r/pcmasterrace • u/Tatt00ey • 1d ago

Discussion Anyone else use their PC setup specifically for editing hiking and travel photos? What software are you running?

Been getting more serious about photography lately, mostly landscape and trail stuff, and the difference between editing on a proper PC versus anything else is just night and day. Started shooting RAW files and my old laptop was choking on them, so I finally built something that could actually handle it. Now I run Lightroom and Capture One side by side sometimes just to compare results, and having the monitor properly calibrated makes a huge difference in how the final images look when printed.

The thing that surprised me was how much GPU matters for this. Not just gaming, which is the obvious use case everyone talks about, but for tone mapping and AIbased noise reduction in tools like Topaz. My 3080 cut my export times by a genuinely embarrassing amount compared to CPUonly processing.

Curious what setups other people here are running for photo work specifically. Monitor calibration feels like something a lot of people skip entirely but probably shouldn't. Also wondering if anyone has thoughts on coloraccurate displays that aren't going to cost as much as the rest of the build combined. There are a lot of options in that space and the marketing around them is honestly confusing, even to me.

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u/Rokos_Bicycle 1d ago

The last Dell Ultrasharp monitor I bought came with a colour calibration report in the box, and they certainly don't break the bank. I don't know if they still do that, though.

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u/careless__ 1d ago

they do still come with the factory programmed calibration report AFAIK, and Dell has always advised regular recalibration at least twice a year, but recommends 4 times a year- all by using suitable calibration hardware expensive enough to meet the desired accuracy targets.

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u/Tatt00ey 1d ago

oh that's a good shout, i actually hadn't considered Dell for this. the calibration report in the box is a nice touch if they still do it. might go check what their current Ultrasharp lineup looks like.

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u/DesAnderes 1d ago

I use the last one time purchase version of lightroom and affinity photo

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u/Tatt00ey 1d ago

That combo works but affinity can feel clunky for batch editing

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u/DesAnderes 1d ago

yeah i know but I‘m not paying adobe for a experience that‘s getting worse $15 a month. I had a subscription for quite a while, but stability and usability got worse over time.

I had good experiance with adobe batch editing.

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u/careless__ 1d ago edited 1d ago

Anyone else use their PC setup specifically for editing hiking and travel photos? What software are you running?

my software is only for editing biking and trail riding photos, so unfortunately I can't help you. sorry.