In general I find using a notebook screen to small for picture editing. I have been using the ASUS N550JA for the last 18 months and for anything that requires pixel level manipulation I plug it into my 39" LED TV using a standard HDMI cable. You can also use the mini plug to connect to a VGA or XVGA projector. The hi resolution so nice for gaming will make you blind when dealing with fine grained edits. Likewise, doing AutoCAD or similar vector graphics is impossible on a laptop screen at really high resolutions.