How much RAM do I need for photo editing? It is not an easy question to answer. What software would be used for photo editing, and on which computer would it be performed? Which type of images would be edited, and how large would they be? These are the questions that make it difficult to answer this question.
Assuming that your computer isn’t very old and the photos are about 250MB each, 16GB of RAM would be adequate for you. If you intend to work with even larger images in the future, it is advisable to purchase more RAM, such as 32-64 GB. It is true that most normal people will not need so much RAM for the purpose of just editing photos. However, if that were the case, they wouldn’t have asked the question.
As a result of all the above, my answer would be 16GB of RAM (for starters). 8GB of RAM may be manageable, but I find that it is relatively slow and takes a lot longer in photo editing for various tasks.
However, no matter how much RAM you choose, consider an SSD, which will almost double the speed of your PC regardless of how much RAM you choose. However, SSDs do not replace RAM when it comes to speed, but they do change the way you think, and they will make you wonder how you lived without them before.
How Much RAM Do I Need for Photo Editing in Lightroom?
As a matter of fact, RAM has not been proven to speed up Lightroom magically, but it certainly has the potential to remove bottlenecks and become more efficient in photo editing. You will require a lot of RAM in order to be able to run multiple applications at the same time or filter large files.
The recommended minimum memory requirement for photo editing in Lightroom is 16 GB of RAM. In addition to this, if you have the money, you may opt for the 32GB option. When you do this, you will not have to worry about upgrading the memory for quite a while.
You should always have at least 16GB of RAM in your computer whenever you open a file using your software or when you scroll through your pictures in Lightroom. To run the latest version of Lightroom and the software that is used to cull the images, the operating system requires approximately 2 GB of RAM. So, now you should have an idea about how much RAM you actually need to edit images.
How Much Ram Do I Need for Photo Editing in Photoshop?
In accordance with the size of your document, I recommend a minimum of 16GB of RAM for documents with 500MB or less, 32GB for documents with 500MB-1GB, as well as 64GB+ for even more large documents in photo editing.
It should be noted that the size of the document as displayed in the Info Panel or under the Status bar is determined by its opening size, not by its actual file size. In Photoshop, it’s not uncommon to see two sizes, such as 20.3M/60.2M.
It is important to note that if an uncompressed flat file is exported, the left number represents the flat-file size, and the right number represents the entire layered file’s size. In determining how much RAM your system needs, the number that includes all layers is generally most relevant when you are choosing your memory requirements for photo editing.