When it comes to making non-destructive edits to your photos to give them that professional finish, Adobe Photoshop is the first point of call for many photographers. Whether it’s applying multiple filters and layers or running large export workflows, your PC should enhance the work you’re doing, rather than interrupting it with stuttering or crashing. Choosing the right components is vital for a PC that will power through your photo editing requirements.
You can find the minimum and recommended software requirements for Adobe Photoshop here, although you will often find with these lists that they only cover the bare minimum requirements and are not geared towards optimised hardware choices that will get the best performance from your software.
When it comes to designing a PC for Photoshop, you should assign a good proportion of your budget to the processor as this will give you the best performance. Each new version of Photoshop makes greater use of the GPU, but for now, the CPU is still the most important element.
It’s also worth noting that Photoshop can only effectively use a limited number of CPU cores, so buying the most expensive, most powerful CPU does not always directly relate to increased performance.
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
With 8 cores and 16 threads, the 9700X excels at handling the demanding tasks of image editing and multitasking, providing faster rendering and smoother performance when working with large files or complex layers in Photoshop. Its clock speeds make it fast and responsive, which speeds up workflows. Additionally, the Ryzen 7 9700X is compatible with high-performance RAM and modern motherboard platforms, making it a solid foundation for a high-end Photoshop workstation.
Intel Core i7-14700K
The i7-14700K is a great, versatile processor that can handle both creative tasks and high-end gaming, making it a great choice if you’re building a PC for multiple purposes. Thanks to its 12 cores and impressive clock speeds, this Intel chip can easily and quickly handle large images, multiple edits and intense export workflows.
Intel Core i5-13600K
With 6 performance cores and8 efficiency cores and a boost clock speed of 5.1 GHz, the i5-13600K is a solid choice when you need smooth, fast processing and efficient workflows and a processor which performs well in both single-core and multi-core applications.
When it comes to Photoshop, efficiency begins to plateau beyond 8 cores, so you will only see a small performance increase beyond that (although you could end up paying significantly more.
Adobe has been making improvements in order to make more effective use of higher core count CPUs, but for now, having beyond ~8 cores is only going to give you a minimal increase in performance. In general, the architecture of the CPU is often more important than the raw number of cores.
Photoshop is not a GPU intensive task, and whilst there are increasingly more elements of the application that take advantage of GPU acceleration, there aren’t many graphics cards that wouldn’t be able to handle the workload required, meaning you can often utilise something fairly entry-level such as the RTX 3050.
You’re going to need a GPU that is supported for Photoshop, but beyond that, the requirements are low, even if you’re utilising a lot of effects and filters. We would recommend you choose something from the recent GeForce RTX 30 or 40 series, and a minimum of 6GB VRAM.
One final consideration when it comes to your GPU is what display you are using. You will need something more powerful if you are running multiple 4K monitors, compared to one 1080p display for example.
Your memory requirements are going to need to factor in how many images you deal with and the size of those images. We recommend a minimum of 16GB, but if you’re regularly working with images larger than 1GB, you may want to consider 64GB or more.
For comprehensive information on selecting RAM, read our blog: What to consider in choosing RAM for photo editing.
Selecting good, high-speed storage will help your system perform optimally and will define the local storage space that you have available. If you are a photographer who is dealing with a large catalogue of high-resolution images, you will see a significant performance increase from installing high-speed, high-capacity storage, which is why we recommend investing in a good storage solution for your photography PC.
You can read our full recommendations for Storage Considerations for Photographers here.
We would recommend you use a multiple drive configuration in your photography PC in order to maximise performance, with a set-up that includes:
A primary drive – Your primary drive will be used for your operating system and to install Photoshop. This drive is responsible for how fast your system and programs load so it’s worth investing in something fast. We would recommend an SSD drive at least, or an NVMe drive if you’re really looking to maximise performance.
A secondary drive – Your secondary drive will be used to store your photos so you want to consider capacity. the right capacity for you will depend on the size of the images that you’re working with, but we would recommend going with the largest capacity you can get for your budget, to ensure you have plenty of storage. This drive should also be fairly fast to ensure your workflow isn’t slowed down, so again, we would recommend an SSD.
Tertiary drive – Whilst not strictly necessary, a tertiary drive can help to speed up your workflow by giving you a fast and efficient scratch disk.
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