Good day.  I hope everyone was able to enjoy the long weekend and were able to get out and take lots of beautiful photos.

in my last post, I discussed my camera gear.  In today's post, I'll discuss my tools for post production editing.

Hardware

My production computer for post-processing is a 2017 model iMac.  It has 40 GB of RAM and two external 4TB Western Digital Drives.

I'm sorry to say, that this computer has been experiencing major issues for sometime and I routinely have to deal with the 'spinning beach ball'.

I'm couting the days until Apple release a 27" (or bigger) iMac with the Apple silicone chip.  In the meantime, I keep my fingers crossed and hold my breath that my comptuter holds out a while longer.

I do all of my photoshop and Lightroom work on this computer.  

I have a 1 TB internal drive.  All that is stored on the internal drive is the Operating System and program files.  All of my non-photo documents are stored in the cloud.

I have two Western Digital 4 TB  external drives connected.  One acts as my repository for all of my images.  The second acts as my backup drive.

The backup drive is segmented into two partitions.  I have a 3 TB partition for my image files.  I use Carbon Copy Cloner for backups.  I've created a job that backups up my image library every night.  Carbon Copy Cloner is awesome.  It's extremely relliable.  In fact, in the two plus years I've used it, I've never once had a job fail.  I also use a cloud service called BackBlaze which backs up nightly  to the cloud.  I like the additional reliability of having my backups stored locally as well as in the cloud.

I use Apple's Time Machine to do backups of my computers internal drive.

My 2nd iMac is 2011 model that's still chugging along.  It's handy to have a 2nd machine.  If I'm following along with a tutorial or help video, I'll open it on this machine.  It's also great to watch TV while I'm working.

I also have an iPad that runs Lightroom mobile which I'll use for culling images and making basic image edits.  Using the sync functionality in Lightroom, I'm able to keep my primary image repository up to date at all times.

Software

Photoshop

I'm a longtime user of Photoshop.  I think I began with version 3 back in about 2002.  I feel I'm fairly good with it and would rate myself about a 7 on a 1-10 scale.
I'm presently running version x.xx on my desktop.  I also have the Mobil version on my iPad, but truthfully barely use it.  It's a scaled down version and  I feel that the functionality is to limited to warrant using it more.

I use Topaz DeNoise and Sharpen as plugins within Photoshop.  I've also got Luminar which I barely use.  These are the only plug ins that I use.

Lightroom

I've been using Lightroom for about 4 years and do the majority of my editing in Lightroom.  My rule is generally to do as much as possible in LR and if there's something that LR can't do, then I'll bring the image into Photoshop for final edits

I'm presently running Lightroom Classic version x.xx.  I also use the mobile version of LR on the iPad.  

Well that's it for today.  In my next post, I'll describe my work flow for editing images.  

Have a good week.