Well in my opinion as far a photography is concerned, I lean more towards taking the picture as near perfect as possible and relying less on the post processing work (Photoshop/etc). That being said, there isn’t one image I take that isn’t tweaked in some way/shape/form. I use Lightroom personally and find that it’s the most powerful tool in image processing for me. I just try hard to expose properly, frame properly and keep and eye out for things that would require lots of post-process work and keep them out of my image. This mostly is to cover up my weak to mediocre post-processing skills.
And SSD makes a night and day difference. If there is one thing I’d say you can’t go without, it’d be that. Hell, and i5 air with 4gb of memory would “feel” easily 4 times as fast as a Pro 13" with i7, 8GB and a standard hard disk. This performance applies to application load times, boot times and anything requiring lots of disk I/O. That being said, exporting/rendering images comes down to mostly processor power and that’s where the i7 will outperform.
Battery life may not matter much, but it’s nice when you do need it. Playing on a plane or whatever. Also, my opinion but optical drives are a thing of the past. Between thumb drives, cloud services, image hosts, app store, etc they are becoming less and less beneficial. You can always pick up a cheap external writer if needed.
Upgrading a non-retina pro to SSD is an option to save money initially though sometimes it’s hard to find an SSD that will work 100% with a mac. I did it in my iMac. Worth the effort, but next time I’ll just buy with an SSD installed.
Nice having an in there. Stuff is not cheap. Worth the money though :excited