Should I be planning on a switch from Mac to PC

[carbon_dragon]

My original Mac was pre-fat mac and was converted into a Mac Plus. I did open my PC when I had one to clean it (carefully) but yes the mac could be opened, but Apple strongly discouraged it. It wasn't designed to be user serviceable.

 

If you opened all those Macs, then you are braver than me (though I'm a hazard around hardware :confused:). Also, Apple likes to refuse to honor warranties if you open the mac (or even fix them maybe). Though some Macs had a door in back that let you add RAM without actually opening the case. iMacs are murder to open, even if you get the iFixit kits. But as I said, there's no way I would open anything that wasn't designed to be opened. I once destroyed a PC by plugging in a board backward ... at work. That didn't go over well.

 

That upgrade thing has bit me too. My old YouTube only iMac (8 years old now) is so slow, it's basically unusable for anything else and there is no downgrade path for making it useable again. I have an old old iPad which is in the kitchen as an extra copy of my recipes (also in my current iPad) and it's so slow from automatic updates that it too is basically unusable for any other purpose.

 

Now my phone and iPad keep pestering me to update and I am reluctant to do so and there's no way to turn off major updates.

[JDMvW]

I once destroyed a PC by plugging in a board backward ... at work.

 

We share that experience in essence, if not in detail. :(

[2Oceans]

carbon_dragon,

Take a look at photographylife.com. Nasim Mansurov does a nice job almost annually of providing the component details of a dedicated photo editing PC build. Even if you don't build one he gives you a good idea of what components should be in a state-of-the-art PC build. At the end of the day you can can use it as a model. As well he seems to be PC Apple neutral and uses both. Good hunting.

[Jochen_S]

Are GPUs useful for photo editing, and if so which ones?

Semi? - Check Adobe's site what they demand / recommend for some exotic filters in Photoshop. - I think it is "not much" in a gamer's eyes.

For an off the mill RAW converter or image disorganizing software they are not.

OTOH: You are torn between getting an Nvidia Quadro which might support 10bit per color channel and a Geforce that will be significantly cheaper and better suited for gaming but AFAIK only doing 8bit color.

 

I don't know if on board graphics would be enough to run a 4K screen, so you might need "something GPU" anyhow.

 

Multiple monitors can make sense, in my eyes. - Combine something awesome, to display the image you are working on, with an old relic to hold your tool palettes and such. - OTOH: What are you aiming for? - Do human eyes provide enough resolution to perceive more than one 4K screen at once completely? - I dare to doubt. So why add (much) more? Having tool palettes on something else is surely OK but as soon as you install let's say three 4K screens and can only focus at one or a fraction of it: What would the other stuff be good for? - How convenient would it be to twist and move to see it perfectly?

I'm torn between tiny 4K screens and human vision (or the leftovers of that at my hands...) vs. seeing my individual pixels on a big conventional screen.

27" 4K screens or 5K Retina iMacs are surely absolutely awesome for displaying pictures but to work down on the pixel level I'd rather have a 24" "full HD" screen. Considering that I am too cheap to rent a contemporary high speed Internet connection (reuse every argument ever made against renting Adobe & you'll understand) I can't watch YouTube in 1080 fluently and am quite content with a modest 15" laptop to watch 720p/ up to 30FPS without gaps.

 

For pure editing purposes you will need a calibration friendly screen. - Eizo is a brand coming to my mind. - I recall reading one photographers focused German retailer's site arguing against Eizo and for something else, with "Apple tax"- equivalent thoughts.

 

#Color management in general: To my understanding it is about crippling a screen to emulate a print and crippling an inkjet to emulate a press as closely as somehow imaginable, but it still tends to go wrong. (Yes, I do sound negative. - I am also a pressman by trade / day job.) To novices: Life is simple but not picky; "Somebody will end with gray hair." it can be either your beautiful young model shot in B&W or you doing color management. - I recommend buying Monochroms & Ilford but each to their own.

If you are half assedly into color: Get a small calibration friendly screen, calibrate the heck out of it and tweak your images on it for printing. Everything else in use somewhere will be far(!) from calibrated.

Investing 4K2€ into an Eizo CG318-4K is an option but maybe not the fast lane to more happiness. (Read the small print that you might need to have it re-calibrated by Eizo themselves ever so often, to make sure it stays right with it's self calibrating efforts. So "no", even spending that lot of money won't put you on the absolutely safe side for a long time.

I also recall a "night & fog" effort to get some screens calibrated at work. The changes, especially a loss in screen brightness, were very significant. - Our sysop was absolutely seriously worried about receiving really angry phone calls the next morning that would complain about "unusable" screens. "Calibrated" might not translate to "a joy to look at".

 

Back to gaming as an option: Different demands on screens there. - You'll want something as responsive as possible. - Another issue: According to reviews the freshly discontinued Geforce 1080Ti was the first somewhat seriously 4K capable gaming GPU. The follow up model retails about 1k5€ right now. For HD gaming the old Geforce 660 seems to have been the benchmark of "good enough". - Follow up models (1060 right now?) seem about 300€. When I combined my 4K screen with a back then top of the gaming line 780Ti, I felt "back to the GPU stone age" enough gaming FPS didn't seem invented yet. (But absolutely no problems with image viewing!)

 

You asked about experiences: I perceive PCs as Lego for adults. - You usually select components and either stick them together yourself or have your electronics shop build the box for a small fee. Anything mass produced will most likely be cheaping out on something since it has to generate revenue and needs to look being competitively priced. Maybe it also has to include surplus specs to impress customers and once it survives the warranty period it's job will be done. "Serious photographers" aren't the default audience for computer manufacturers.

 

I am not up to date about hardware and also not able to make out failure patterns.

These days new builds seem to utilize DDR4 RAM and have a dedicated slot for SSDs on the mainboard that connects faster than regular SATA. To my understanding there hasn't been impressive CPU tech progress since the days of my by now old Sandybridge i7. People still recommend a fast i5 for gaming. RAM wise I'd start at about 16GB with slots to ad more. For a modest general purpose PC it would be 8GB now. - 4GB seem just enough to run win10 and open an Internet browser and it doesn't take long to notice a bit of lag.

 

While you find hardware reviews testing components in current games listing what gains how many FPS, I haven't seen anything similar done to inform photo editors how and why more cash sunk in a PC is going to speed up a batch conversion of RAW files or what might be able to make Lightroom fly.

 

I found out: I seem to need 3(!) PCs; one to carry on, one to fail and the third to borrow components from, fixing the failed one, to figure out what spare parts I'll need to get. Combined with the current pricing situation - RAM in short supply, GPUs too, due to crypto mining, I am postponing a major upgrade.

 

if you want to use your stuff forever you'll face issues with CPU sockets going out of production and main boards limited to either the used market or very fishy brands catering the basic office needs by providing just 2 RAM slots instead of the 4 you are used to. So the upgradeability of PCs gets limited over time.

I doubt keeping a 20 year old PC case stuffed with almost contemporary hardware to be a great goal. - A case is how much? Somewhere between $30 and $150? What are those compared to the content's pricing and the annoyance of having to handle valuable electronics? Aren't there points when newer, more impressive hardware gets handed down for free?

Tinkering with free used stuff can be fun. - I am just not very happy to wire front panels to mainboards and have seen some PCs with broken power on button at work too. Given a choice I'd rather put my HDDs into a newer PC than a newer mainboard into my box.

At some point you'll always face a situation where you might have to abandon good enough stuff to go for a next mainboard + RAM + CPU generation. Even internal storage connections seem to get outdated.

 

About switching - Is there a way for you to boot Linux on your oldest iMac? - That way you could maybe gain some usability outside the photo editing realm

 

IDK if planning a complete switch to PC is the right thing or necessary. Yes, buy one if it seems a good deal (which isn't hard, looking at Mac pricing & limitations). But why not stick to something on your current better Mac's level too? The arguments against windows are surely all still valid; i.e. it's need for resources hogging virus protection and the tendency to waste lots of time and resources grooming itself, updating doing background chores etc.

[carbon_dragon]

Macs do have a program called bootcamp, but it's pretty dedicated to also booting into Windows as opposed to LINUX, though I can't say it's impossible. The Mac is actually UNIX as well, under the surface too these days! I was actually a UNIX software developer before I worked with PCs (and all kinds of things before that). But my experience with bootcamp (even with Windows) is that it works ... mostly, but it's twitchy. It worked well enough for me to work from home on PC software development to some degree, but whenever I tried games, they were often failures from a usability standpoint. What I did was to buy a PS/3 and then a PS/4.

 

The gaming would be nice, but truth is I'm such a terrible gamer that there aren't really many I can really play anyway. There might be some I would like to try, but it would be a secondary consideration. When I had my PC last time (an old Gateway 2000 one, if you can remember back that far) I was playing Flight simulators which was really hard on PCs. I bet they run really well on a modern gaming machine.

 

Thanks for that great post. That is very helpful. I am, in fact, worried about color management because I no longer have a printer and it would be nice to be able to upload files for printing online but I have never done that. Mac monitors are not supposed to be good for calibration. Like you said, you have to really make them look bad to get a really decent idea of what they will come out looking like printed. But I want a good looking screen the rest of the time so I haven't actually tried doing anything like buying a calibration tool for my existing computer. Heck maybe I need to buy a small monitor JUST to calibrate ONLY that and use it only in preparation for sending something to be printed? My 4 year old iMac might have the ability to run an additional monitor, I'm not sure. Or maybe if I tried to calibrate my mac it would look fine and I could just upload and print. My computer is in essentially a glassed in porch/solarium so when the windows are open, there is a lot of light. Could I calibrate it quickly only when I wanted to do prints online, and then reverse the changes the rest of the time?

[AJG]

Calibration of my 3 year old iMac with my i1 Display Pro takes about 5 minutes from start to finish, so yes you could simply calibrate to upload prints. I also don't have a serious printer, but upload to a lab when I need prints and get good results.

[carbon_dragon]

Expensive, but it would probably be worth it. Is it hard to figure out for someone who has never calibrated before?

[digitaldog]

Mac monitors are not supposed to be good for calibration. Like you said, you have to really make them look bad to get a really decent idea of what they will come out looking like printed.

I don't know what gave you that idea, or that the calibration is targeted for your needs, or that the display, like all displays, doesn't alter it's behavior over time. IOW, that concept about Mac displays is an urban legend. Ignore it.

Now what is true about many Mac displays is that from unit to unit, they behave very similarly colorimetrically; Apple's quality control is superb. And yes, I've measured them to make such a statement. But is that behavior ideal for the goals of say, viewing a print made from (what? Printer on what paper in what behavior); not at all necessarily. Calibration is the task or placing a device in a desired and consistently behaving condition after producing the desired condition.

[digitaldog]

I've just heard they're more bright and colorful than accurate (as far as color calibration is concerned). But good. Maybe I'll do that so I can try some online printmaking. Thanks! Which ones have you used, and what does an iMac display look like when you're done. Can you live with it calibrated, or do you feel like you have to brighten it up again after?

Newer Mac displays are wide gamut (DCP-P3). Not more colorful, wider range of colors.

One Mac is a Retina Display; used on location. The rest of the time, I'm using a color reference display system: NEC SpectraView PA-271Q and PA272W.

[carbon_dragon]

I've just heard they're more bright and colorful than accurate (as far as color calibration is concerned). But good. Maybe I'll do that so I can try some online printmaking. Thanks! Which ones have you used, and what does an iMac display look like when you're done. Can you live with it calibrated, or do you feel like you have to brighten it up again after?

[Jochen_S]

Is it hard to figure out for someone who has never calibrated before?

"Not at all!"*

The mentioned night & fog mission at work was performed by the weary sysop who wasn't overly keen to read through English manuals and scatterbrained me (of course not remembering everything watched the previous night on YouTube, since hey that was neither about my toys nor am I given the rights to do it myself) with i1.

A native reader should get pretty far on his own stuff. <-That's the computer & hardware side. - The color management side is a different cup of tea. @digitaldog above has more knowledge about that than me. Basically the simplest use of a calibration device is to check how far something seems off from default and correct that. Defining "default" is a bit of a challenge. Under ideal conditions you'd have a default print

1. of a test target
   
2. made on a well adjusted printer (that some folks might call the technical equivalent of an unicorn...)
   
3. in a Normlicht booth
   

to compare to the same file on your screen.

+ Professional routine to judge "close enough". (I'd value some more senior pressmen's opinions in that field a lot.)

 

#Link to some test images#

Adjusting to "as suggested by calibration tool" gets you far but there seems to be eyeballing to do beyond that.

[digitaldog]

Link to such images with images too:

http://www.digitaldog.net/files/Gamut_Test_File_Flat.tif

http://www.digitaldog.net/files/2014PrinterTestFileFlat.tif.zip

Bill Atkinson - Test Files - John Paul Caponigro – Digital Photography Workshops, DVDs, eBooks

[Sandy Vongries]

No horse in this race, saw a Colormunki Smile in a Gifts frt Photographer list the other day - just over $81. Any good, dunno, but someone will.

[digitaldog]

No horse in this race, saw a Colormunki Smile in a Gifts frt Photographer list the other day - just over $81. Any good, dunno, but someone will.

It's far from the best hardware for the task; old hardware, not great software. Newer hardware (i1Display, pro version has better software) is the ticket.

[Jochen_S]

Can you live with it calibrated

Might depend on the man cave's darkness?

The human brain sucks at remembering visions and does a lot of auto-correcting to the stuff you believe to be seeing.

Schedule your calibrating session to the end of your day, shut that screen down, have a beer to get over the shock, sleep(!) and look & see the next day.

[carbon_dragon]

Mine's a sunroom. Dim'ish when all the blinds are closed but very bright when they're open.

[andylynn]

People tend to get very political about Apple for whatever reason but practically speaking here’s how it works:

 

Macs are serviced by Apple as long as they can keep parts in stock. That’s usually 5 or 6 years, but some Macs have longer product cycles and service periods. If it has user serviceable parts, like DIMMs, and you replace them, Apple won’t service the replaces parts.

 

iPhones and iPads are the same, except the parts they’ll service are pretty much limited to screens and batteries. Anything else, they replace your device with a refurb and send yours back to the factory. If you’re past the time window for them to have the refurbs available they won’t help you, but you might find a third party shop that will. (That’s not just Apple - most phones and tablets are like that.)

 

So if you want more options for service, go with a PC desktop made from off the shelf parts in an ATX case. You’ll be able to get parts for many years and any geek off the street can repair it. Or get a new Mac - iMac or just get a Mini and a 4K display - and understand that you’ll get great service for several years and then draw a line under it and get a new one, and count yourself lucky because you don’t have to switch your OS. Neither answer is right or wrong, they’re just two different models that will appeal to some people and not others.

[digitaldog]

Mine's a sunroom. Dim'ish when all the blinds are closed but very bright when they're open.

http://www.lumita.com/site_media/work/whitepapers/files/calibrating_digital_darkroom.pdf

[Jochen_S]

That means you'll either have to calibrate for your dimish / artificial lighting or re-calibrate "just in time" for the moment, with blinds open. Surrounding light seems to matter (& gets measured during calibration).

Looking at bright sky behind the monitor wouldn't be a good idea.

OTOH: Lots of sunlight are probably needed, to get along without a Normlicht cabin, to judge a sample print you are trying to calibrate for.

 

My personal issue with absolutely not great monitors: They don't even offer the contrast range to make stuff between zero to 5% and 95-100% distinguishable at the same time, setting and head positioning.