Which Computer configuration for digital Imaging

[fastfashn]

Unfortunately we live in a mostly PC-centric world... I love Macs and have worked with them a lot in video editing, but they aren't perfect either. The last version of the Mac OS 10 had some memory issues, and check out the Mac forums sometime...

PCs work if you don't load up the machines with games, web apps, networking... If you dedicate the machine to photo or video and word processing, and don't go surfing the adult web sites and getting all the spyware and tracking cookies bogging your PC down (and you have all the latest Windows XP or Windows 2000 updates (except for Win2k service pack 4 - yuck) your PC should work well.

If you can afford an Apple Powermac G4 or G5 system, more power to you. The systems are elegant and well engineered in general. Personally I think the new 20 inch i-Macs are really lovely. If you can only afford a PC though, don't buy a clone from Dell or Gateway or Sony. Go to your local computer hacker/mom and pop computer store and build yourself a box with a decent mainboard, video card and sound card. Asus, Supermicro, MSI mainboards are good. Nvidia and ATI make great video cards and of course SoundBlaster for the audio card. Put in two hard drives - one for the OS and applications and one to store photos, word processing docs and video on. Make sure the hard drives are the latest in SCSI or IDE, and get 512MB of RAM or more. For large images 1GB or RAM is more than acceptable.

The power supply in the computer should be 450W, and get a Pentium 4 processor or the latest AMD.

Lastly, keep your hard drives defragmented with Diskeeper or Norton, make backups of files you want to keep. DVD burners are not all equal, look at the Pioneer DVD burners before you spend $99 on some cheap special from Tiger Direct. The backups you make on a DVD (or wherever) are only as good as the media you write the backup files to.

One thing Apple does better than anyone is make DVDs that are actually usable.

-Dana

PS Make backups and backups of the backups. PPS Death to Windowz

 

[ttu]

Considering all these Mac / Windows comparisons I wonder if there's any experience with Linux - based systems for digital imaging available? Caveat is, Photoshop is not available there, only Gimp which supposedly is inferior to some extend. But apart from that?

Speaking of myself, I do work with Linux / Gimp but wouldn't call me an expert on digital imaging.

 

[saspencr]

Thanks to all the great comments. I think discussion of both an "ideal" system and a "budget" system is relevant and should be explored in this thread, just remember what you are describing. My original post was to find the least expensive way to work on photos reliably given my current setup. I have added memory so my laptop is maxed out at 320 mb. I will soon buy a CRT monitor because the Sony laptop screen never lets me know how bright/dark the image really is. My third purchase I am undecided on... and that is for archiving images. This part seems like it can get out of control (archiving slides is easy, reliable and less expensive, just retrieval is slow). So I would like an archival system that does the same for digital images. Seems like CDs are not the way to go as I might lose an image after just a couple of years. Could we focus discussion on digital archival? I am looking for something reliable, simple, and not costly. Based on some of the prior postings, I may lean toward an external hard drive, but I want to feel out the options better hear first. Thanks again for the spirited discussions! Scott

 

[jsmisc]

I think that would be a good question for discussion Scott. It is part of a computer system as wee.
I have just bought a DVD recorder. I have heard the stories of CDs especially cheap ones, losing data but I don't know if it really happens or if DVDs are subject to the same sort of worry.
Cheers,
John

 

[beethamd]

Thomas,
I was waiting for someone to mention Linux ;o) I use only Linux at home with Gimp and Corel Photopaint 9 which I have had running through WINE. The beauty of GIMP is that you can write shell scripts for it to automate any batch editing processes therby fully automating the whole process if that's what you want.

In three years of Linux use I've never had a single crash. It's a truly wonderful operating system. My PC is four years old. Wont need upgrading for ages with Linux running on it.

David.

 

[rico1]

Thomas,

Linux is viable for the adventurous individual.

A facet of my day job is assembling PC's from carefully selected components for use in financial analysis. These have 4GB memory, 2TB RAID, 2 CPU's, gigabit ethernet, and run Linux. These machines NEVER crash - I'm talking an uptime of YEARS.

My personal machine is similarly configured, and I use software like Gimp, ImageMagik, pbm tools, IJG tools, xv, and stuff I write like image stackers. I also paid $40 for VueScan to run my FS4000 film scanner. My next mission is to learn ICC, and free software (e.g. Gimp plug-in) is already available.

The one area where I'd consider an OS from Mircosoft or Apple is driving a printer. Epson is quite open with their hardware specs but they, and Canon, have such rapid product deployment that free software cannot keep up. I will probably spring for the Epson 4000 and dedicate a machine running Windows 98.

Finally, note that commercial software from VMWare allows you to run Windows software like Photoshop under Linux. This won't prevent Photoshop (or Windows) from crapping on itself, but at least the machine stays up, and your files are safe from corruption.

 

[ttu]

David,

same experience. No crashes and installing software doesn't even require to restart the PC . Also scanning via SCSI seems to be somewhat faster although I haven't done a real benchmark yet.

If you are interested in batch image editing processes, there's probably another good tool available which allows to carry out a vast number of operations from the command line. Anyone interested may have a look at http://www.imagemagick.org . It is supported by both Windows and Linux systems. I'm regularly using this set of tools to carry out batch operations for images, creating thumbnails, rotating images, converting file formats (it even handles CGM !! ) and creating fancy borders which otherwise would require long tedious and repetitive work in a usual imaging program such as Photoshop or Gimp. Quite a relieve to convert 20+ .tif files to .jpg, add decorative borders and create thumbnails all in a single command with a little bit of scripting. It supports a lot more operations, such as unsharp mask etc. I'd reckon everyone has a certain number of steps in imaging work which do cry out for automation. Only disadvantage is, running from the commandline means this is a real RTFM animal ( RTFM = "Read The Foolish Manual" , sanitized version ) .

Thomas

> Posted by David Beetham (Beethamd) on Wednesday, December 03, 2003 - 7:04 > pm: > > Thomas, > I was waiting for someone to mention Linux ;o) I use only Linux at > home with Gimp and Corel Photopaint 9 which I have had running through > WINE. The beauty of GIMP is that you can write shell scripts for it to > automate any batch editing processes therby fully automating the whole > process if that's what you want. > > In three years of Linux use I've never had a single crash. It's a > truly wonderful operating system. My PC is four years old. Wont need > upgrading for ages with Linux running on it. > > David.

 

[neilb]

Yes, Linux is very reliable and flexible. But using it for digital imaging is not for the average photographer. Printing can be a pain in the neck. Color management support is very poor. 16 bit support is almost non-existent, except for Cinepaint, which only works under X-Windows. Support for advanced graphic adapters is usually slow in coming to Linux. If you use a laptop, you may not be able to find support for power management, sleep & wake, etc. All of these things will tend to work much better with a Dell, IBM, or Mac running windows or OSX as appropriate. But once you get your Linux setup working, it will just keep on working. You never have to reboot it if you don't want, and if you do it boots up very fast. Also, the same machine will probably seem faster running Linux than running the other OSes. I don't know if it actually is faster, but it seems faster. If you knownwhat you're doing, you can get away with a smaller machine using Linux, and save money. If you're a programmer, or other geek, who also does photography, maybe it would be appropriate. But if you're just a photographer, I don't think Linux is ready for prime time.

Neil

 

[paul_schliesser]

For those who have not explored it, look at the 'actions' window in Photoshop - you can automate sequences of commands here. Also, note that the little scripts you write here can call each other, so you can built a lot of little modules to carry out simple tasks, then write another script to string them together to create very complex series of events.

Also you can save curves settings in a file and reuse them - this saves a lot of time if you've got a number of images from the same shoot that need similar corrections.

What I often do with curves is use them as an adjustment layer instead of actually applying them to the image. You can then drag a copy of this layer to other files to apply the same curves, and can easily tweak them without a lot of wear-and-tear on the image itself.

One trick with curves (and also with levels) is that you can hold the option key down while selecting curves or levels from the menu, and when the palette comes up, it will default to the settings from your previous use of that tool. I'm not sure if this works (perhaps with the alt key?) under Windows.

On the Mac, you can use AppleScript to write scripts to automate complex sequences of events - you can even hand off the same file to multiple applications in the same script.

DeBabelizer is a useful program that lets you write complex scripts for automating graphics production tasks. I worked on graphics for several computer games a few years ago, and made extensive use of this program.

- Paul