, with SSD, works just fine without any extras.

Still have the large monitor but that's just MSE, if it ain't broke etc

I only have an old laptop which takes 20 minutes to even open anything up. I will be online learning so would need a reasonable computer anyway and I have a large smart tv in the spare room which could be a monitor unless I get an all in one. I'm fairly sure this will be my last computer purchase.
This isn't for job prospects, I'm already a pensioner. It's my own personal learning addiction if I can put it that way.
It's just so confusing in the shops when you ask. They obviously want to sell the most expensive stuff anyway.
This will be money saving in the long run as I wont need to buy again and can dispose of my ancient laptop. 
I would prefer a desktop to a new laptop.
Xx

Fit a solid state drive within. Twenty minutes could be down to less than a minute. Prices from £19.
What is the full model number of the current laptop?

Don't get an AIO.

photodgm

Without a little more information it is difficult to be very helpful. Photography is rarely a money saving hobby. Are you intending to follow a structured online course or pick up information from a number of online tutorials? What is your ambition with regard to photography? Is it to learn how to better use an existing camera and do a little lightening, darkening and cropping of the resultant photos? Is it to take RAW images heavily processing them, merging and stacking them to produce highly detailed and crafted images? Are you going to want to print the final images? Is it that you want a new desktop computer and you want to be sure that as well as other things it can be used for photo editing?