Photo editing sits in an interesting performance sweet spot. Lightroom's import and export pipeline is heavily multi-threaded, while Photoshop's brush tools and filter operations lean more on single-threaded speed and GPU acceleration. The Ryzen 7 7700X delivers on both fronts, with 8 fast cores that tear through batch exports while maintaining the single-core speed Photoshop demands.
The RTX 4060 Ti accelerates GPU-based operations in both applications — neural filters in Photoshop, Super Resolution in Lightroom, and general canvas rendering all benefit from CUDA cores. The 8GB of VRAM handles even large panorama stitches and 100MP+ files without issue.
32GB of DDR5 is the sweet spot for photography workflows. Lightroom's catalog and preview cache live in RAM, and Photoshop's scratch disk performance depends on available memory. The 2TB NVMe provides fast storage for your current working catalog, with room for tens of thousands of RAW files. For long-term archival, add a secondary HDD or NAS down the road.