The year 2020 is already coming up, and perhaps you want to start the New Year with a brand new laptop you can use to edit your photos accurately. Whether you are a creative photographer, image producer, graphic designer, or video editor, you may be thinking about what best laptops can I invest in for my editing and manipulating works.
While a highly powered laptop is often the tool of choice, this may not work for everyone, especially if you travel a lot. With this in mind, I have put together some of the best photo editing laptops for the year 2020. So let us dive deep and check out some top and high-quality laptops you can upgrade to today.
Table of Contents
- Apple Macbook Pro with touchbar
- Lenovo ThinkPad P1
- DELL Inspiron 13 7000
- Microsoft Surface Book 2
- Acer Swift 3
Apple Macbook Pro with touch bar
If you are looking for an excellent, all-round laptop for your photo editing works, the 2019 Apple Macbook Pro should come to mind. With different variants to choose from and its exceptional retina display, the MacBook Pro is a beast when it comes to visuals and image quality. It is loaded with lots of performance and feature upgrades. With its subtle silver metallic finish, the laptop has a gorgeous screen resolution of 2560×1660 that will make your photographs look incredible while offering a sleek design that Apple is known for.
Additionally, making the MacBook Pro potentially the best laptop for photography editing due to its outstanding hardware.
Most importantly, the MacBook Pro runs on a 2.9 GHz Intel i-9 Core Processor with a memory of 32GB of DDR4 RAM that makes it powerful yet runs fast regardless of what programs and app you install on it.
The Touch Bar, a slim OLED display, is also an excellent feature for creative designers and photographers. It runs along the top of the shallow keyboard and displays some cool sensitive buttons that change based on the software you are using. The touch bar works well with Photoshop and can make a significant difference to your workflow. What’s more? The long-lasting battery life of the Apple Macbook Pro is another bonus, which is especially useful when you are always traveling on the go.
2. Lenovo ThinkPad P1
Lenovo ThinkPad P1 is another elegant laptop with amazing features that make it a dream machine for any graphics work, including photo editing and image manipulation. It is a real laptop beast, featuring a powerful Intel Core processor and a 16GB DDR4 SDRAM (can be extended up to 64GB DDR4 SDRAM and 4TB internal solid-state storage), given you enough performance for the more demanding photo editing jobs. With this configuration, the laptop can contend with any desktop PC – while still being outstandingly small.
Lenovo ThinkPad P1 has a gorgeous 15.6-inch 4K color screen display that supports 100% of the Adobe RGB color space – something you cannot find on many other laptops. This machine weighs around 3.7-lbs and is about 0.7-inch depth, making it convenient for transporting whenever you are traveling. About its battery life, Lenovo ThinkPad P1 can work for 13 hours in one full charge, which is nice. But you can expect to get less when you push the laptop hard.
The ThinkPad P1 makes this potentially one of the affordable laptops for photo editing as well.
3. DELL Inspiron 13
Dell Inspiron 13 is a sturdy-built laptop that offers 2-in-1 benefits to users. It can be used as a regular laptop, or you fold it down into a tablet format. Apart from its dual appeal, this device is pack full of powerful features and some great performances. With an 8th generation Intel Core processor, Intel Optane Memory H10 32 GB, a built-in stylus to boost user experience, and a vibrant 13.3-inch touch screen display, DELL Inspirion 13 guarantee you top performance for any photo editing jobs.
Having a processing speed of about 2.7 GHz, extendable 4GB RAM, and an Intel UHD Graphics makes this laptop conveniently accommodate any photo-editing app or software while they run fast and smoothly. Dell Inspiron 13 offers excellent choices for interface and ports, including a USB 2.0 port, two USB 3.0 ports, a full-size HDMI 1.4a, and a 2-in-1 card reader slot. For flawless wireless connectivity, it has dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0.
Dell Inspiron 13 weighs as little under 3.7 pounds with a thickness slightly over 8.7-inch, which never compromises on the portability of the laptop. Above all, its 4-cell battery offers up to six hours of use after a full charge to enable you to enjoy peak performance. Also making the Inspiron 13 one of the cheap laptop for photo editing.
Whether you are using the trackpad in laptop mode, or with your fingers in tablet mode, this exceptional laptop offers sufficient power for high-resolution images.
4. Microsoft Surface Book 2
When it comes to choosing the best editing laptops for creative professionals, the Microsoft Surface Book 2 is unique on its own. With an 8th Generation 1.9 GHz Intel Core processor, non-upgradable 16GB RAM, a perfect aspect ratio for viewing full-frame and APS-C images, and an incredibly vibrant 3240 x 2160px display, this notebook is one of the best devices ever produced by Microsoft. It has the best combo of premium performance, portability, and screen quality. It comes with a graphics processor that is powerful enough to handle demanding photo editing workloads even faster than most of its competitors. However, it may not be accurate enough for print production and video color grading. Also making the Book 2 one of the best laptop for photography editing as well.
As a 2-in-1 device, you can detach the screen at the press of a button and use as a tablet computer or use it as a conventional laptop PC. If you think the 15.6-inch version is too expensive or too big for you, you can opt for its 13.5-inch version. In addition to a sleek trackpad and keyboard, it features a USB-C port, two USB 3.0 ports, and a full-size SD card reader slot. Most importantly, it has the best battery lifespan of 17 hours on a full charge, giving you enough time to edit images all day.
And due to its price range also making the Book 2 one of the best cheap laptops for college students.
5. ACER SWIFT 3
The Aspire Swift 3 is yet another best laptop for photo editing at affordable prices. With a dedicated and influential graphics card, 8GB DDR4, the latest generation of Intel core processor, a 14-inch Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) pixel screen display and a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), this attractive productivity machine is sleek, elegant and ideal for general photographic editing tasks. It comes in silver, sturdy all-aluminum chassis, black trim around the display screen, and a subtle Acer logo on the lid. Thanks to its price range, the Sift 3 makes this the best laptop for college student that needs to get things done.
The Aspire Swift 3 is generally a reliable midrange notebook, faster and more power-efficient than any other laptop of the same configuration in the market today. It boasts of excellent performance and a stable battery life of ten hours that will likely last you a full working day. As regards connectivity, the options include the standard USB array, an HDMI port, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth for wireless connections. The keyboard is backlit, allowing you to keep editing even in dark areas. The touchpad works well without a mouse, allowing you to edit photos correctly without stumbling over the screen. What is more? The Aspire Swift 3 laptop stays cool to the touch even during extended sessions.
Choosing the best photo editing laptop
When you want to select the best laptop for photo editing, you will need to consider the following:
- Screen quality – never settle for anything less of appalling contrast and the best viewing angles.
- Speedy storage – All new laptops have SSD, but make sure you do not go for small capacity. 512GB is the minimum if you will be working with 4K video.
- Check the Processor – It is practically not feasible to decipher processor model numbers. However, make sure you focus on the number of processing cores and the ‘base frequency’ (speed, measured in GHz)
Final thought
Regardless of the laptop that you choose from the above list, you can rest assured knowing that you have invested in the best laptop for your photo editing tasks. Do you think we have missed something? Kindly let us know through the comment box below.
