Lightroom on MacBook Pro, monitor question

Question: I do my Lightroom editing on a PC with a 24" Dell display, but I was thinking of transferring everything to my Mid-2009 15" MacBook Pro. It has a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo and 8GB RAM, so I would think that part is ok, but I have been hearing that laptop displays are not good for photo viewing. Would the display on my MacBook Pro be adequate for this?

Thanks, and sorry if this has been posted before...

Adequate? Are you a pro? If so you'd want to keep your ips monitor if thats what you have. What camera have you got as core 2 duo is very outdated now!

If the laptop can cope with the processing can't it also drive the external monitor?

Well, I guess what I was trying to say was, I hear that laptop monitors aren't too good for photo editing, mainly because of their design and color output and such, but since the MacBook Pro monitor is better than most, would it be good enough to use for editing.

Hope that made sense...

my girlfriend does all her graphic design work on a 2011 macbook pro and the color is always accurate, and those graphic designers are anal about colors and shades

Andriukas wrote in post #13999195
my girlfriend does all her graphic design work on a 2011 macbook pro and the color is always accurate, and those graphic designers are anal about colors and shades

Well I'm not anal.... YET!

Thanks.

oh yeah, she has a matte screen btw so I don't know if that makes a difference, apparently the regular glossy ones are much brighter

Mine is glossy. We will see how it goes. Thanks for replying.

Make sure you calibrate the screen, a laptop monitor is not ideal but you can do it, depends how's critical your work is.

Is your 24" monitor an IPS Panel? Could you not just hook the laptop up to that?

It's a Dell 2407WFP, and I don't think it's IPS. But I just wanted some portability while editing. And the option to bring it with me on a shoot and stuff like that.

You can run LR on a laptop and a desktop a the same time, unless your desktop is older than your laptop you will find it's a faster and easier place to edit.

Laptop screens, even the very best ones (the Mac screens are only middle of the road) are never as good as a proper monitor.
Contrast and colours change depending on viewing angle and they are never very accurate to being with.

It's nice to be able to edit while mobile, but if your doing anything colour critical don't trust the laptop.

Moppie wrote in post #14009658
You can run LR on a laptop and a desktop a the same time, unless your desktop is older than your laptop you will find it's a faster and easier place to edit.

Laptop screens, even the very best ones (the Mac screens are only middle of the road) are never as good as a proper monitor.
Contrast and colours change depending on viewing angle and they are never very accurate to being with.

It's nice to be able to edit while mobile, but if your doing anything colour critical don't trust the laptop.

Thanks for the info, I figured as much. I generally don't do too much color stuff, and it would be nice to be mobile, but I guess I shouldn't trust a laptop screen too much.

kenjancef wrote in post #13990040
...but I was thinking of transferring everything to my Mid-2009 15" MacBook Pro. It has a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo and 8GB RAM...

This is exactly what I use while traveling, but at home I use the Apple mini-display port to DVI adapter to use my external Dell 24" monitor. So just because you are switching to the MacBook Pro, doesn't mean you can't continue to use the external monitor if you need it.

Also, I recently just upgraded my Early-2009 17" MacBook Pro with a Crucial M4 SSD and let me tell you, that really brought back the responsiveness of the laptop. If you do consider this in the future, I would recommend installing Lion from scratch and do not use an entire system restore from Time Machine. I had a few stability issues with the laptop after doing a full restore from Time Machine. But after the fresh install and re-installing and configuring all my application again manually, it has been running for two months without issue and was definitely worth the cost of the SSD as every application is noticeably snappier.

I had been debating long and hard about just buying a newer MacBook Pro, but it wasn't really in the budget at the moment. For a few hundred dollars, this upgrade definitely extended the life of my Early-2009 MacBook Pro. Just thought I would mention this if you needed some more performance out of it.

mwierowski wrote in post #14042659
This is exactly what I use while traveling, but at home I use the Apple mini-display port to DVI adapter to use my external Dell 24" monitor. So just because you are switching to the MacBook Pro, doesn't mean you can't continue to use the external monitor if you need it.

Also, I recently just upgraded my Early-2009 17" MacBook Pro with a Crucial M4 SSD and let me tell you, that really brought back the responsiveness of the laptop. If you do consider this in the future, I would recommend installing Lion from scratch and do not use an entire system restore from Time Machine. I had a few stability issues with the laptop after doing a full restore from Time Machine. But after the fresh install and re-installing and configuring all my application again manually, it has been running for two months without issue and was definitely worth the cost of the SSD as every application is noticeably snappier.

I had been debating long and hard about just buying a newer MacBook Pro, but it wasn't really in the budget at the moment. For a few hundred dollars, this upgrade definitely extended the life of my Early-2009 MacBook Pro. Just thought I would mention this if you needed some more performance out of it.

I appreciate the info. I was going to look into an SSD, but I am trying to upgrade some of my photo equipment right now. I did replace the stock hard drive with a 500GB Seagate drive over a year ago, and that made a huge difference.

Connecting to my current monitor might be a good solution. I installed Lightroom on my Mac last week, and just did a quick import of a few photos as a test, and I REALLY do miss the extra screen real estate that my 24" has. I'll give it a shot.

And being a computer tech, I know a lot about what can happen if you do a restore of an OS, Mac or Windows. I would definitely do an OS install if I swapped the hard drive. That's what I did when I put the 500GB drive in my MacBook.

Thanks!!