I am considering purchasing an i-Pad Pro which I'd like to be able to use for  both processing photos and for video editing.

Do you have experience in doing that with either an i-Pad or some other tablet? If so, what has your experience been like? Were there a lot of memory problems? Was it a lot slower process? Did your editing software run well on it?

Thanks for any info you may care to share.

From my research it's not a great device to edit photos on using something like Photoshop. I have some iPad Pros and have done a little drawing on them but it's best to buy something designed specifically for it like the https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/ … 4_pen.html

It's more expensive but worth it.

Or you could use a Wacom tablet without the display connected to a laptop or desktop.

NM

I own an Ipad Pro 12.9 gen 5.  M1 processor.   The display is awesome, and with IpadOS 16 nearly ready, the amount of features is awesome.  Be sure to purchase a model with extra ram.     But yeah, I also own laptops, and a purpose built desktop for intensive task.  I’d say go for it.  LightRoom is awesome on an Ipad Pro (M1).  Photoshop is limited lol.  I guess they’re working on it.  And it can definitely hinder workflow.   There’s also Serifs line up.  Affinity is a full featured photo editing app.  If you’re someone that already has iCloud storage, it makes life easy to share files.  Especially on the go.

I do most of my edits on the Ipad.  Procreate is my personal favorite, but you really have to consider your own personal needs and how much flexibility you’d like.  Also, if you already invested into the App store market or not. 

My software lineup is,

LightRoom, Photoshop, DarkRoom, Affinity, Procreate, LumaFusion, Artleap.    There’s a big catch, storage and transferring files is a pain.  You could easily spend 2k for just Ipad with Pencil, a case, screen Protector, USB adapters etc….  And guess what?  If you encrypt any external drive, you will not be able to use it.   The Ipad Pro, is very capable yet, crippled in many ways.   There’s great things about it, like reference mode, Supports a wide range of formats off the bat, Apples Photo app is powerful and quick, it’s portable, battery outperforms both of my laptops,  I can send photos while shooting, it can serve as a second screen & remote for my camera.  It fits my workflow, but I do get headaches from its bs at times.

The big however….   Add-on’s for LightRoom and other apps is crap.  Batch jobs suck.  It’s doable, but slow and glitchy.  Maybe it’ll be better with the M2 version.  It cost just as much as a new, and very capable MacBook Pro 14inch.  Matter of fact, you can find them cheaper than what you’d pay for a brand new Ipad Pro.  I do love my that my Ipad has cell service and hotspot.   I also don’t have enough experience with video edits to give advice on.  The stuff I’ve done works for me.  It’s basic.  LumaFusion is a full featured app, but again, storage and processing power leaves you waiting, and sometimes a big headache.  Btw, for some stupid reason, many tools are left out of Photoshop.  You’ll have to export into Fresco or something else to use something like Liquify.


My thoughts and opinion; to use it as your only machine, might not be wise.  If you’re an all over the place jack of all trades person, the Ipad Pro 12.9 5th gen is an awesome tool, if you’ve already invested into Apples Market. Or a great supplement to any PC, Linux, Mac machine, if you don’t have the apps.

I hope this helps a little . At the end of the day, it all depends how you like to work.  There’s A LOT to consider.

Thanks a lot for all of your information Christopher. You've covered a lot of ground.

I'm mostly looking to get away from my desk and to still be able to do at least basic cropping and editing of images and clips. I'm sure anything beyond that would be best done on my desktop.

That's a disappointment that encrypted external drives are unusable. It is a bit hard to understand why that would be so since, at least to my non-tech mind, it would only require a bit of programming..

Thanks again.

Yet more thanks . . .

That's good to hear about the ability to connect an encrypted drive. It would have been a pretty stupid limitation if not.

I don't expect to ever be an Adobe customer again though. They lost me with the first subscription model, and because of the lack of non-cloud functionality and local image/database storage.