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Choosing a Computer System for Digital Imaging

by Darron Spohn; created January 2002

This article discusses what you need to consider when choosing a computer system for digital imaging work. Digital imaging, in this context, is defined as getting a still photograph into a computer and preparing that photograph for printing. If you are shooting with digital cameras you can skip the section on scanners. This article will discuss general principles in choosing a system, but will not delve into specific hardware recommendations.

Computer hardware is evolving rapidly. What is state of the art today will be off the market in nine months.

Choosing a Monitor

This discussion starts with monitors for the simple reason that the monitor is critical to a digital imaging system. Just as light is the most important element in a photograph, the monitor is the most important component in the digital imaging workstation.

Get a monitor that gives you control over the individual electron guns. This may take a bit of research on your part, but it is essential to matching screen display with printed output. Another consideration is aperture grill versus shadow mask. Aperture grill monitors are sharper than shadow mask monitors. This is not important in most tasks, but when you're looking at a 24x30 inch image at actual size to clone out dust and scratches it is vital that you have the sharpest monitor possible. Research the various manufacturers' web sites for specifications. Look at the aperture grill models only, and make sure you see something that states the monitor gives you individual controls over the R,G, and B intensity, and the white point settings.

You also want a monitor with a flat screen. These cost a bit more, but are well worth the extra expense. The flatter screen means you won't stare at distorted corners when you're working on your images. Spend the extra money and get the flat-screen.

Then consider size. Most people assume bigger is better. It isn't. Look over the specs carefully. You'll notice that smaller monitors are significantly sharper than larger monitors. Seventeen-inch to 19-inch monitors offer the best compromise between sharpness and screen area. This has not changed in the last 10 years. The problem is that a 17-inch or 19-inch monitor is too small for your images and all the tool palettes you'll need to work on them. The solution is to use two monitors. Get a 15-inch monitor for holding your tool palettes. You won't believe how much time this will save you until you use a dual-monitor setup.

LCD monitors are just now (early 2002) maturing to the point where they may be useful for critical color work. Their advantage is a smaller footprint than CRTs, meaning they take up less desk space. LCD monitors do not flicker like CRTs, so are easier on your eyes during long work sessions. The disadvantage is that LCD monitors remain two to three times as expensive as CRTs with the same usable pixel dimensions.

Calibrating the Monitor

You need a monitor that gives you hardware control over the white point and the individual electron guns so you can calibrate it properly. PhotoShop ships with a built-in software calibrator. The Macintosh OS ships with a Calibration Control Panel. Adobe ships Adobe Gamma with PhotoShop. Ignore these tools. They're good enough for non-critical work, such as desktop publishing or web development, but the only way to properly calibrate a monitor is with a hardware sensor to measure the colors, and software that lets you adjust the red, green, and blue separately. Optical makes a very nice calibrator for a good price, but - as with all things in the computer industry - things will change with time. Ask on the photo.net non-archived forum for current choices.

How Much RAM Do You Need?

Before deciding how much RAM to purchase you need to decide how you're going to scan your photos. If you want a home desktop scanner for getting 35mm images into your computer you'll need a lot less RAM than someone who shoots 4x5 film and sends slides to a service bureau for drum scanning.

Also consider how much post-scan manipulation you'll perform on the files. Cleaning up dust and scratches does not increase file sizes. Using multiple adjustment layers in PhotoShop can easily double or triple the file size. Keeping these files in RAM so your computer doesn't access the scratch disk frequently will speed your work tremendously. For example, consider a typical 35mm slide scanned on a home desktop film scanner. These usually come in around 25MB. Add some adjustment layers and you may be working on a 75MB file. If you shoot medium format or 4x5 film and send your slides to a service bureau for drum scanning you'll receive 300MB files. Add a few adjustment layers to those and you can see the file swell to 900MB. That is when 1GB RAM can quickly become too little, and you'll hear your scratch disk churning away as PhotoShop writes information to the disk.

If you're working on 35mm images you'll want 512MB RAM to give enough room for the OS, PhotoShop, and other applications. Larger formats require more RAM. The answer is simple: get as much RAM as your computer will hold.

Choosing the Computer

Processor speed is not as important as you might think. This statement will seem quaint in 10 years, but computers have gotten so fast that processor speed is a secondary consideration. PhotoShop craves RAM. Budget for RAM first, then decide how fast a computer you can afford.

Macintosh, PC, or Linux?

This is a never-ending debate here and on many discussion boards. Because of the volatile nature of computer hardware, any recommendations in this article will be outdated in a few years. Who knows what is coming down the line three to five years from now? But you have a decision to make, and you're spending a lot of money on a system, so you want to get the best platform for the long term. If you post a question on the non-archived forum regarding platform choice you'll get conflicting opinions from both Macintosh and Windows camps, with perhaps a Linux proponent chiming in.

The best advice is to study the current market and see which platform offers the best color management tools. As of this writing, the Macintosh still leads in the color management department, but Windows has made great strides. Linux, despite its devoted following, does not offer much in the way of color management. Only you can decide which platform is best for you. Just don't swallow the old "(Insert platform here) has the most software available" argument. How much software do you need? If that software is available for a particular OS, then that platform will work for you. What is more important, preparing your photos for printing or playing games?

Also consider the processor's true speed, not just its MHz rating. Judging processor speed by MHz rating is like judging a car's speed by the size of its engine. There are other variables at play here. The following information will be outdated quickly, but it serves as a reminder to do your research and consider the total package before making a decision. Apple's current G4 computers top out at 867MHz. Intel's Pentium processors top out around 2Hz. Taken at face value, you would assume the Intel-based computers are twice as fast as Power Macintosh computers. They aren't, at least not in PhotoShop. The G4 is a RISC chip, and processes more instructions per cycle than do the Pentium chips. The 867MHz G4 is actually as fast or faster in PhotoShop than the 2GHz Pentium IV. Ironically, the 1.3GHz Pentium III is faster than Intel's latest Pentium IV. Again, do your research on current models so you don't make an expensive mistake.

Almost any computer you can buy today is more than fast enough for all but the most demanding professional needs. Expansion room is more important than RAW speed. Most bottom-of-the-line computers have limited expansion capabilities, making them unsuitable for using as a digital workstation.

The decision often comes down to your comfort with a platform. Unless you are willing to learn a new operating system and its foibles, you're better off sticking with what you know how to troubleshoot. When something goes wrong you need to fix it, not wait around a few days while a friend gets time to come over or you have to take the computer to a shop and pay shop rates for fixing a software problem.

Hard Drives

Go for capacity. A few years ago SCSI drives were the only game in town for digital imaging. No longer. Today's ATA drives are often just as fast as SCSI drives, and cost less than one-third what an equivalent size SCSI drive costs. You can spend more money on a SCSI drive and save a few seconds here and there while you're opening and closing files, but the day will come soon when you need more capacity. Those seconds will seem unimportant when you find yourself installing a larger drive so you can work on your images. Go for capacity. You won't regret it. Get a 7200 RPM drive with a 1MB or larger cache, and make sure the access time is under 9 ms. If your computer doesn't have one already, invest in an Ultra ATA 100 or faster drive controller too.

Whatever computer you choose, make sure it has multiple drive bays and a power supply that can support the drives. You will run out of drive space eventually. Adding a drive is easier that replacing a drive, and less expensive than adding an external drive.

Having multiple drives opens another possibility; striping. You can buy software that writes to two drives simultaneously, yielding noticeable gains in read/write performance. This used to be the exclusive domain of SCSI, but recent software works on ATA drives as well. Most of the new ATA controllers include striping software.

Backup and Storage

There is a plethora of storage options available, and the future will undoubtedly bring more. Current choices include CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, and DVD-RW. ZIP and JAZ drives, although available as of this writing, are not suitable for digital imaging. ZIP disks are too expensive per MB, and Jazz drives never caught on in the marketplace.

CD-R (CD Writable) media are the least expensive of your choices. One disadvantage is you cannot change the information once you write it to a CD. That is also an advantage, as you cannot accidentally overwrite your files. Also, if you write multiple sessions to a CD you'll see multiple CD icons on your screen when you pop the CD into your computer to retrieve a file. This is a minor annoyance unless you write dozens of sessions on one CD.

CD-RW (CD Rewritable) has the advantage of allowing you to write over existing data, much like your computer's internal hard drive. This can be a disadvantage if you delete an important file. CD-RW blanks are currently much more expensive than CD-R media.

DVD-R (DVD Writable) writes to DVD discs, of course. The advantage is DVDs can store much more data than CDs. The disadvantage is that writing that data can take a long time. This is not an issue if you use them only for backup. Start your backup program before you go to bed and remove the media in the morning.

DVD-RAM (DVD Rewritable) is more versatile than DVD-R, but the blanks cost more.

Also consider how you will share files with service bureaus and editors. Every and service bureau editor has a CD drive. Not all have DVD drives. If you're working with a service bureau it is a simple matter of asking them what media they can accept. If you work with just a few editors you can do the same. However, if you're sending work out to many media seeking work, CD is the safest route.

Don't buy your blank media at a discount computer store. You can never know where the media were manufactured, and thus have no idea how the disks are long term. Buy known brands, or go to CR Recordable.com and order online.

Scanning

Before deciding on a scanner you need to decide what you want to do with your images. Do you want to print 8x10s from an inkjet printer? Or do you want 30x40 fine art prints? Any desktop film scanner will do a decent enough job for making small prints from an inkjet printer. Only a drum scanner will capture enough information for 30x40 fine art prints. There is a middle ground of course, but you should carefully consider your needs, your standards, and the limitations of affordable scanners before deciding to purchase one.

Scanner manufacturers throw around DPI and Dmax ratings to impress consumers. DPI improves with each generation, and advertised Dmax ratings of home scanners inch closer to those of drum scanners with each new introduction. Be very skeptical of these claims, especially when it comes to Dmax. There is no industry standard for measuring Dmax, so marketing departments are pretty much free to claim whatever figures they think will drive sales.

Even worse, no manufacturer publishes signal-to-noise ratios. S/N is the biggest drawback to home desktop scanners. You can find several models with similar DPI and Dmax ratings, but when you use them you'll see noticeable differences in noise. Compare those scanners with a drum scan, and you'll clearly see the difference. Where drum scanners capture clean details, home scanners exhibit muddiness. This is not an issue for 90 percent of the people using home scanners. As mentioned, they're good enough for printing to inkjet printers.

Don't let this dissuade you from buying a desktop film scanner. They're certainly good enough for most peoples needs. Newspapers around th world use desktop scanners and get results far better than in the old days of shooting halftones and color separations. Desktop scanners serve well to get your work in your computer, where you can publish it on the Internet or write it to CD to send to prospective clients. And inkjet prints, when done properly, are indistinguishable from lab prints. But if you're after that last 10 percent of quality, nothing you can afford to buy will do the job.

This is where service bureaus come in. They can afford the best equipment because they can spread the cost out over hundreds of customers. Beware, though, that not all service bureaus are created equal. The majority of them specialize in prepress scanning, and their standards are simply not high enough for the fine art market. Look for a service bureau that employs fine art photographers and specializes in working with the fine art market. The photo.net archives contain many recommendations for good service bureaus.

Software Choices

There are many choices, but only one standard. PhotoShop is the standard. Every service bureau has PhotoShop installed on its computers. If you're going to work with a service bureau, PhotoShop is your only choice. The publishing industry grew up with PhotoShop, and there is an entire sub-industry devoted to making PhotoShop work better than even Adobe intended.

But is PhotoShop your only choice for home use? It depends upon your budget and comfort level of striking out into uncharted territory. If you can afford PhotoShop, and need occasional help when things don't go exactly right, then get it. Most bookstores have entire sections devoted to PhotoShop, so you can easily find tutorials and guides for this software. If you have a lower budget, or a pioneering spirit, your choices are more flexible.

Photo Elements is a scaled down version of PhotoShop available for Windows and Macintosh platforms. It doesn't have all the features of PhotoShop, but if you just want to use a cheap film scanner to get images on the web and share with friends and family, PhotoShop Elements does the job. Be aware, though, that PhotoShop Elements will not let you use ICC profiles, making it unsuitable for critical color work.

Corel PhotoPaint has its admirers, and is also available for multiple platforms. People with experience using PhotoPaint are welcome to add comments at the bottom of this article.

For Linux users Linux, the GIMP is a nice image editor. As mentioned previously though, color management tools are lacking, but the GIMP has an excellent interface and, best of all, it is free. Color management tools may appear as Linux matures. The GIMP is also available for Windows and Macintosh OS X.

For other recommendations see the Digital Imaging Software category in the archives.

Printing Choices

How you intend the print your photos will determine everything else. Inkjet output at home will require far less RAM than preparing files for a high end printer (the current state of the art is the CSI Lightjet 430). Printing technology changes as rapidly as computer technology, so study the current market and make your decision based on today's needs.

Inkjet printers have improved tremendously in the past few years. Early color inkjet printers had poor archival properties; the prints faded into oblivion in a matter of months. Printer manufacturers and third parties have improved their inks and papers to the point where inkjet prints can often exceed the life of minilab prints. They can look better too, if you prepare the files properly. If you want to share prints with friends and family, inkjets are the way to go.

But if you have higher aspirations, you'll need more computer power and a better scan than you can get at home. Again, this is where service bureaus come in. You're not going to get fine art quality out of a home printer, no matter how good inkjet printers get. They'll always lag behind the state of the art, because of cost simple engineering economics. A $250 inkjet printer cannot be designed and built to the same standards as a $250,000 continuous tone printer. Consider your needs and make your choices.

Should you get an inkjet printer for proofing your images before sending them to a service bureau for high end output? Absolutely not. This statement is going to stir come controversy, but consider the ramification. Proofing on one device for output on another device throws more variables into the equation. Those of use who struggled with math in school understand the importance of minimal variables. Proof on the same device you use for final output and you'll avoid a lot of headaches.

Budgeting Decisions

Now you're ready to get down to the details. Where do you spend your money? Choose a monitor or, preferably, monitors. Buy an excellent monitor for your working monitor, then get a cheap one for your tool palettes. Next, decide how much RAM you'll need. Look up the price of RAM, and plug it into your spreadsheet. Then add in the software. Now you'll see how much you have left over for a computer and peripherals.

Low end system

  • 512MB minimum for working with 35mm originals
  • Software = PhotoShop or other
  • Monitors = 17-inch for images, 15-inch for tool palettes
  • Backup device = CD-RW
  • Scanner = low end film scanner
  • Printer = inkjet for sharing files with friends and family
  • Hardware calibrator for monitor
  • Computer = Whatever is left in your budget

High end system

  • 1GB minimum, but more is better
  • Software = PhotoShop, there is no other clear choice
  • Monitors = 17-inch or 19-inch for images, 15-inch for tool palettes
  • Backup device = CD-RW, DVD-RAM optional
  • Hardware calibrator for monitor
  • Printer = Laser printer for business use, let your service bureau worry about proof prints
  • Scanner = Don't bother. Do it right and send your originals to a service bureau for drum scanning.
  • Computer = Whatever is left in your budget

One More Consideration

If you're serious about the fine art market, you should honestly evaluate your computer skills and the cost versus the benefit of preparing the files yourself. Doing the prep work gives you absolute control over the final image, but do you have the skills and inclination to sit in front of the computer and prep the files yourself? Do you know how to set up a color management workflow that will succeed outside your home or office?

Before the advent of digital imaging very few photographers bothered printing their own color work. They'd shoot the images, then drop off the film at a lab for processing and printing. Unless you have extensive darkroom experience you'll find this whole process frustrating. And it will not put money in your pocket. Think about this if you're running a business. You might find that you're better off letting a service bureau work with your files so you can spend your time generating new images. Your images are your income, after all.

Conclusion

You need RAM, but you also need a monitor with hardware control over the individual electron guns. If you cannot calibrate the monitor, you will not know what your print will look like. You will then churn out endless trial-and-error proofs trying to get a good print. Fortunately, you can save money by purchasing a smaller monitor. Buying a 17-inch image monitor and a 15-inch palette monitor is less expensive than buying a 21-inch monitor, and gives you more screen real estate. Unless your workspace is cramped, buy two monitors. You will be glad you did.

Do not sacrifice RAM in your budget. Without adequate RAM you'll find your system painfully slow, no matter what processor it features. You're better off with maximum RAM and a slower processor than with minimum RAM and a faster processor.

Operating systems are a tertiary, although important, consideration. Both Apple's Macintosh OS and Microsoft's Windows have more applications available than you will need, and both can run the one critical image editor you will need. If you're printing at home exclusively your image editor choices are extensive. If you're printing commercially or sending your files to a service bureau, then you will need Adobe PhotoShop. As mentioned above, the digital graphics art industry grew up with PhotoShop, and it is the one application you can know will work at any service bureau worth using.

But Ultra ATA hard drives in the largest capability you can afford. This is one purchase you can safely put off until you need the extra capacity. Hard drives are getting larger, faster, and cheaper all the time, so waiting is a good idea anyway.

Buy a computer with plenty of expansion room. You'll want internal hard drives unless you need to carry your drives from place to place.

This information will help you decide what computer equipment you need, but you have to decide if digital imaging is right for you. Computers, like cameras, are tools. Having the right tools to do the job is important, but the right tools are useless unless you have the skills necessary to use them. If you have those skills then you're well on your way to success. If you don't have the skills then you'll need professional help. There are many people offering digital imaging workshops, and they're a great way to start.

Photo Classroom run by West Coast Imaging
Santa Fe Workshops

Readers' Comments


Add a comment



Vuk Vuksanovic , January 16, 2002; 06:24 P.M.

You're not going to get fine art quality out of a home printer, no matter how good inkjet printers get.

My experience (including dye sub, Frontier and Lightjet) has been quite the opposite, though I'd be glad if someone could point me to an output device that produces a better image than my Canon 800 inkjet.

Andrew Grant , January 16, 2002; 06:55 P.M.

Some would argue that the Epsons are better. One problem with Canon's 800 is it is limited to 8x10. Canon has a new printer coming out that will address this issue though. The other Epson advantage is more papers to choose from including some very nice matte papers.

The high end Nikon 8000 desktop scanner can scan Medium format and costs around $3000. The quality is probably good enough for most purposes.

If you use a digital SLR be aware that Kodak seems to favour the Apple platform somewhat and if you shoot with a Canon and want to use RAW files, a Windows PC will offer you many more options. Canon's own software is poor but they make an SDK for the PC platform only which has resulted in several excellent third party applications.

Tommy Huynh , January 16, 2002; 07:06 P.M.

About the different kinds of drives, I think deciphering the family of DVD drives is probably one of the most confusing decisions when building a computer system nowadays. This is a good link from CNET if anybody wants to learn about the different types.

http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1091-8-6270835-5.html?tag=st.co.1091-8-6270835-1.txt.1091-8-6270835-5

IMO, I disagree with the article that DVD-RAMs are more versatile than DVD-R/RWs. I think it depends on whether you find use for DVD-RAM's double sided disks or not. Unlike DVD-RAMs, DVD-R/RWs can author movie disks(using DVD-R disks) which may be important to some, and they are generally faster than DVD-RAMs. DVD-R/RW seems like the most popular format right now (I think this is what Apple's Superdrive basically is), but the DVD+RW (not mentioned here) is also popular since it allows you to use the drive like a hard drive, but it may not be as economical as the DVD-R/RW, depending on your usage. Confused? So am I;)

As far as the different types of CD-R/RWs to get and some other good information on them, here's another good article.

http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1091-8-8020643-1.html?tag=st.co.1091-8-8020643-4.subnav.1091-8-8020643-1

I thought it was interesting that budget Comp/USA disks had a lower BLER (BLock Error Rate)than the pricey Sony disks. The Yamaha disks though outperformed them all. However, as the article mentions, you should not expect any consistency from budget CD-R/RWs like the CompUSA ones, because they may use different OEMs for different batches.

About striping your disks, if you're planning to do this, it's worth mentioning that you need to make sure you buy 2 disks that are *identical*. Also keep in mind that striping (RAID 0), will also increase the chances of disk failure since you are splitting your data between 2 disks, and if one of them dies, all is lost. Having said that, I still use a RAID drive on my computer, and just make sure to back up my data every now and then. I'd also recommend motherboards with hardware RAID controllers rather than software RAID control.

Robert Landrigan , January 16, 2002; 11:30 P.M.

On the G4 side, take a look at the Acard IDE PCI card - it gives you four more IDE (ATA100) drives, and has hardware raid. Superfast, and exceptionally stable. Also, in the DVD issues, having a drive like the Pioneer mounted in the latest Apple products not only allows you to save files, but the included software lets you make slide shows on DVD for clients. A good way to show off a portfolio, and at 5 bucks a disk, beats the heck out of prints cost-wise:)

Paul Gittins , January 17, 2002; 08:03 A.M.

Speeding up your machine for extensive processing.

Okay, just a few words from experience; my company (one of the big US imaging companies) builds a specialist solution for high speed Photoshop and image post processing. The input files are 75-100mb in size from a specialist scanner, but the image manipulation is faily standard - cleanup/scratch removal/sharpen/etc... using custom tools and Photoshop as an option.

The core spec machines is: 2*PIII 1ghz

1gb RAM

Promise IDE RAID - with 2 pairs of 2*40gb-9ms-2mb cache-7200RPM disks (Striped to RAID 0 for speed)

Running Win2k Pro

The big speed gain in part comes from the dual processor, but mainly from the RAID subsystem, which is surprisingly inexpensive. All the parts for this can be bought surprisingly inexpensively (not sure of $ price, but les than a comparable Dell box) and it blazes through the applications. Win 2k or Winnt4 will let you make the most of the speed.

Hope this might help...

Rodger Donaldson , January 17, 2002; 12:51 P.M.

A point that needs to be emphasised when considering striping drives for speed: this will half the reliability of your drives. Backup then becomes critical, and the risk of downtime rebuilding a system goes up. That's not to say striping is all bad, but it's something to bear in mind.

Dan Wolfgang , January 17, 2002; 01:17 P.M.

It's nice to see some general recommendations here, but I think two important aspects are completely missed:

1) Establishing a color management workflow is not the simplest of tasks. Expect to spend substantial money and/or time "learning the ropes" until you get the required results.

2) No matter how much money you have and no matter how much hardware you've bought, learning PhotoShop intimately will take a long time. Don't expect to see magnificent results overnight.

Steven Lyons , January 17, 2002; 02:17 P.M.

..."Should you get an inkjet printer for proofing your images before sending them to a service bureau for high end output? Absolutely not."...

I really don't understand this comment. This is common practice. It's farily simple to profile a certain printer and duplicate its output on a good inkjet. Certain inkjets can be used with software like Adobe PressReady - which does a fantastic job at simulating CMYK press output on cheap inkjets. HP has just started shipping a whole line of pre-press proofing inkjets (starting at $800).

Richard H. Weiner , January 17, 2002; 03:52 P.M.

Perhaps this title should have read "Choosing a(n) (Ideal) Computer..."? Albeit the thrust of this article is to address new computer system purchasers but there are many of us out here running with adequate (as per Adobe specs) systems that may only need a bit of tweaking. Yes, our systems are slower and Yes, they may be less than desirable but probably are 'good enough' to start with.

As example, I'm printing with an Epson 880. With this printer I lose out on having 6 colors (mine is 4) printing with 'longlife' inks (definitely not mine). But while this printer is a 'family' printer with school reports being run through it, I'll forego the better image quality for cost savings.

The way I look at this is that I'm still in a learning curve manipulating images in my spare time (I have another real day job to pay for my hobby) and until I get more comfortable with all the aspects of digital manipulations...I'll make do (realizing my limitations).

After all, I may dream of a Porsche but I won't buy one to learn to drive with.

Darron Spohn , January 18, 2002; 02:46 P.M.

Doug, establising a color management workflow is a whole 'nother article. I've got mine down pat, but I'm not sure I have the experience to write an article outside the scope of what I'm doing. Any volunteers?

Pawel Loj , January 20, 2002; 07:01 P.M.

My 2 cents:
Backup and Storage.
A mere 2400 dpi, 16 bit/channel TIFF scan from a 35mm slide frame is about 50 megs. This is almost 10% of a CD! And, if you are serious about preprocessing, you want to save a separate copy of the same image on different stages of preprocessing so you can easily revert to any later on. Think about it if you do tons of scans and want to use CD as your storage.
Scanning.
Selecting your desktop scanner be very careful not to go with total amateur solution. While result of one frame scans from many scanners may be very similar, it is your time that counts here. Make sure that your selection equipment:
- can be properly calibrated,
- has auto-focus capability,
- can batch process bulk loads of frames slides,
- can batch process strips of 35 mm film,
- can batch process entire rolls of 35 mm film,
- works with Silver Fast (or something alike),
- automatically removes impressions of dust/scratches (read about digital ICE),
- supports some fast connection to the computer (SCSI or, I guess, USB 2.0).
These requirements will make sure that your will not spend most of your time scanning you photos.
I would also slightly disagree with Darron as far as drum vs desktop scanners quality comparison. Some relatively cheap scanners can give you the same quality as many drum ones. It is the processing time and high specialization (features like built-in CMYK separation) that makes drum scanners better for large print shops.
Printing Choices.
Consider sending scanned, preprocessed files to a digital lab. They will "print" your work on a real photographic paper. Of course, based on your targeted audience (friends/family vs fine art) you may want to select different labs that give you different processes, results, source scans requirements and, finally, prices.

Paul Wilson , January 21, 2002; 01:15 P.M.

I'll confine my comments to the PC world since I'm not very familiar with Macs.

SCSI: What makes great is not so much ultimate speed and throughput but that it offloads the I/O processing from your CPU. This means that you system will continue to be responsive when moving a lot of data. ATA100 (and now ATA133) disks will move a lot of data quickly but they will bog down the main CPU making the machine unresponsive. Som IDE RAID controllers will also offload the processing similar to a SCSI controller. I have used and own both SCSI and IDE based systems and the SCSI systems are more responsive.

Processor: Seriously consider going to a dual processor system. Once again, this is about not having the system bog down. Dual processors will make multi-tasking much easier.

If my budget were limited, I'd probably pick dual processors over SCSI.

Scott Hill , January 21, 2002; 05:36 P.M.

I felt like this article just lacked the "meat" that I was hoping it would have. Leaving out the mid-range options seems like a mistake to me. I'm using the Canon FS4000US scanner and Epson 1280 Photo printer, and am having a great time with the digital darkroom. I'm blown away by the quality that I'm getting right off the bat; I'm sure I'll improve as I learn new techniques. This article came across to me as relatively discouraging -- the exact opposite of the experience I'm having right now.

Per-Christian Nilssen , January 25, 2002; 09:11 A.M.

Vincent J M:

You post: "look at the Wilhelm research fiasco". I have used the Wilhelm pages for deciding on printer and paper. Has something happened (fiasco) that I have not seen?

Richard Alan Fox , January 25, 2002; 10:08 P.M.

Scott Hill is right on with his comments, I too use a Canon FS4000 scanner at the input end and an Epson 2000p at the output end, and I am very pleased with the prints I produce with these peripherals. My computer is a thrift shop mac 7300 that I maxed out to 512 megs of ram it works fine with photoshop elements and the Canon scanner plug in.

Philippe Wiget , January 31, 2002; 07:54 A.M.

I am just about to decide for a (probably Epson 1290) printer and have already a scanner and computer. So, information about reasonably priced system calibration methods, tricks and solutions are of interest for me. I have already found a few articles that I will add to the links below. If others know more resources, I would be glad to hear about them.

Steve Bingham , January 31, 2002; 03:27 P.M.

Nice article, Darron. However, I would argue a few points. SCSI hard drives , in my opinion, are still a better way to go. 1-They don't bog down the CPU when under heavy load. 2-If you ever do run out of ram, and it does happen, you won't think your computer just died. 3-And lastly, when opening and closing very large 100 meg or larger files it makes a huge difference. I run a P4 at 2 gig with 1 gig of fast RDRAM and a Seagate Cheeta spinning at 15,000 rpm. With access times around 3.6 ms and throughput near 70 megs per second, it does make a big difference in my work time. At $100 an hour, the SCSI drive has already paid for itself a couple times over!!

As an example, I just opened a 100 meg tiff file in less than 1 second, rotated it 90 degrees in less than 1 second, and closed it in less than 1 second - while still on the internet AND running other programs! Photo manipulation is very time consuming and every bit helps. As for which platform is fastest, that's like saying which is faster, Ford or Chevy. It depends on which Ford or Chevy, who the mechanic is, and what he has done to the engine. If anyone would like to do some comp tests, I am game. We would need the same image. (Easy enough to download a large image from one of the digital camera sites and make it larger - say 100 megs). I am always interested in faster ways to work!!!

Again, a great article.

Carl Smith , February 04, 2002; 07:52 P.M.

Reading the most recent comment I thought it was pertinent to touch base on the P4 debacle and RAM.

The Pentium 4 is fast in clock speed, but spins its wheels. It just doesn't have the grunt power needed to truly chug through photoshop work. A 1.13 Ghz Pentium 3 will outpace it in most any imaging process. Also, RDRAM is a relatively lost cause now. Its pricy and posts minimal speed gains for a considerable increase in cost, even simple PC133 SDRAM will perform admirable. DDR RAM is probably the best way to go, however it hasn't realized its full potential, and right now its hard to say whether it ever will. They hardly stepped in the doorway of second generation DDR ram, and if they had made it to the third generation as planned, we'd all be weeping over our modest SDRAM and RDRAM. The third generation would have been able to produce several times the performance over normal SDRAM (depending on the system and who's designs you followed) but the overall performance would have definately been higher.

I guess that's all dreaming right now because the second and third generation DDR rams haven't yet come to be. Even with that though, an Athlon at approximately 1.2Ghz with 1gb DDR, a Pentium 3 1.13 Ghz with 1Gb PC133 SDRAM or a G4 with 1gb of ram will all perform well, and easily trample all over a Pentium 4 (sorry intel, you blew it).

Incidentally, a rumor in the computer industry that leaked from intel supposedly is that the P4 will be remarketed as the Celeron. Food for thought.

Pierre Caillaud , February 05, 2002; 10:46 A.M.

A word about Filesystems, Drives, and OSses

Some here have said many good things about SCSI drives ; it is true that SCSI is faster, but this is mainly because the fastest drives (ie 15000rpm) are not available in IDE, and the SCSI controller offloads the processor too. However, regarding the Bang for Buck, an IDE raid wind hands down because SCSI drives that are faster than IDE are also horrendously expensive.

Regarding processor load, this depends a lot on the OS too. Win95/98/Me is incapable of asynchronous I/O, ie. the processor is used 100% during disk accesses. This is the same for Network accesses. They are also not real multi-task OSses. They are slow.

XP and 2000 will, on the other hand, work like you'd expect and let the processor run your apps during disk accesses. An IDE drive will maybe use 5-10% of your cpu, a SCSI will use <1%, the difference is marginal given the huge price difference.

XP is a peach and performs very well once you switch off the gimmicks.

Few people know this, but if you use a Windows box, you should really format your hard drives in FAT32 not in NTFS. My own personal benchmarks indicate that NTFS is 2 to 100 times SLOWER than the good old FAT32 depending on what you do. It is almost never faster except in particular situations that never happen (ie if you put 10000 files in the same directory).

This is the main reason why NT machines seem to run slower and slower as time goes by. NTFS is a hog on fragmentation, and it is not uncommon to see your favourite big photoshop scratch file fragmented into several tens of thousands fragments. My record is more than 20000 fragments for one single file. In such cases, it is slow as hell.

This is why NTFS has to be defragmented every day at least. FAT32, on the other hand, fragmentsvery little and will keep your HDD throughput to the max all the time.

Take care.

Tommy Huynh , February 10, 2002; 12:16 A.M.

About monitors, it is not true that Aperture Grill CRTs are generally sharper. Shadow masked CRTs are generally considered to be sharper than Aperture grills because the electron beam is more confined. However Aperture grill CRTs generally give richer, more accurate colors which is what you want if you are editing photos, especially in the corners where Shadow masked CRTs often suffer from increased dot pitches and distorted pixels resulting in uneven brightness and inconsistent color.

Joze Volf , February 16, 2002; 02:09 A.M.

I simply dissagree with the tip about choosing monitor. I work in a computer business and I see and evaluate a lot of equipment. Generaly an aperture grill display realy has a very fine dot but this doesn't mean that the picture is sharp and pleasant for viewing for long hours on a daily basis. Most AG CRTs I have used (and they were all high priced models) were irritative for my eyes. This was specialy noticable on high resolutions. And the colors; the black is never near black when compared to shaddow mask display and the structure of dots on quality shaddow mask monitor is much more apropriate for viewing and editing photos on screen and picture also looks more natural and ergonomic (less irritative). But I have to say that this is so when evaluating high priced shaddow mask monitors like those from EIZO which I generaly prefer.

Gary Voth , February 18, 2002; 02:03 P.M.

For those choosing Windows, I would also strongly suggest steering clear of any Windows 9x/Me platform and choosing Windows XP. Solid as a rock, and a true multitasking/multiuser OS.

Re. file systems, I have to disagree with one of the comments that you should choose FAT32 over NTFS on an XP system. When formatting, FAT32 volumes are limited to a maximum of 32Gb on Win2K/XP. This is a significant limitation, IMHO. While NTFS does need defragmenting for best performance, this can be done easily enough. I use a product called DiskKeeper that runs in the background and keeps my disks defragged automatically. There are many other benefits of NTFS, including transaction logging, automatic rollback, security, compressed folders, virtually unlimited partition size, etc.

Larry Kincaid , March 03, 2002; 01:36 P.M.

It always amazes me to hear anyone worrying about "archival" print stability from a print made originally from a negative/positive already scanned into very high quality digital form. The digital form which is saved on hard disk, cd, or now dvd will last forever and can be transferred to many other storage device with no loss of information. But more to the point: you can reprint the digital file anytime you want and expect nothing but dramatically increased quality every time you print it. You will throw away many evolutions of cheap ($ 100 to $500) ink jet printers before you have to worry about achival quality of the prints you've made. You will be printing them again in 1/10 the time at 10 times the quality of the print you are now worried about having archival qualities. What strikes me as most important in this review is the time and cost of "my labor" to produce prints from home equipment. As much as I hate the cost of letting professionals do it form me, I still think I'm better off spending my own time taking new photographs than sitting in a small room fighting with my computer. Someday, however, I'm sure I will have the latest Mac, scanner, and printer!

Ray Paseur , March 05, 2002; 02:49 P.M.

Overall a very well done article. I use PaintShopPro instead of PhotoShop. PSP (from Jasc Software) handles all my photo manipulation needs and makes TIFF files which are 100% compatible with Photoshop files. PSP costs less than Photoshop - enough less that you can buy a SCSI drive with the difference!

Dan Tremitiere , March 14, 2002; 02:30 P.M.

One compromise between the processor load of the typical IDE drive and the cost of SCSI drives is to invest in a high-end IDE RAID card. (A currently-shipping example is the Adaptec ATA RAID 2400A.) These cards include a dedicated RAID processor (often an Intel i960-family chip), thus presenting a much smaller load to the main processor in the computer.

Ayos Kah , March 26, 2002; 03:56 A.M.

Rather than giving a direct feedback to the article, I would rather talk about my own experience with regards digital darkroom equipment. I have a Mac G4 with 640 MB RAM and 40 G drive. I have an Epson 1280 printer that can print up to 13" x 19" and a midrange Epson Scanner. I use MIS archival dye/pigment inks on Somerset Archival Photo Enhanced (Textured Finish) watercolor paper. The prints I get from this set up are museum quality comparable to very expensive giclee that one can get from service bureaus. BTW, gicleι prints are in reality just prints printed in expensive inkjet printers using pigment inks on archival fine art watercolor paper.

Below, are some of the links I went through while doing research on printers, inks and papers. I hope that you will benefit from these sites as I did.

• http://www.fineartgicleeprinters.org/ • http://www.digitalartsupplies.com/ • http://www.tssphoto.com • http://www.visual-artists.com/ • http://www.einks.net/lyson.html • http://www.inksupply.com/index.cfm?source=html/arcnew.html • http://www.legionpaper.com/digital/resellers.htm • http://www.peimag.com/site_central.htm

Andrew Delianides , March 26, 2002; 10:00 P.M.

Hi,

I enjoyed this article. I was wondering of anyone could elaborate on the dual monitors. How is it done. Besides a monitor, what do you need.

Andrew

Fabrizio Giudici , April 11, 2002; 07:35 A.M.

A quick note about CRT vs LCD. Some profiling software & hardware do not work with LCDs. For instance, the EZ Monaco color probe does not work with LCDs, according to the manual.

I don't know if it is just a way to prevent the suction cups from damaging the LCD screen. Among the links below there is an article from Luminous Landscape which deals with a Mac product which works with LCDs. In any case, should you choose to use a LCD, always check if it is compatible with your profiling solution.

Carl B , May 10, 2002; 01:37 P.M.

Hard Disks: IDE RAID (promise fasttrack 100 with 4 x4 40GB WD ATA100, raid0) worksfor me, never seen anything better, the only thing that beats it is SCSI160 raid, and a controller for this is way too expensive. Works awesome on XP. FAT32 is still way to go (Pierre is right), no it is not limited to 32gb, an fragmentation of MFT and such is not an issue then. Gary is wrong, and NTFS really gets slower, and cannot be read from a plain boot disk in case of crash. DiskKeeper is slowing you down and you have to pay for it too.

Inkjets: Epson 1280 works for me as well, the main cost is still ink and photo paper, cheaper than any lab print still.

Monitors: I have two 20" trinitrons. Works great as well, got them refurbished at a great price. Photoshop Interface Improver is nice to have as well. (ATI Radeon 7000 VE card) I could not even think to go back to 15" or 17"!!

Ajoy Prabhu (www.AjoyPrabhu.com) , May 22, 2002; 11:23 A.M.

A word about Archiving and Storage

Lets look at the basics for a bit, ~20Mb/image will give you no more than 32 images/CD!!! At the rate at which we shoot, we will have to burn 1 cd per "roll". Add to that the time for burning time. All this equals frustration. RAID drives sound good for now, but does anyone know about lifetimes on these puppies?

The main question however is, what happens a few years from now when SCSI drives, RAID, IDE, CDRW and DVDRW, etc. are passe? How does one migrate upward?

I am struggling with this as my digital collection grows to a few gigs in a few months. With slides you know you have a tanglible medium in you hand!

Any pearls of wisdom anyone?

Brian Breczinski , May 28, 2002; 01:27 P.M.

The following is gleaned from what I have read from reliable online and print sources as well as my own experience.

Dual monitors (aka Dual Head) -- There are two ways to do this: use a video card that has two outputs, or use two video cards. I have not tried to use two video cards; I expect there would be difficulties with resource conflicts. Probably best to use two cards from the same manufacturer.

Matrox used to be the king of dual-head (and quad, etc.!) cards. Now ATI and nVidia have also gotten into the act. If you don't care about 3D performance (mostly used in games), Matrox is still an excellent choice. I have used a number of their cards, albeit with only one monitor, and had no complaints. Their 2D quality, which is what you need for photo editing, is legendary. Their software (driver) support for dual-head is supposed to be good and the cards run about $120 for a G450 dual-head with 32MB video RAM.

ATI makes a number of dual-head cards. I have a Radeon 8500 which works OK. ATI's problem has always been with driver support but they seem to be improving. Their 2D quality is also good. ATI used to make all their own cards but now they also sell chips to other companies so it is more difficult to know what you are getting. Lots of choices from <$100 up.

nVidia actually only makes the video chips which they sell to other manufacturers, so you have to be careful that you are getting a card from a quality manufacturer. Their 2D quality has been a problem in the past but is now quite good. They have a good reputation for driver support, but this doesn't necessarily extend to dualhead support. Dual-head cards using nVidia chips have been something of a compromise in the past.

update: Matrox is coming out with a new video chipset sometime later in 2002 that should provide good 3D performance and triple head capability. But it will be expensive. Also, SiS has begun producing a chipset ("Xabre") that provides dual-head capabilities on the cheap. But I would wait and see on this one. Check out the review at: http://www.dansdata.com/xabre.htm

Hard drives -- check out the following site:

http://www.storagereview.com/

SCSI vs. IDE/ATA: I think that most people would benefit little from SCSI. Its main advantages -- faster seek times and the ability to handle multiple access requests intelligently -- are of use where one needs to get lots of little files spread all over the disk(s) rather than loading one big image file. Modern IDE/ATA controllers often use less cpu time than SCSI. A 7200 rpm ATA-100 or ATA-133 drive will give decent performance and double the capacity at half the price of a 10000 rpm U160 SCSI drive. Better to spend your money elsewhere. Seagate and Maxtor make dependable drives. Avoid IBM; they have had some reliability problems recently with their IDE/ATA drives.

dual cpu -- Here is a review where they compared Intel and AMD systems using photoshop and a 50 MB file:

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000321

Notice that the dual-cpu setup doesn't provide much benefit. It may be that the system is limited by RAM bandwidth, or Adobe didn't optimize very well for 2 processors. This may not apply to Mac systems, for which Adobe is known to optimize photoshop. If you are trying to run many programs at the same time, a dual-cpu system would probably be more responsive. If the memory performance is really the limiting factor (as the reviewer claims), then Macintosh systems should be at a disadvantage relative to the systems in the above article. I haven't seen any comparisons involving large files on both modern Mac and PC though. Probably best to pick whichever operating system you feel more comfortable with.

software -- Microsoft started putting useable color profiling in Windows with Windows 98. It is reportedly identical to what was used on Macintosh at the time. The Mac version may have been improved since then but I don't know how or what effect this would have. Adobe Photoshop Elements reportedly *does* support color profiling. It is limited to sRGB (appropriate for output to a web page) and Adobe RGB (what you would use to print on your color inkjet). It doesn't support things like CMYK, which is what commercial printers use. Photoshop LE, etc. do not support color profiles.

Note that Windows 98 (and possible ME as well) may limit the amount of RAM you can use to 768MB. Windows XP has a number of drawbacks, mostly related to security. Windows 2000 is probably the best of the bunch for photo editing.

printing -- With inkjet printers, you aren't buying a printer. You're buying an ink/paper system. The printer is cheap and not intended to last decades. Would you want a Leica M2 if you could only use 1950s film with it? Using the latest inks usually requires the latest printer. Printer companies reportedly don't make money from the printers; they make it from the ink and paper. This is one reason to buy name-brand supplies, it supports the companies. I would not buy off-brand ink anyway as it can ruin the printer.

Ink comes in two basic types, dye or pigment based. Dye based inks don't last as long as pigment based. Some printers use pigment for black and dye for color. They cannot be used together, which is why you can get color shifts in the black areas, especially if you aren't using color profiling correctly. (They use pigment for black because it gives better text quality.) I only know of one printer that uses pigment based color inks: Epson 2000P. That is why they claim the images will last 100 years if printed on the correct paper (e.g. Epson heavyweight matte) and protected from bright light, smog, etc.

There are two ways to squirt the ink onto the paper. One way involves heating some of the ink to boiling, which produces pressure and forces it through the nozzle. The other way uses a piezo-electric device, which flexes when current is passed through it and forces the ink through the nozzle. Printers that use the first method usually have the head built into the cartridge so it is replaced every time you buy a new cartridge. This is usually touted as an advantage, but I figure that they wouldn't do it unless they had to; boiling the ink probably would clog the nozzles after a while.

There's my two cents worth. Hope it's of use to someone.

Adam Eberbach , June 19, 2002; 09:12 A.M.

I used digital cameras for a while then realized that while digital images would only ever be as good as the resolution in which they were taken, negatives could always be rescanned. Film cameras can be as small as digital and there are some very sharp cameras around. From an archival point of view your negatives are way better than a CD too, but when you do this you need more computer than if you just shoot digital and download the images from the camera.

The Nikon Coolscan 4000 is the cornerstone of the system. It has fairly nice software included with good download support from Nikon for new versions and is very easy to use - feed in the negatives, choose output size and format, crop, adjust color and go. It's quite fast, and works on a Firewire interface, they even include a PCI Firewire card in the box. I can't scan prints or pages but I don't really need to. I haven't used any other negative scanners so I don't know if this is really the best - but it's very, very good.

A Macintosh dual-1GHz G4 does everything else. It's easy to use and the included iPhoto software is good enough for checking out what you've scanned, even if it isn't the best way to organize a lot of images. If you've looked at a Mac before and rejected it because of the operating system you owe it to yourself to take a look at MacOS X. Until a month ago I had been a Windows user since version 3.1...

The number one thing is RAM - more is better. It is as cheap now as it has ever been so go for a full gigabyte. If your vendor is charging more than $100 for 256M that's way too much - see www.mushkin.com for RAM for any system, with a good return policy. The second thing is hard disk - storagereview.com provides excellent reviews of hard drives, and their leader board is a good way to choose the fastest at any given time. Fast hard drives make a big difference. In IDE right now the Western Digital 120G with 8M cache (not the 2M cache version) is great. In SCSI the Seagate X15-36LP series is even better.

Arguments over choice of computing platform are possibly the biggest waste of time on the internet so take my views with a grain of salt and look at them all before handing over your money. Most of all be clear about what you expect from your computer and see your candidate systems do that before committing to anything. Take along a CD with a >50M TIFF image and see it loaded, manipulated and printed - if your sales person won't or can't do that they shouldn't get your money.

Juan J. Garza , November 26, 2002; 02:18 A.M.

My digital darkroom workhorse? Amiga 1200 w/8Mbs ram, '040 cpu, SCSI drive, Epson 880 printer, working off Photo CD's (when required), photos scanned on Windows ME platform in PNG format on HP ScanJet 3200 scanner, and then re-written to JPEG format on Amiga Cross-Doss for printing at a digital color lab. Photogenics, Personal Paint, Image FX for image manipulation. Who needs Photoshop?

Eric Arnold , December 18, 2002; 01:36 P.M.

Excellent general article. I'm not sure why the author felt the need to poo-poo complete home solutions and promote outsourcing for "fine art." Every year mass-marketed printers and scanners get closer to the big-bucks hardware. Some will argue they can't see the difference now.

I love the dual-monitor recommendation since most people rarely think about it. My ATI Radeon 7500 (now on sale at $75) dual-output is very stable in WinXP with the latest drivers and two medium-size monitors are way cheaper than one monster.

One item nobody mentioned is you should not use multi-session CD-R because one bad write will kill your ability to read the rest of the disk. Not to mention that name-brand CD-R blanks are absurdly cheap now. The storage boxes cost me more than the disks.

I'm a big fan of RAID 0 on-the-mobo with ATA drives. SCSI drives are just too expensive and termination-tempermental. As far as reliability, all your irreplaceable image work is stored on CD-R or other media, right? If not, I can still buy four ATA drives and get mirroring (reliability) cheaper than the SCSI solution. And for system crash recovery you DO use back-up software, right?

I have a similar problem with dual-processor mobo's. Good concept but the mobo price is jacked up so far above single-processor versions it just isn't worth it.

The question of memory is a little trickier. The format (EDO, SDRAM, DDR) is not so critical if you buy as much as you need up front. More important is to get decent quality memory. You might not think this but some of the cheapest no-name memory modules are unstable and will contribute to system instability in mysterious ways. I do not really understand why this should be so but I have experienced it myself and so have others.

The article did not dwell much on I/O's but any new box I put together has to have Firewire and USB2 ports to maximize peripheral choices. Again, for me, SCSI is entirely optional (been there done that, no big value).

Vincent J M , December 19, 2002; 07:25 A.M.

Inkjet printers have improved tremendously in the past few years. Early color inkjet printers had poor archival properties; the prints faded into oblivion in a matter of months.

And exactly how many current inkjet printers offer "archival" print stability? Your only choice is the Epson 2000P (since it has been around a while - I know there are newer printers too) which is not exactly cheap, and the claims of archival stability (100? 200 years?) cannot be verified in real life. There is yet no agreement among the experts on how to measure archival permanence of prints by accelerated testing - look at the Wilhelm research fiasco.

What I do know is that many prints I have made from Epson 870 printers are fading after 6 months. They are turning orange. This is at least better than the 3 months which my Epson 750 gives me. The papers used were Epson PGPP (3 months on a 750) and Premium semi-gloss (6 months, slight but noticeable fading).

Printer manufacturers and third parties have improved their inks and papers to the point where inkjet prints can often exceed the life of minilab prints.

That's a really tall claim. Have you done real tests? What papers and printers were tested? Any links? Were Fuji Crystal Archive and Kodak Royal tested? Who did the testing and under what conditions? What kind of accelerated aging tests were done?

Serge Boucher , February 02, 2003; 10:27 A.M.

I thought I'd had a few comments on Corel PhotoPaint, a rather nice digital imaging program.

My first encounter with a real graphic program was with CorelDraw 3, something like 10 years ago. (CorelDraw is Corel's vector imaging program, counterpart to Adobe Illustrator.) My uncle was using it at the time, and I decided to learn about how it worked. At that time PhotoPaint was a minor add-on to CorelDraw and only a minor improvement on Windows 3.1 Paint program. As the versions went, Corel progressively expanded and developped the Corel Draw graphics suite, turning PhotoPaint in an amazingly powerful program without actually inflating the price tag.

I haven't tried the latest version (PhotoPaint 12 I believe.) but I've work quite a lot with versions 7, 9 and 10 and they were all real good. Every time I read a tutorial about photo editing, it was based on Adobe PhotoShop. Everytime I was able to do the same thing with PhotoPaint. The tools have the same name. The settings are very similar. The set of commands in a picture editing program can only vary so much.

Now I understand that some people really need some of the arcane functions found only in Adobe PhotoShop. It is also true that for a professional potographer, the digital editing program is a rather minor part of the investment. But me, I'd rather pay one third of the price, use the remainder for a bigger monitor or a new lens and get a nice vector drawing program as an added bonus.

In case I didn't really get my point across, if you're building a digital editing workstation from scratch, I suggest you take a real good look at Corel PhotoPaint.

Serge

Kyle Nolan , February 21, 2003; 02:47 P.M.

I feel there are some good points and some misleading points made in this article. I am a graphic designer and have more experience in this area than in my hobby (Photography). I'll start with the accurate points that should be emphasized. RAM,RAM,RAM - It's like money, you can't have too much. I personally prefer http://www.memorytogo.com I spent around 2 hundred for 2 gigs for my mack there almost 2 years ago. Monitors are very important, but LCD's still haven't reached the quality found in CRTs when comparing dot pitch, aperature, or pixels per inch. As far as having two monitors, it's more costly by the time one upgrades the video card and cables then bying one solid 22inch CRT. Personally I chose the Philips Professional Brilliance, for price/color control capabilities. The best color control on the market to my knowlede in that found in Lacie monitor calibration systems. A point of disagreement regarding the need for less quality for desktop publishing. I produce posters which are 24'x36" and need not only reproducable fine art quality imaging but also the ability to create an 8pt type face for a copyright. In terms of storage capacity DVD's are great for archiving but at around 10 bucs a disk, they are not the choice for backups. I will add some more points when time allows. One other note in terms of software. Buy at educational pricing, even if it means you have to pay 180 bucs at the local community college, you save thousands on software. To view some educational pricing on software like Photoshop, Pagemaker, Quark or Wacom Intunous Tablets check out http://www.journeyed.com

Roberto Totaro , February 24, 2003; 09:54 A.M.

Concerning CPU and RAM choice, currently the way to go is AMD. On a cost and performance side the Athlon and the P4 are more or less equivalent. One month the Intel is the fastest, one month the AMD is: it does not really matter what you have, just buy a CPU one or two steps behind the cutting edge and you will get the best performance for your bucks (i.e. right now that would be an Athlon XP 2400+). Where you really save money is on the RAM: RAMBUS modules (the ones used by the latest P4 motherboards) are about TWICE as expensive per megabyte as DDR modules (the ones used by Athlon motherboards)! If you want 1 GB of RAM that can be a nice amount of money, almost the difference between a (good) CD burner and a (entry level) DVD burner. Speedwise, in principle RAMBUS should be faster than DDR. In practice you won't see the difference. Last but not least when shopping for DDR memory, get the PC-2700 modules (333 MHz bus clock), not the marginally cheaper PC-2100 (266 MHz). Don't buy PC-3200 (400 MHz) DDR: most motherboards support only 1 (one) PC-3200 module, that is 512 MB of RAM. If one day you want/need more memory you'll have to throw away your hugely expensive super-fast PC-3200 module and get two PC-2700. Well done!

Concerning backup devices, IMHO a CD burner doesn't make much sense: I scan my 35 mm film on a Canon FS4000 and the resulting Photoshop files are around 100 MB each (at 14 bit/color, 4000 dpi). That means 6 or 7 images per CD. Ridiculous. Get a DVD burner. Among DVD burners, possibly the best buy at the moment is the Sony DRU500: it can burn basically any kind of DVD media (DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-RAM...) I have it and it's absolutely great.

Hard disks: I have a humble 120 GB ATA-133 7200 RPM hard disk (not a SCSI) and I can still open a 100 MB Photoshop file in a few seconds. Whether a SCSI hard disk is going to be faster than an ATA-133 depends on many factors, but especially on the SCSI controller you have. Unless you have a fancy controller with plenty of on board cache, you won't see much of a difference between SCSI and ATA disks. The ATA's, though, are cheaper and you don't need an additional SCSI controller that, in my own experience, can be an endless pain in the a** (because of compatibility and performance issues).

Linux: great OS, I use it at work and I love it, but there is nor a decent color calibration tool, neither a package comparable to Photoshop (there is "The Gimp", but I find it doesn't come even close to PS 7, unfortunately).

Robert Cohen , April 29, 2003; 05:04 P.M.

Great news! Photoshop Now Works in Linux! http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/supported_applications.php

It may not be free, but If you need to keep a windows box around for photo editing like I do, you can chuck it now.

Robert Nilsson , July 27, 2003; 07:12 P.M.

I just wanted to share my own "backup" sollution. I bought two identical 200Gb ($200 each) disks and installed them as D: and X: on my Windows XP system (installed on C:). I save all my work on D: and every night at 03:00 am the system starts to xcopy (with lots of flags) everything on D:, that has the archive flag active, over to X: and resets the archive flag on the original file. So if I add a picture or modify an existing image, it will be copied the next noght. Once a week I copy all my work out on a DVD-RW and store it in my safe.

I started with this after I had, anot so plesant, experience with a disk crash om my system. Lots of pictures from my digital camera and a few Adobe Premiere projects diappeared!! I had all work stored on a Western Digital SE 200GB disk. The NTFS partition was "Unreadable" from Disk Manager from within Windows XP. I read lots about this problem and discovered that a progra called R-Studio (R-tools Technology Inc) could help me. And it could!!! It scanned the entire disk for a few hours and then displayed the entire directory structure. R-Studio was able to restore all files but 5 to another disk - I was releaved I can tell you. Since then I went for BACKUP!

Sunimoto Sato , September 10, 2003; 04:57 P.M.

I just want to add a comment regarding monitor suggestion. 17" monitor is really not for photo editing (and other tasks). I would go with 21" CRT monitor with flat screen (do not confuse with flat panel). I work on 21" Sony G520 and really love it, and there're better quality monitors out there. 15" is really miniscule, I think -- and wouldn't suggest it to anyone who will work with photos. Besides monitor size, you should also look at resolution. I think 1280x960 is optimal. Monitor frequency is also very important, as if it is low (60hz or so) you will not be productive and hurt your eyes. To have high frequency (100hz or above) with high resolution you will also need a good video card.

David Indech , September 20, 2003; 12:31 A.M.

In response to RAID commentary:

I've a set of 60 GB IBM 120GXPs in a Promise RAID-0 array. They continue to function well in tandem after nearly two years. Despite this luck, I'd still caution those attempting to use such an array without backup.

Oddly however, my more recent 120 GB WD1200JB is significantly faster, particularly in write times. Read benchmarks are nearly identical between the two. Given how quick IDE drives have become, I doubt I'll deal with RAID in the future.

I'd like to re-emphasize Phil's RAM comments. RAM is everything.History states in particular toss it back like candy. If you're into serious multitasking like I am, and beat the tar out of PS, take the largest image you intend to play with and multiply it by 15. That's how much RAM you may need to cover a probable worst case scenario.

DI

Serge Boucher , January 04, 2004; 04:57 A.M.

Very interesting article. I'd like to add two things :

SCSI drives are faster. When you install the OS and main applications on a IDE/ATA drive, the system sometimes slows down or nearly freezes for a second before you get control back, and this lack of responsiveness can be annoying. I've changed computers a few times over the years, and once I looked at transfer rate/seek time/etc and "deduced" that SCSI wasn't worth it. It's the only computer-buying decision I've ever regretted.

By the way, forget benchmarks : they don't give any relevant information. The only way to judge a computer's speed is to actually use it to do the work you have to do.

Fergus Kane , April 03, 2004; 10:46 A.M.

ARCHIVAL LIFE: One should be aware that archival life is dependent on BOTH ink and paper types. For instance, prints from my canon i965 fade very quickly when printed on standard canon paper. However, when printing on Ilford papers, fading is much less of a problem. I've had photos on my wall (not under glass) for about 6 months now with no visible fading - hopefully this will last. One should also not place the blame entirely on the printers. Be careful where you keep your photos; for instance, keeping them near a fridge or laser printer may result in severe fading due to high ozone levels. Equally, keep photos away from air conditioning and direct sunlight. Even lab photos will fade readily if not looked after.

Also worth noting is that the prints I get from my humble inkjet are very difficult to distinguish from lab prints. Given this, the benefit of having your own printer that you know really well should not be underestimated - it provides so much more control than the average lab. IMHO any standard of digital photographer should have an decent inkjet (or equiv) even if only to provide proofs.

Sander Vesik , May 08, 2004; 03:24 P.M.

On the archival media side, don't overlook magnetic tape - whetever DAT/DDT or DLT. While it is much more expnsive than just getting a CD-RW drive, the media is much more archival oriented than CD-R / CD-RW is ever going to be. It also comes in large media (starting in 10 - 15GB per tape).

If you *are* going the CD-R / CD-RW route, you should absolutely read some of the articles that have recently been published about its potential for not being long-lived at all.

William Leming , September 10, 2004; 04:30 A.M.

Well these days there is a program out there that will let a linux/unix based PC decode the Canon and other RAW images. The program is called dcraw.c .This actually work on Windows and Mac OSX. You just have to compile it your self and it is not that hard. After using dcraw I noticed that 99.7% of my pictures where sharper and the color was much better too.

Donald Trask , September 15, 2004; 01:48 P.M.

Doug, establising a color management workflow is a whole 'nother article. I've got mine down pat, but I'm not sure I have the experience to write an article outside the scope of what I'm doing. Any volunteers?

-- Darron Spohn, January 18, 2002

Don't be shy, Darron. Do it!!! Desperate to learn more. My wife and I quickly learned that the long pole in the tent is the relationship between what we see on the monitor and on the paper.

George Frost , May 13, 2005; 02:12 P.M.

With regards to the monitor specs: I do a lot of photograph restoration and it took me months to find the right monitor. I ended up getting the 17" NEC MultiSync FE700 in 2000 - it's now 2005 and i have no complaints or regrets. I've been contemplating going with LCD, but have yet to find one that convinces me to part with my FE.

Andrew Roland , December 05, 2005; 08:37 A.M.

If you want an easy life - get an Apple Mac. I've used Mac's since 1984 and Windows for about 2 years and I know which I prefer! No crashes, pop-ups - Photoshop was created for it, calibration is easy and you get iPhoto for free. When you buy a camera just plug it in and the Mac will automatically load iPhoto, install the images and from there you can edit them in Photoshop. All this without any software to be installed.

Chip Reuben , March 11, 2007; 03:38 P.M.

I think it's time to update this...

J. W. Wall , July 08, 2007; 07:06 P.M.

What Chip said. And please discuss backups and long-term storage, too.

Colin Southern , September 07, 2007; 10:05 A.M.

Gosh Andrew, I've been using PCs since about 1980 - I've used Macs too - and I know which I and the other 95% of the world prefer and it's not Macs.

And guess what - I don't have any crashes either - nor do I have any popups - or problems with viruses. And I'd put your fastest Mac up against my machine anyday.

Photoshop wasn't "written for the Mac" - Thomas Knoll just happened to write the first few versions ON a Mac and although Macs have a disproportionate percentage of their ridiculoously small market share involved in the education & graphics fields, in terms of sheer numbers there are MANY more PCs runnings photoshop these days than Macs.

Need to calibrate a PC - no problem - just run any one of a number of programs available and it's done in a matter of minutes - of course with a Mac you won't have anywhere near the same range of software available (like only the brave or foolish develop software for a platform that has roughly the same market share as the margin of error in most surveys) - and any quality software that you do get will generally cost more, and be less "feature rich".

Got a PC - just plug your camera in and (gosh, just like a Mac) the OS will kick in and let you transfer them to your PC to a place of your choosing, with no additional software required - will wonders never cease eh?

If Macs were even 1/2 as good as the Apple "barmy army" keep preaching, why is it that, despite all of the hype and propoganda they try to diseminate, as a platform they STILL only have about 5% world-wide market share. Oh and don't forget to mention that their very existance is so precarious that they've now been forced to make their hardware capable of running Windows just to try to ensure the very survival of the hardware. The only reason Apple have any market share at all is because it IS possible to fool some of the people all the time - the rest of the world aren't having a bar of them.

Customers voted with their dollars - Apple lost.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/04/30/daizovi/index.php

You might find the following except from Macworld interesting ...

"I have found the code quality, at least in terms of security, to be much better overall in Vista than Mac OS X 10.4."

JR Stultz , January 22, 2008; 02:36 P.M.

I have a G5 quad 4 and a power mac duo widescreen, as well as 3 custom pc's..the verdict from someone who has it all, easier to run a program on a mac, easier to manage files, but more expensive. Is the extra cost worth the ability to manage files better, quicker? Well if your serious about photography and video editing like I am it is. Keep in mind that all of my macs and pc's run different media. But I have never had nay viruses on my macs, and a few have found there way on my pc's. Also, the reason pc's are so popular is that it is easier to find/create crack copies and share the files..(for all of you who do not support the community you strive to be a part of) thats all..

JR. (Mac/PC owner and lover)

Jeremiah Andersen , January 31, 2008; 10:19 P.M.

I have found that AMD processors are especially great in the graphic speed arena and yet there seems to be nothing mentioned about AMD. I agree that pentium processors advertise that their speed is cutting edge but what the article says is true, they don't measure up to Mac's G4. However, you can not just rule out the PC completely after looking at those facts, because there are other processors out there that exceeds Mac's G4 at a much cheaper price. That is where AMD processors come in. These processors are fairly common and exceed both Mac's and Intel's standards as far as bandwith(speed) goes. In all, I thought the article to be somewhat helpful, but I would love to see him compare a decent AMD processor to Mac's G4.

Aaron Long-Jordan , February 16, 2008; 07:00 P.M.

Simplest thoughts I can add from working in the IT field.

1. It's all about getting the data through the processors in your system. So, get more RAM (1 - 2 GB to start). Then get the data off of your disks with SATA or SCSI. PATA and related RAID technologies are problematic at best. Yes, they work but not well in the long term. Finally, buy a system that does not use shared video memory. It usually means that upgrade is either not possible or will be a problem. Also, some BIOSes are really funny about turning off the shared chunk of memory which will come out of your main system RAM.

2. Try to eliminate slower buses from your system. Floppy drives/controllers, serial (DB-9), and parallel (old printers) ports are bottle necks that whether or not you use them your operating system has to load a driver for them and periodically talk to them to see if anything is out there. Eliminate them. If you absolutely have to have a floppy, get one that works on USB. If you can, eliminate PS/2 keyboard and mouse and go to USB. Following all of this will get rid of a minimum of four drivers in Windows for example.

3. And this is the biggest suggestion I make to people who ask my advise on a computer purchase. Look at low end business grade systems rather than home/home office grade. The warranties are usually better and longer and the support is usually better as well. The hardware at least in the realm of the major brands tends to be a bit higher quality as well.

4. The final note I will add is this. Learn optimization techniques for your particular operating system. Turn off services that you do not use (including all of the pretty user interface "improvements" in Windows XP). The final part of this is: get the system set up, make yourself a non-admin user, and only use your admin account for actual system administrative tasks. This will improve the security of not only your system but the entire Internet as well. (And yes, I am a security nut.)

I would be willing to do write-ups/articles on system selection and various Windows optimization techniques. I cannot help with Mac. My Linux experience is in servers so that won't be much help. I would not even begin to talk about monitors, color calibration, and the like. I do however have some to add to the scanner information.

William Pahnelas , February 25, 2008; 12:25 P.M.

i'm enough of a tech weenie that i make my living in the IT field, and yet i'm a relative newcomer to this whole world of image processing. i understand the paramount importance of a good, accurate display. also, that it's computation- and memory-intensive, and depends on very fast data throughput writing to and reading from the storage media.

what i've not seen mentioned is the role of the GPU, and the video card in general, in this kind of work. when working with photoshop (or image editor of choice), is some of the processing off-loaded to the GPU, or is the advantage of a superior graphics card mostly limited to how quickly the screen can be painted?

i agree with the other posters who've noted that the article we are commenting upon is quite out of date. while it's unrealistic to expect articles such as this to be rewritten every 18 months, six years is quite an eternity in the computer marketplace.

frankly, processing photographs has got me more excited about my PC than i've been in many years. for someone who's in the business, that's a very good thing.

Antryg Revok , May 30, 2008; 09:01 A.M.

The GIMP *sucks* for photo-fixing, mostly due to its user interface.

For Linux: hit http://www.bibblelabs.com/ and download both the demos ( lite & pro ), and their movies showing how to work it.

NEVER has The GIMP worked as quickly, or as effectively, to fix photos as Bibble does.

it never will, either, since it isn't intended to do so: it's a web-background manipulator, originally.

The reason you need both demos, & the videos, is the demos are time-bombed, & the videos show you HOW to work in Bibble, and... one can gain understanding of Which Version Of Bibble Works Right For Me?, see...

Unless you install 'em in Knoppix ( which would mean the Debian versions ), they're going to stop working in 1 or 2 weeks.

In Knoppix, boot from the CD, install Bibble Lite or Bibble Pro, play around with it, and when you shut down the system, the system-image in RAM disappears, so the demo's "expires" key disappears, too.

.. along with all the settings you put in...

Image straightener, excellent processing, excellent RAW support, fill-light, highlight recovery ( for any REAL RAW format, not for G9 or lesser, which seems to be 8-bit RAW? ) a cut-down version of Noise Ninja...

TRY it.

Oh, and Knoppix is at: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/ The CD image isn't being updated anymore, so if you want to burn your worked-over test images onto CD or something you're going to need a DVD burner for making the Knoppix DVD, and either a CD-burner secondary drive ( because the DVD has to remain in a drive when booting from it: all the system software is on it! ), or one can have a DVD-Rom drive to boot from the disc, & burn whatever in the DVD-burner.

Cheers,

Ashley Jacobson , June 24, 2008; 05:50 P.M.

I use a MacBook, or iMac for my photo stuff. We have a network setup in our home that is hooked up to an HP media drive that has tons and tons of storage for my photos. I used PS CS for image enhancing/messing around/what not... I've used PC's all my life and just recently started with Macs, I think they are great and so easy to use. But to each his (or her) own, you just have to find out what works best.


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