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Mac vs. PC Digital Photography Comparison
An anonymous reader writes "Rob Galbraith posted a comparison among two Macs and two PCs. Both a high-end Mac and PC are included with somewhat surprising results given the number of Mac zealots who will claim otherwise... optimized for PC, Mac support second, Photoshop is faster, yada, yada, yada."
My "terribly slow" Dual 1 Ghz Macintosh is limited by its slowest part... me.
I keep the CPU meter running in the dock, and its twin towers of darkeness mock me..."what's the matter, buddy, can't even feed two glacial G4's? We're just sitting here, at 20% of capacity, while you try to decide which Actionscript to incorrectly code next..."
Even when I'm saving giant Photoshop files, checking 14 e-mail accounts and loading web pages into three different browsers (IE, Chimera, Safari), it still has one or two little dark blocks at the top of each meter. Probably just to piss me off.
Disclaimer: If I was a 3D or video artist, a 10% increase in speed could free up an hour a day. Since I'm not, even a 100% increase in speed would just mean my computer would have half as much to do while it waited for my sorry ass.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
Not magical- integrated. Macs have a system level technology called ColorSync, that can calibrate and store color profiles for all your output devices.
Add that to the limited hardware space Mac users have to account for- only certain types of monitors, video cards, etc- and the hooks the application developers build into their DTP apps, and you have an elegant way to make sure your puke green logo is the proper shade of puke green throughout the production process.
For instance, I develop for the Web- so I have embedded a ColorSync profile that makes my monitor look like a Windows machine (about 20% darker than a typical Mac). By propagating that profile through all my apps that support ColorSync, I can make sure that even if I specify a very light color, it will be properly compensated for and appear darker on my screen.
Windows users can do the same thing- Photoshop recently shook up their entire profile handling on both platforms, much to the concern of digital artists everywhere- but, as is usually the case, the implementation is not quite as elegant, and the results not as predictable.
That said, there's no reason why Windows can "never" reach a similar level of function. Never is a long time...
(p.s. Safari inline spellchecking in HTML forms is a great way NOT to look like a doofus when posting at 3:05 AM!)
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
Cyan is the absence of red, Yellow is the absence of blue, and magenta is the absense of green. Why is it so hard to convert colors?
Converting to a CMYK color space is not difficult. But you have to consider that as an additive model the color of the paper matters to the conversion, as does the ink used. You also have to provide a means for the user to adjust their monitor so what they see on the screen has some correspondence to what the final output looks like. A good CMYK conversion can save you hundreds of dollars per image in the fewer proofs you'll need before the final output looks good. You also really want to do this yourself because if you leave it up to the printshop you soon begin to believe that all their employees are color blind.
Photoshop has profiles for major printers with brand-name ink and paper plus less effective monitor profiles. It also has support for little sensors you stick on your monitor to measure it's whitepoint. This almost works, but you need very controlled lighting, and it still needs to be adjusted a bit because your eyes aren't standardized... (everyone sees additive and subtractive images differently, but how differently depends not only on the ambient lighting and the brightness of the monitor but your particular eyes too.)
So to sum up converting to a CMYK colorspace is not so hard, converting to the right one is a PiTA.
When i bought my powerbook with osx it was too soon, things didnt really roll until the 10.0.4 release. I was sucked in by their excellent marketing of the powerbook g4 running a gorgeous open sourceOS. Call me a sucker but apples marketing department sure knows what its doing! Still I felt resentment over buying (into) something that didn't live up to what I thought I would get.
But right now things are different. OSX is sweet, my powerbook g4 at 400mhz might not sound like a powerhouse but it's sexy. No matter what I run on it or do with it it conveys an image that I am stylish, that I value quality over other considerations such as cost and speed. That I think different. Even though I am a programmer I really noticed that this laptop made me stand out. If you're meeting creative people commercially the powerbook does the selling for you, it tells them you are no lummox. In many many fields the thing the apple brand means and conveys about its owner is a priceless add on.
I have to say i mostly run mandrake 9.0 cooker on the powerbook G4. With KDE 3.1 beta. People who have never seen osx but heard about it sometimes think Im running OSX and they comment on how beautiful it is. Yeah KDE 3.1 is gorgeous! It runs very well on the 400mhz G4. But all that's besides the point. (albeit it does show that its hardware rather than software that appeals!)
Apple did something with its brand that very very few companies have done. They created incredible value; Apple appeals to people. You dont get that with your dell or toshiba or even an alienware rig.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
"Not really.. as great as the GIMP is, it still has a ways to go before it can pry photoshop out of the cold dead hands of the people who use photoshop what it is intended for rather than just for general cropping and resizing."
I can vouch for that. Paying $150 every so often (plus the $600 tag to start) is somewhat painful, but my experiments with Gimp didn't prove fruitful enough for me.
Let me explain some things, though:
a.) I already have PS paid for. So for me to switch to Gimp, it has to be better. Price tag isn't everything.
b.) I already have a well established workflow with PS and no real bottlenecks (that I'm aware of) that Gimp has the opportunity to fix. So, for me to adopt it (or evaluate it) then they'd have to do something Photoshop doesn't do. I guess this makes me a Photoshop zealot. At least I'm honest!
c.) As long as Adobe keeps making really big updates to PS every year or so, they keep my attention. Gimp would have to ride that wave to keep me on board. So far, it feels like they're playing catch up.
I realize my reasons aren't entirely rational, but I can imagine that there's a significant portion of the PS population that shares or would share similar feelings.
Adoption of Gimp may happen in a year or two, particularly when Linux becomes more and more attractive to the digital artist. (Note: I'm not implying Gimp's only on Linux, but rather that Photoshop is not on Linux...) Today, though, it's not all that interesting in any way other than for the visionary. Us artists would just like to get our work done.
They compared the very fastest notebook you can buy (when not running off battery), which only runs nearly that fast when tethered to wall outlet with cpu cooking at like 50W, to a PowerBook that is slower than any you can buy right now (20% lower clock rate and much less cache than currently available) and uses less than half the power.
What kind of comparison is that???
Looking at the charts, it appears that a current PowerBook would easily smoke the P4 book in speed alone. Even if you ignored the higher cache (which is not insignificant b/c altivec is severely handicapped by small caches), a 1GHz PowerBook would be about 25% faster than the one they tested. This would make it faster than any P4 book even when P4 plugged into wall cooking at like 50W.
Furthermore, PowerBooks with Radeon cards can run at full speed for hours on one battery, whereas P4 books will roast your nads for about an hour while running half speed and then die.
I've never owned an Apple product and certainly am not a mac zealot, but this test is ridiculously rigged. Nice way to get on Slashdot real easy.
I had a friend that worked at adobe a few years ago that told me that they release 10-20 serial numbers into the wild for about all of their products so that kids resizing and cropping will choose their software. When the kids grow up, they'll know Photoshop/GoLive/Illustrator/whatever and will be more likley to purchase it or recommend it for purchase to their company. Nothing really lost as they wouldn't have bought the $500 package anyway. I believe macromedia came out a few years ago and said that they put together and distributed a full package version to pirate web sites to do the same. Now it's the most popular program going.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.