Lessons

Lesson Info

Backing Up and Importing to Lightroom

backups just show you what I use a za basic thing in the field in at home and we'll talk about managing and creating the backups later but I'll show you what I use in general wherever your pictures are stored if it's only one spot whatever that storage devices you could drop it you could pour water on it fire could happen whatever and you'd lose those images and so I always make sure I have my images and at least two places ideally in three uh and here's what I use in the field you see I have these little bitty hard drives in these are really really fast hard drives there were what's known as an s s d so it's not actually a hard drive there's no spinning disc inside of it and when you get away from a little spinning hard drive and get to what's called an ssd drive there much faster than normal and so it's very responsive when I'm trying to transfer images onto it were copied them off and I have two identical ones of these so in the field this is what I copied too it's a usb three is th...

e interface cable that I do and I just make sure I haven't an identical back up on the second one I'll show you how to update that back up so if you make any changes in light room you do anything even renaming your files you can figure out if you've made a change since the original but that's what I use in the field uh these just say no I wrote down the name somewhere if you're interested okay this is from a company called o w c that stands for other world computing and I don't know anybody that works there I don't make any money off their stuff I just like there this particular product it's called an envoy e n v o y probe so if you look for an o w c envoy e n v a y pro they're not mega cheap because look at how small they are in the really fast you can get him in either two hundred forty gigabyte or four hundred eighty gigabyte which for me is fine in the field you know pricing though for the smaller capacity as far as I know is two hundred fifty bucks for the larger is four hundred twenty dollars but for me if you think about what a lens costs or a camera costs that's not that expensive compared to all the other gear that we use and this is really fast and I like it there's not a spinning drive in it so if I drop it like if it falls off the table and hits the ground this is a little more durable I feel than a hard drive which is very fragile then when I get home I have I personally use what's called a draw a bow but I wouldn't say you have to use that particular brand is just a convenient and redundant thing but what a draw a bow is is very similar to what is known as a raid system and what both of those do is they make sure that as you work on what looks like a normal hard drive it actually keeps two copies of your images and it keeps him on separate drives so that if one dr fails your picture isn't lost you still have it on the second drive and you can continue working so if I were to remove the cover this front cover here there's actually ate hard drives in here most draw bows have four five hard drives and I happen to get the fancy one that's got eight end so the more drives you have in it the larger the capacity could be total when it adds together all those drives but this shows up is one hard drive on my computer and it simply make sure that it keeps a redundant backup of it so if one of these individual drives fails I didn't just lose what I was doing and I can continue working and just to replace that dr this little light here changing color means that I'm getting to full capacity and I should replace that drive with one of our higher capacity so I have that that's my working drive that's what I work off its what I transfer my images too when I get home and then I also have a backup of it this backup is not usually physically sitting right next to it so I put it there for a photograph I can't fit this entire contents of one drive so I have to and what that does is if the drug will get struck by lightning these aren't usually attached I attached them like once a night or once every couple of days this makes a backup of it so if this thing ever gets water poured on it literally there's been florida for the next few months thunderstorms every single night who knows what electronically is going to happen to this thing don't want to lose it so I get on these two and then I have another set of these two in a different country different state actually that I fly too frequently and I back these up to the other set of drives so I actually have my images and three spots this is my main place this is where I'm working on it day to day this is the backup of that one just in case that device fails and then I have an off site backup which is in case this house burns down kind of thing and it's up to you how many copies you like what the main uh idea for me is uh that this drive is my working dr uh this is my backup of it and if anything happens in this particular location that I can always um get back to a version of my image and I can always if anything happens to that particular building it it goes up in flames I have them offside as well all right so those are a bunch of information about overview workflow and all that kind of stuff it covers a lot of the stuff will be going over over the next three days not the most exciting stuff it's kind of dr just kind of introductory to a lot of it s so what we're going to be doing next is starting to get in the light room we'll talk about importing our pictures in the light room how to make that fast and easy we'll also talk about um starting the process are images and just move on from that throughout the rest of the day before we get into that are there any general questions about the overall workflow are talking about or any of the other stuff we covered up until now one question that we've got from a lot of people in this may be something you talk about later as we get into more of the elect sorting process but it is where you are storing your images as far as do you keep your catalogue in one place you have multiple catalogs motions like that that stuff we're talking about what you get into that later on yeah there's in general I usually have about three catalogs from white room but for many people one catalog would be fine but once we get mohr into um working with catalogues and just working with images we can discuss that maur if you'd just like to know just on the top of your head you know how minus I have let me think how many catalogs for catalogs I believe one is my catalog of my photos which is my landscape travel you know all the photos that I'd like to eventually turn into prince books or show my website what you might just call my professional photography I have a separate catalog for my iphone photography because I have too many iphone photos where they're just snap shots that have nothing to do with anything related to my professional photography and I don't want to see them showing up as I'm just going through my images I also have a separate catalog for some of my personal passions I am into what's known as vintage america which is just americana old photos of I don't know all sorts of things in like the art deco era they're not photos I took and so therefore I keep them in a separate catalog because I never won a mistake one of them for my own and I don't want them showing up in searches that I make relating to my photos because I didn't take him they're just related to one of my passions and I simply want to organize them and then the last thing I might keep a separate catalog for in my case would be if I do a lot of nude photography and I don't want those showing up in normal searches and things I do some fine art nudes where when I'm teaching and other things I often don't want them showing up because it's just inappropriate for some of the you know I'm teaching of corporate venue to have those show up and so I might keep them in a separate catalog but if instead you go out on shoots for particular client's if you're being sent you might choose to make a separate catalog for each client but you might not might decide to keep him in one we should discuss that more detail later sounds great alright pick catherine turbo dave and I think others are wondering whether you use any online storage why don't you just use the back up in the cloud instead of having a backup driving in other states like that back up on the cloud can be nice but the problem is I'm always travelling and I don't have the come back to the studio and have the the mega internet line instead I'm in I'm in a hotel I'm on a cruise ship on a train I'm I live in a motor coach with a fancy word for a motor home on and the internet is limited resource so for me this the amount of band with it would take to upload those images makes it limiting what I might do though is you'll see and my way of organizing my pictures that I have what I would do what I call superheroes which are just my absolute best images and those would be great to have in the cloud because if I lost those those are the images that are my absolute best and I would I want them the most packed up you could say and it would be worth me finding places right of the right band with to get those somewhere else so that's when and online backup would be useful and so when you see my way of organizing what I would call it either my superheroes or my portfolio level images those might be the ones I'd consider but I doubt I would have the bandwidth or the management for all of my image is just not practical fantastic all right sounds good so we're going to talk now about importing in the light room we knew get the light room and you open it for the very first time it's just empty it doesn't know that any year photos exist because part of the idea behind light room is we only want to show those images you've decided to manage within light room we don't want to show you every single thing that's on your hard drive because that would be the same kind of clutter you get when you double click on your hard drive not the most effective way of working with your photos so let's talk about importing now just so you see what it looks like when you don't have a bunch of images already in here I'm going to go to the file menu and choose new catalogue that's something you don't usually need to dio you'll have your main catalog that you've already worked within light room and you could just import additional images I'm gonna go over here though and create a new one I'll put it on my desktop and I'll just call it today monday and it's going to reopen that image or that catalog updated all right and so right now I have catalog that pretty much has nothing in it on the left side is usually where you would see what you have in your images and especially in this one area on the left called folders you'll see that there's nothing there so what I'm going to do is take my external hard drive I'm going to put a cable on it here attach it and I'm going to act as if I just came back from the field and here's my little hard drive maybe I'm in my hotel room right now so I'm going to run right off of this hard drive and I'll keep the image is on this drive when we get back to the office we could transfer them to our main storage but that's where we're going to start for now and if this was a compact flash card or an sd card can you'd actually having your camera you can set up light room so it would automatically bring up the import dialog box which would make it so under screen it would bring you to the area you get two for importing but if that doesn't happen in the lower left you see a button called import you should also find a similar choice under the file menu it's just called import photos in video I'm gonna click on the button and lower left that's what I usually do to get to it unless it showed up automatically if you put a card from your camera into a card reader it will usually automatically choose it on the left side of my screen that's where my sources in this case since it's not one of those I'm gonna have to manually tell it where is this dr but just so you know once you have this configured in the way that you'd like to use it in the future if you're putting compact flash cards in it will automatically choose it is the source of what to do it will remember the settings that you have set in other areas in the on ly areas that I usually need to change is one field over on the left side it's not currently available but it's called shoot name so I've been you said left but I'm here right yeah thank you know sometimes I get little dyslexic but shooting him on the right side of my screen there'll be a field here would simply type in some descriptive name for what subject I shot like yellowstone national park or whatever I was shooting o r name of a particular waterfall or whatever the shoot is is what I'll have to do in the second thing I would have to do is down at the bottom I would have to tell it where to put my pictures I would click on the drive that I usually store my images on and there would be a simple choice over here to name the folder to put them in and so on saying right now is once this is configured which we haven't done yet all you're going to have to do is type in the name of the shoot on the right side which is a descriptive name and then down here you'll have to choose which drive is it going on then you'll type in the name of a sub folder and that's all you'll deal you'll hit the import button but we haven't set this up yet it's brand new catalog if we've never been in here before so we have to go over some details that you wont usually have to go over again and again you pretty much set it up once and then when you come back in the future you type in your chute name and you tell it the name of the sub folder you want to put your images in so let's take a look first this is divided up into four different areas on the left side is your source your source is where your pictures are coming from at the top is what you're going to do to those pictures are you going to copy them to another hard drive you're gonna leave them where they are right now that type of stuff and we'll cover all the details of that but that's what's at the top is what you're going to do to them and on the right is where you're gonna end up putting them in any settings that might get applied in the process in the middle is where we're going to end up seeing a preview of the images just in case we don't need to import them all so let's look at each one of those sections the source that's on the left the action that's across the top in the destination and settings that are on the right so first over here on the side my images are stored on this hard drive that I call little zippy because it's really fast and so all I'm going to do is navigate to wherever my images are and they're sitting here right there these I happened to have shot on the blue ridge parkway now when I click on it the name of the folder over here it will show me previews of the images here if I want to import all the images which is usually the case I could just ignore those previous because then it would just use them all we'll talk about what you can do with those previous later on but for now let's ignore those and look at the very top at the top we have four choices copyist dmg we'll cover that later because we haven't covered what dmg means d angie is a file format you could call it a digital negative file format we'll get into that later on a different day so if I ignore that we can copy move or add these pictures copy means you're going to put him on a different hard drive that's the setting that I would use if I had a memory card from my camera in a card reader we're in the slot in the side of my laptop and I want to get him off the card in onto another hard drive like my internal hard drive or onto this little drive that I'm using and therefore they would stay in the original location and they'd get copied to the dr I'm going put him on so what happened in two locations if I chose move then it's usually going to get them off of the location they originally were on so they're no longer located there so it's rare for me to use the choice called move because usually I like having more than one copy of them so copy is what I do so if I have ah compact clash or sd card I just came out of my camera I want to get him on a hard drive I use copy the other setting that I used the most is add add means leave them where they are right now just making sure open light room and so I want to leave him on this little drive that I have attached my computer because I'm acting like I'm in a hotel room I just came back from shooting I've gotten my images on this little drive and maybe I just have a little bit of time to work on him I want to add these to light room so I'm gonna choose at that means they're going to stay in their current location over on the right side it doesn't ask me for a destination over here because I'm not telling you to move the files I'm telling it to just leave them where they are and therefore the destination part down here goes away so use ad if you already have your images where you want them to be and you just want him to show up in light room if on the other hand you want to move them to somewhere else use copy so that would be if there on the little memory card just came off my camera I want to cop him over to a drive and let me show you what happens if we use that setting on the right side of my screen down the bottom he wants to know where to copy um to the destination and here I have a list of my hard drives I have little zippy of macintosh hard drive those of the two drives they're attached to this machine at the moment and if I come over here and expand one of these I can tell it exactly where to put them so I'm gonna just tell it to put them here on this drive called little zippy which is kind of odd it's going to copy it to the same drive but I'm asked acting as if they're not on the drive yet imagine this is on a compact flash card where little sd card is trying to get it off I choose the name of the drive that I want here there's little check box here called in to sub folder better turn that on and right up here I'm going to give the sub folder name the naming structure I used for my folders which if it makes sense to you you're welcome to use or use whatever makes sense to you is the year first and then the month what is the month right out of seven and then I do an underscore and whatever the subject was so in this case I typed in blue ridge parkway the reason I put the year first is so that when I look at my list of folders it's sorted chronologically by year and then month if you shoot a ridiculous amount where you might shoot in that month you might have fifteen shoots in a month that kind of thing I might add two more number's on the end of the date for the day you know the actual like what is today today is the twenty twenty one had put a twenty one in there but I don't shoot that much where I'd have to keep track of it at that level so I used the year the month and then the subject matter below that it will ask you how you'd like to organize the images and if you choose by date it would create an individual folder for each day that you shot things in that's assuming that whatever's on that drive was shot over multiple days if you shot it only on one day you'd have one folder I personally do not separated by days I just choose into one folder and that means whatever is on this card is going to go into a single folder and that single folder has the name I typed in but if you go off on ten day shoots and you want it separated by date within there you're welcome to come over here and choose by date then I would get additional sub folders within the folder I'm creating with date on each one and it would separate my images I find for me that's usually not needed it just makes more clutter in my folder structure so I say into one folder now when you look where you have your destination down here you'll see that it gives you a preview of the folder it's about to make right there it's in a lighter grey in it sight alec and that's to indicate it doesn't exist yet it's about to be created when you import your photos whereas all the other ones that are in more of a white tax and are not italics they already exist on your hard drive then above that we have a bunch of other settings but before we get into those other settings the only thing we really need to think about before actually clicking in port is just one other thing and that is right here called build previews if I click here we have a total of four settings as I go lower in this menu it will take longer to import my photos because light room will doom or work in the process minimal ho to the absolute fastest import if I go to embedded inside car it will analyze my pictures mohr to see if there are larger previews attached to them but it takes more time to uh analyze it so it takes more time to import if I have just a little bit extra time I usually use embedded inside car that's like my default the only time I choose minimal is a time in an absolute hurry I'm in africa my cards air full there's a lion sitting right there I need to get him off I wouldn't even be in like him I just copy them over to the drive clear off that card and slap it back in my camera or just start deleting files off the camera but the main thing is if I'm an absolute hurry for some reason I need to get him in the light room I might use minimal my default is embedded inside car and what that means is just do this relatively quick but grab enough information where I got have previous for my images if I'm back at home on the other hand and I haven't imported things in the light room yet I'm in no hurry whatsoever I could give go have lunch I can have coffee I could do whatever standard previews are nice what standard means is create previous for all these images that would be able to fill my screen and therefore I can quickly review those pictures go through them and uh so standard is a nice setting to use if you have some time but it's gonna take some extra time in one two one means full size previews I would only use one to one is if I don't need to look at these images right away because going to take a long time for create them but what's nice about one toe one is you could check focus on every image very quickly when it's done because when you click on the image to have a zoom upto tio one hundred percent view it wouldn't take any time for it to do it after the previews have been generated and you could check critical focus on all those images so if that's what I really need to do then I would choose one to one and just know it's going to take a while it might take fifteen minutes for it to do it in so I'm going to go have a coffee or something else so for me embedded inside cars kind of my default setting when I just wanted to be on fast in standard is my default the rest of the time and every once in a while I might use that if I find my focus might have been off maybe I was shooting with a a f stops like f one point to back type of thing where you have really thin a sliver of stuff that sharp and it's really need to check and make sure it was uh nailed it then I might use one to one so in general embedded inside cars what I use in the field when I'm in a hurry standard is what I use if I'm not in a hurry and I rarely use one to one so I'll set that I'm gonna hit the import bun and it's just gonna import my photos in the upper left you'll see that it will say copy and import photos right up here in whenever this has done it done I will see the images slowly showing up here is long as I'm viewing that folder in my folder list since I don't have anything else in the catalog is not the now second view but if I scrolled through this list in waited a few seconds I would usually seymour images appear I can scroll further down you can unfortunately on ly import one card at a time so even if you have multiple card readers in your office I have somewhere I could just stack them this is asking about reverse geo coating will talk about that later for now I'm just going to choose enable reverse geo coding means if I had that little device on my camera remember that little pod from canon that I could put on where it has a gps built in that instead of just having the g p s coordinates where it knows exactly where the photo was taken it would actually look up those coordinates on the internet and we figure out what state is that and maybe what city is that it would also input that information so it's known as reverse geo coding because it has on ly the exact location like a dot on a map but that doesn't mean that it has the data of what state city country and all that is you can fill in some fields for me automatically if I said enable that's why I did the second thing is doing here is fashion initial previews and that's where it's going back and looking to see if there's any previews that my camera attached that might be higher quality than what it just got and if so it's going to import them but as long as it says it's done with the importing as long as it no longer up here says importing photos I hit the import button again an import more so if I have another card to import you don't have to wait for these progress bar's to finish the on ly one you have to wait for is the one that says importing anything else you don't have to wait for so I'll hit the import button again let's go grab a second folder of images and now we can look at more settings that aaron here so again on the left side we have our source the main thing over there is there's a little check box of include sub folders and you just have to think about how is the drive you're importing structured do you want it to look into ah sub folders that air in there or not most of time I have that turned on because sometimes my camera will create more than one folder on a card because if the numbering system resets there's only so many files that can put in one folder and it'll create a second one to make sure it grabs what's in the second folder I might have that turned on but the majority of the time it's not gonna matter because whatever it is I'm importing it's usually all sitting in one folder anyway so that's our source over on the right side though there's a bunch of other stuff we can look at we talked about our previews I usually use embedded inside car when I'm in the field I am in a hurry you standard when I'm at home and I not in a big hurry I just wanted to be more convenient there is a choice called build smart previews that's only in the newer versions of light room in what a smart preview allows you to do is edit your photos when the hard drive that contains them is not attached it will capture a special preview that has mohr information in it than normal but one that is compressed so it doesn't take up much space is the original image you know captured just enough information where you'll actually be able to adjust the pictures when the hard drive that contains the images are not attached which I think is pretty cool so if I know that I'm about to get on a plane right after I'm out shooting and I might spend the hours and I'm on that plane if I come back from australia on one of those flights I have a tremendous amount of time on the plane but it might be really inconvenient for me to have the hard drive attached when I'm on the plane I might build smart previous it's going to make take up more space in my hard drive uh but it might be worth it and you can easily discard the smart previews later if you find is taking up too much space so smart previous could be nice I hear there's a great choice called don't import suspected duplicates most of the time I have that turned on in the main reason for it is I find that sometimes I forget to format my little uh memory card before I put it back in my camera and I go out and I continue shooting I come back and I now need to import those images in the light room that I just shot and if I've already imported what was on the card earlier if that check boxes not turned on I am going to end up with two copies of those files but if I turn that uh on where I don't import the duplicates I can shoot on the same card over and over again and it's only a import the images that haven't already been imported it ends up looking at the file names and the date that they were shot to see if they are um equivalent so most of the time I have that turned on the main time that I don't have it turned on is when I have my images in a separate location for a reason like let's say I have a folder for teaching like this class in all my hard drive I've moved so my images I copied them into another location on my hard drive so they do have two copies I have one copy where they usually reside in my main photo archive and then I got a folder sitting somewhere else that I'm going to use for teaching where I can adjust those images and not screw up the originals because these are copies that I might use during a class if I have that check box turned on and I tried to import that separate folder that has the copies in it it'll say hey they're already in the catalog whywould you import those and I'd have to turn that off but for most people that it'll be a rare instance when you need to turn that off here we have a choice of make second copy too and if I turn it on I can tell it where to uh make a second copy so if I have two of these drives I can have it where it automatically copies to the second drive uh when it's importing into light room which could be great if you have two drives teo back up too and then here you could just choose the folder that you would like to use if you choose choose folder you get a standard kind of open dialog box here and I could come in and find that other drive I don't have a second drive here but I could find another drive click on the folder where my backup would be and have it do that since I don't have to drive here not going to use that below that is a section called filed renaming and I always rename my files or at least now I do I didn't used to I used to just be lazy and if you're lazy you see what your file names are you conceal one of them right here came right off the camera what happens is if you leave those original file names the problem is your camera will eventually re set because it gets up to nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine in it'll reese turnover and just like the odometer in your car it'll start back over with one and you're gonna have some duplicate file name so if you ever e mail those images to somebody else like let's say a magazine and they come back and say I would like image number four five one one and you go to your light room catalog to search for that more than one image will show up because more than one image has that same name or if you're taking in making a portfolio of your images to email to somebody and you tell him to export to a particular folder you might have to file with the exact same name it's going to end up creating some issues so I always rename my files and here's how I set it up he had actually ends up being really easy once you set it up and you only need to set it up once in this area called file renaming you can make a template if I choose here here's my template in what this template will do is automatically put in the year the month the day and then a shoot name let's see how it's set up when I click on this little menu over on the right side next to template I can choose edit to make a new template brings up this particular dialog box and this is where I can create my own template up here is stuff that I already put in if I select this by clicking and dragging across it I can hit delete to start from scratch down here is all the kinds of information you could put in there and what I'm going to do is come down here to a date format and if you want to keep it nice in short I might come in here and just use a two digit year uh two digit month and if I wanted to do today I choose that and it puts it up here then I'm just gonna type up here a little dash and then there's a bunch of other things that I can choose I confuse the original file name I can have a number of things if I'd like and I'm going to end up putting it in a number here I rarely shoot more than nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine uh shots in a single shoots on we'll use that number of digits and then it down here there's a special choice called shoot name I'm going to hit the insert button so puts it in there and then you could move these things around but dragging and dropping them so here's my set up right now it's going to put in the date shoot name and then a number now it gives me an example of what a file format might look like right above that here's the example of what it might construct then finally at the top of my screen there's a pop up menu called preset if I click on it I can say safe current settings is new preset give it a name if I click done now that particular precept that I've chosen will be available right here and all have to do in the future is it will remember whichever preset I have chosen in the past and right here is a shoot name I type in and I got to remember where these were taken because it was a while ago the great smoky mountains and it'll automatically throw that into my uh my file names so all my files will be named with the date the chute name and then a number after that the only other thing I do down here is tell it what the name of the sub folder should be what I usually do is just grab the name of the shoot and copy it and I come down here and just pasted in and make sure the date is before I'm gonna hit import and uh it's going to start importing those images now there are other settings in there like keywords and things will talk about key words when we talk about organised organizing our pictures I'll tell you which ones I might enter well importing in which once I won't because there are some reasons why you wouldn't want to do it for everything so now that we have the file naming template made importing our files are easy when I put in a compact flash card it automatically choose is it on the left on the right side already told it what kind of previous I like I don't have to change it every time usually the only thing I need to enter is the shoot name in the name of the sub folder it should go into and it's usually pretty quick we'll get into importing images again and again over the next three days so any settings that you see in there you'll get more used to we'll talk about the middle section we have thumbnails as well but that gives us some basis to start with questions yes we've got a couple here before we head into our break so first one from catherine is very appropriate since we're talking about travel photography can you please talk about copying or importing a catalogue created while traveling on to your deaths top at home so you've got a laptop or something that you're working out in the field you create a traveling catalogue and then you bring it home and need more to import into main catalog a do you do anything like that and b you talk a little bit about that process yes well first off for me I don't do that simply because this is my sole machine I literally live on the road so there is no like coming home to your mane based thing I mean other than my rv but this is you know I'm a machine so I just leave it here but if I did have a separate desktop computer in this laptop computer there's a way to take the catalog you've been working on in the field and imported into a different one and we'll talk about that when we talk about managing your files in general which is something that will get into during other sessions during this but just so you're aware when you get back home to your other machine let's say you have a desktop tower a huge machine you use and you launch light room there you could go to the file menu within light room and there is a choice called exporters catalogue and you can also import from another catalog right now it can't because it's in the process of importing my images they can't due to importations at the same time but see here import from another catalog and I could point it at the catalog that resided on my lap top and it would import things in but we'll talk about that when we get into talking about managing catalogs and maybe just a brief description because I think you sort of already talked about it there was some discussion of desktop versus laptop for well for retouching in general but for travel photography in particular you said this is your personal computer and what you do all your work on is that correct on this is what I do all my work on yes I use just ah laptop for me that doesn't mean that that's the ideal situation though but know that a powerful laptop can handle all the images you see me ever make and I have huge panorama is that I stitch I mean I have panorama is that I think we're about twenty five images wide like the seattle guy line from across the water and things this laptop can handle stitching those things I also have layered files that probably have ah hundred fifty plus captures in it full resolution in one file this laptop can handle it but just because it can handle it doesn't mean it's ideal so the problem with laptops is usually the memories you can install maxes out at sixteen gigabytes I think it is and that means that working on large files like a many layered photoshopped file can be slower on this than it would be on a tower so soon I shouldn't say soon within eight months I'll have two machines one will be a desktop machine in one would be the laptop it's just a matter of what you can afford and how complex of images you work on so if you work on huge panoramas or do other things where your files end up being considerable like you do video and stuff having a desktop machine as well would be ideal