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The Great Debate Anonymous
From a photogropher's point of view, which is the better work environment?

Apple's Mac OS X with iPhoto, Aperature, Adobe Bridge, Photoshop or Windows XP/Vista with just Adobe Bridge and Photoshop?

Are there other things to take into consideration?

I'm borrowing an old mac to get a feel for it.
>> Anonymous
there is a reason why the industry standard are macs and it isn't because of the sexy white.
>> Anonymous
>>65643
Macs are PCs now. This argument is dead.

Use whichever operating system you like best. Bridge and Photoshop are practically identical on each system save for different keyboard layouts.

I use Macs at school and an XP system at home. It's the same damn thing.
>> Anonymous
I'm a little incensed that this is a photographic question. As long as the colors are all calibrated its just a question of which layout of functions you like, since pretty much every program does the same things. The only unique elements have more to do with graphic design than photography.
>> heavyweather !4AIf7oXcbA
Photoshop and Lightroom are essentially identical between platforms. If you want to use Aperture (it's nice), the victory goes to the Mac.

Photographically, with a nice calibrated monitor, either platform is fine, I guess. It's all the other stuff that makes Macs worth using. I'm not 100% certain about this, since I've never seen a single printshop using PCs (and probably for this very reason), but Macs handle printing, special ICC profiles, and so forth with remarkable aplomb. Every Epson I've ever used with a Mac has had fantastic drivers, from the itty bitty desktop printers to the gigantic, $20,000 monsters that take big ol' rolls of paper. Theoretically PCs should be fine at this too, since they release drivers for Windows as well, but... well, why submit yourself to that level of torment?
>> Anonymous
>>65643

yeah, it's cuz they also come in sexy gray. matches yr camera.

Srsly tho, Macs had an advantage when PCs were still in the Windows 3.1 stage and and they came bundled with a pretty decent video card. That was 15 years ago, though. Now, there's no advantage, especially since Mac started using Intel chips as 65644 said.
>> Anonymous
It's like people pretend there are magical pixel faeries in macs that will massage the colors into better shape. A color value is a number. A correct calibration means those numbers are being shown accurately. A print driver is a print driver and a color profile is a color profile. There's no special magic separating macs and pcs and the “macs are better for graphics” has been a staple cliché for people who don’t know what they’re talking about for how long now? It just has to do with what you feel comfortable setting up and working in, neither is really better.
>> heavyweather !4AIf7oXcbA
>>65660
I think the valid point to make here isn't that "Macs are better for graphics" but rather that "Macs are better for people who create graphics". Macs remove or bypass so many elements of frustration that impede and slowdown professional workflow, it's no small wonder that people are willing to pay a premium for the tightly integrated system Macs present. Excellent customer support, no confusing hardware choices to make ("I want the one with the bigger screen!"), blah blah viruses blah blah malware, and just pure ease of use. 4chan isn't an accurate sampling of the population. We're all very tech savvy here, by and large, due in large part to our proud status as a hacker gang. Most creative professionals, be they graphic designers, typesetters, printers, illustrators, or whatever other visual media you want to talk about, don't want to deal with command lines, .DLLs, apt-get, Spybot, AVG, the Windows registry, Xorg.conf, or any of that shit that we delight in. They want something that will quietly and prettily get the job done, and possibly even give them artist-cred for having the glossiest, sparkliest, eye-candyist machine on the block.

Me, I use'em because I love the Mac design aesthetic from top to bottom, hardware to software to packaging to Steve's reality-distortion field. I drank the kool-aid long ago.
>> Anonymous
Generally speaking, for the same money spent on a mac you can get a computer that is 4 times faster, the money you spend on a 20" cinema screen, intel cored pc and large hard drive could be better spent towards a an intel quad core, 1tb of space, 4gb ram, and a 30" LCD.

PC's also have a wider range of graphics software, there are literally thousands of apps for pc, whilst on mac the are only a few good big ones like corel, photoshop and others.
I have used apple aperture and dont see why it gets the hype, there are much better and cheap (if not free) equivelants on the PC platform.

The pc, in my opinion bet the mac long ago, (and now they are using intel chips, what reason is there to use them, not the cpu architecture obviously because its the same).
>> Anonymous
>>65665
True, true. I talked for a while with my photoshop teacher and others about why artists gravitate toward Macs and we came up with a few reason:

1. Apple has done well with promoting Macs as the choice for artists and people buy into that regardless of evidence and they in turn propagate it as well.

2. Many artists are simply not familiar with computers and having their PC fall to some stupid spyware shit just isn't worth the risk.

3. Macs are pretty.

I think number 1 is the biggest reason. I go to a super faggy art school and when I tell other students that I use a PC at home for all my homework they look at me like I'm talking moon speak. They actually say things like, "But aren't you an artist? You can't do art on a PC."

For the record, my desktop is an XP machine and that's where I do 99% my photoshop at home. I have a MacBook that I use for internet related things and very light image editing or when I'm away from home and need to purge the CF cards. All the computers at my school are G5s.
>> Anonymous
Lightroom, platform is irrelevant. End of discusssion.
>> Anonymous
What about throwing Linux into this argument? I know that thinks like GIMP don't have all the high-end things that Photoshop does, but doesn't it have enough functionality for most photographers' needs... at least amatuers. (there's also some others like krita which have features missing from gimp).

What about color profiles too? Anyone know if there is even support for calibrating X11 to a monitor with color profiles? I don't even have a clue if that's possible.

sorry if you think this is off-topic, but i have a personal battle going between linux and macosx and which I should use, so i think about these things.
>> Anonymous
Flame wars are awesome!

>>65669
>Generally speaking, for the same money spent on a mac you can get a computer that is 4 times faster
Translation: I haven't priced a Mac in four years.

>PC's also have a wider range of graphics software, there are literally thousands of apps for pc, whilst on mac the are only a few good big ones
Translation: PCs are better because they have hundreds of shitty apps nobody wants to use in addition to the ones that are also available for MacOS.

> (now they are using intel chips, what reason is there to use them, not the cpu architecture obviously because its the same).
Translation: It has never occurred to me that different software might work differently.

(Disclaimer: I'm actually a Linux geek. I've got a Mac and a Windows box next to me for the purposes of compatibility. I mostly use the Windows machine to play games, and I mostly use the Mac to talk to my scanner and printer)
>> Anonymous !MjcMqTX/iM
I'm on an artschool myself, we use macs. But I always bring my laptop with Windows along.
As said, the software range for Windows is just much bigger. I use loads of old windows 95 software, crappy and buggy as hell, but they are unique in results compared to big names. I can't go without stuff as Teddy modeler, ALICE, Terragen, vOICe, VirtualDub, etcetera.
>> Anonymous
>>65708

Yea, but the entirety of Windows doesn't grind to a half when a mounted Samba shared starts timing out.

Also, try and find equivalents of CAD software on Mac. AutoCAD... SolidWorks... ProEngineer... 3DStudioMax... etc. Please don't argue that there is nothing that is PC-only.
>> heavyweather !4AIf7oXcbA
>>65681
Linux is not a platform for creative anything, however much they try to fool themselves into thinking that it is. Their vector art programs are approaching where Illustrator was a decade ago. GIMP is a piece of shit with a featureset barely equal to Photoshop 5.
>> Anonymous
ITT: Mac fags try to defend shit.
>> Anonymous
>>65712

Maybe true, but a lot of the new features of Photoshop/<insert adobe product> are a little broad compared to what most of the market needs. How many people in the market actually *need* to use the new features of photoshop on videos... how many people need to spend the extra money to have all those video/3d features in photoshop? Mostly relatively few people at the top of the market actually need that stuff. Professional photographers certainly don't.
>> Anonymous
>>65712

Their vector art program is also only a couple years old IIRC. And I don't know anyone claiming that it's a pro app. But a lot of people pirate Illustrator/Photoshop for things taht smaller progs like this provide.
>> Anonymous
This is worse than the Canon/Nikon debates we've had. Far, far worse.

That said, I prefer PCs. I don't like the user interface of Macs, and it looks too slick, like its designers are trying too hard to make it slick or hip or pretty or something. And I've had no headaches with a PC, and I abuse my computers like hell, both physically and in terms of how many programs I run and so on. But in the line Heavyweather was going in, I'm knowledgeable enough about computers to coax and glide them through the hell I put it in without even thinking about it.

In the end, they're both equally capable platforms. Use what you work best with.
>> Anonymous
>>65712

Um, bullshit. What do you think they make all those Pixar movies on? A Mac? All that stuff is done in Linux on 30 grand workstations.
>> Anonymous
lightroom w/cs3
>> Liska !!LIVFOETqL8j
>>65641

I personally prefer mac. Easier to work with for me and more convinent, but both OS's have their advantages and disadvantages. Best thing to do is to do research, find out what programs will fit into what you are looking at doing or what you may potentially need to do. Once you figure out what type of work you're looking for, you can then make a decision on what type of computer to buy to do your post-processing with.
>> Anonymous
>>65722

They used Macs before they made Cars.

That's a crap argument anyway, Pixar use whatever they can for sheer processing power, nothing to do with functionality or features, I mean at the moment I think they're using Linux Dells.
>> Anonymous
I use UFRaw and GIMP on Windows.

Stupid to use Linux based software on Windows? Probably, but I started using GIMP ages ago since it was a free alternative to Photoshop (I didn't know about torrents back then either :-p) and now I'm so used to the UI that using Photoshop feels pretty awkward.
>> Anonymous
The whole discussion is moot because if you're serious about your work, you use the right tool for the right job. Macs for some things, PC for others, and Linux for... whatever linux is good for.
>> Macheath !8b4g0BkNZg
Hey guyz wut about BSD? It owns j00.
>> Anonymous
For me, I own a PC and I do all my image editing on it with Photoshop, and it works fine for me (when the computer itself works, I've been having tech issues for a month or so, I'll have to buy a new machine). However, my brother who does film and my father who does film and photography both use macs and love them. They are highly reliable, and have never had software or hardware issues for the years that they've used them. They use programs such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, Final Cut Pro HD, and the like.

The only reason I use my PC is because of the games I like to play on it. If games were not an issue, I'd definitely go straight for the mac.
>> Anonymous
>>65797

There's always the option to buy a Mac and double
(win/mac) or triple boot (win/mac/linux).