Mac or Windows for Editing

ianbarber

ianbarber

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Name
Ian
Edit My Images
Yes
I am thinking of adding a second PC to manage my Image Workflow only.

My workflow consists of:
  • Lightroom
  • Photoshop
  • Nik Software Plugins
  • HDR Photomatix

I was wondering how many people use the MAC as apose to Windows for their editing.

For those that do, How do you find it compared to Windows for both Speed & Image Quality on the Screen.
 
That is a recipe for a heated debate. However, there is little difference so buy which ever you are comfortable with.

Graham
 
Linux - RawTherapee - GIMP for me :) Just because I'm a tightass
 
blue max said:
That is a recipe for a heated debate. However, there is little difference so buy which ever you are comfortable with.

Graham
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After pressing Submit, I thought this...

However, I am interested to hear peoples views on the MAC as I have never owned or had a good play with one apart from at PC World but they would not install Photoshop for me :)
 
Had PCs since I was a nipper, bought a Macbook about two years ago and have never powered up the PC since. I am also on the same install as I started out with and its as stable as ever.

Once you have used and got used to a Mac you will never go back to PC.

Nathan
 
To be honest stick with PC, I've had the same dilemma recently and stayed with PC down to personal preference.

it's easy to type and I'm used to the hotkeys on a PC.

the software i had was for PC and it would have cost £2,000 to replace with MAC and even then the MAC was only the basic Macbook.
 
Hi,

After having the same thought myself I decided on a change.

I have a Vaio Desktop and Laptop both are good in their own right but I knew that sometime soon I would be buying a new SLR and needed to have an Isolated Desktop with Photos Video and Music as my Primary aims.

What was on offer in the PC range did not Impress, so I decided to take a look at the iMac.

I was Very Impressed with what I saw.

The Display quality is Fantastic and even the basic Photo Apps are decent so I decided that would be the way to go.

I decided on the 27" iMac (bigger is better) increased the memory to 8 GB and Installed Elements 8, good to go .After getting used to the Mac (it is a simple Beast) I then bought the new SLR (Canon 7D) that would do for the next ten years or so.Yes I was wrong Apple brought out the iPad I must admit a gadget I had dreamt of for years Yes I bought that because I knew it was very portable,very light and I could transfer photos,videos,and music from the Mac (you can from PC as well).I can surf the Web and E-mail etc.The screen is excellent too ,but most of all its near instant on.

I now have the bridge to the Mac which I can transport with me most places I need to go without the weight of a decent size Laptop, No its not a Computer but it was never meant to be one.


All I can say is its a Simple but a Quality solution for me,I know it all sounds Expensive for my Limited use, but it will be the Hub of my Digital Darkroom, for a long long time to come.

Sorry for waffling as I wasn't even going to Reply.

No I do not work for APPLE or any Store connected with them.I Bought I hope Very Good Hardware so what I do on a Computer becomes something I want to do.

Regards and I hope you decide on what's best for your needs.

Regard:thumbs:s.
 
Is there really that much difference? Prices/Hardware aside, most people will be doing editing on photoshop, which is available on both platforms.

So far is hardware's concerned, you can quite happily get great hardware for either platform too. Only small point is that there is of course far more customisation possible with a PC.

In my opinion the only thing holding you back is if you want to use aperture, in which case the choice has already been made.

As much as I like trolling and such, the fact is both Windows and MacOS both have their merits, and anyone who thinks there's that much of a difference needs to get out more, I'm sorry :D Sure some PCs are of low quality, but of course there are also computers which are also high quality too.
 
ianbarber said:
I am thinking of adding a second PC to manage my Image Workflow only.

For those that do, How do you find it compared to Windows for both Speed & Image Quality on the Screen.
Click to expand...


As others have said you wont be any worse off either way, except maybe the Mac costing a bit more.

If you get a PC and keep it for photo editing only, and don't install tons of junk etc it should have no stability issues whatsoever.
Most issues are caused by incompatible or badly coded third party software/clutter etc, a downfall of the fact that there are so many programs available.

You might find you'll get more for your money in terms of storage/performance with a PC.

In terms of image quality there is no difference between the two as long as you buy yourself a decent non TN panel monitor.
 
Boopop said:
Is there really that much difference? Prices/Hardware aside, most people will be doing editing on photoshop, which is available on both platforms.

So far is hardware's concerned, you can quite happily get great hardware for either platform too. Only small point is that there is of course far more customisation possible with a PC.

In my opinion the only thing holding you back is if you want to use aperture, in which case the choice has already been made.

As much as I like trolling and such, the fact is both Windows and MacOS both have their merits, and anyone who thinks there's that much of a difference needs to get out more, I'm sorry :D Sure some PCs are of low quality, but of course there are also computers which are also high quality too.
Click to expand...

I think its more the OS more than anything for me. All in all since using a Mac, I find it more stable and cleaner to use. Its a joy to power it up and use, I never see applications not responding nor do I get crashes or blue screens.

All of the above problems are just too common when using a windows based PC, fair enough you could learn Linux and your PC would be more stable. However that takes more time than it does to learn MAC Osx, which to be honest takes no time at all.

It all boils down to preference at the end of the day, I used to be a hardcore PC fan. Jumping at the opportunity to upgrade it with the latest hardware on the market. However since having the Mac I havn't upgraded it nor have I ever felt the need.
 
Thmaga said:
As others have said you wont be any worse off either way, except maybe the Mac costing a bit more.
If you get a PC and keep it for photo editing only, and don't install tons of junk etc it should have no stability issues whatsoever. You might find you'l get more for your money in terms of storage/performance with a PC.
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Mmm have you seen the spec of the iMac.

Regards.
 
ianbarber said:
I was wondering how many people use the MAC as apose to Windows for their editing.
Click to expand...

I use Lightroom, Photoshop and the wonderful Raw Photo Processor on my Macs - a 2009 MacBook Pro and a 2006 G5 PowerMac.

No complaints here.

For those that do, How do you find it compared to Windows for both Speed & Image Quality on the Screen.
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Afraid I can't say, I've been using Macs almost exclusively since 1989.* :)

The screens I use for photo work are an Eizo flat-panel and a LaCie CRT, which are great, but they'd work with any OS.

I do run a couple of Windows servers at work (and Win XP in a VM on my MBP) but they do boring stuff with databases, accounts software, phone/door entry system management and miscellaneous other bits and pieces that I occasionally need access to Windows for.

* disclaimer: I was tech support manager for a major Apple reseller for a period in the mid-90s and a freelance IT consultant specialising in Apple systems for a few years thereafter, so I may be a bit biased. ;)
 
nathan said:
I think its more the OS more than anything for me. All in all since using a Mac, I find it more stable and cleaner to use. Its a joy to power it up and use, I never see applications not responding nor do I get crashes or blue screens.

All of the above problems are just too common when using a windows based PC, fair enough you could learn Linux and your PC would be more stable. However that takes more time than it does to learn MAC Osx, which to be honest takes no time at all.

It all boils down to preference at the end of the day, I used to be a hardcore PC fan. Jumping at the opportunity to upgrade it with the latest hardware on the market. However since having the Mac I havn't upgraded it nor have I ever felt the need.
Click to expand...

Amen.

Regards.
 
nathan said:
I think its more the OS more than anything for me. All in all since using a Mac, I find it more stable and cleaner to use. Its a joy to power it up and use, I never see applications not responding nor do I get crashes or blue screens.

All of the above problems are just too common when using a windows based PC, fair enough you could learn Linux and your PC would be more stable. However that takes more time than it does to learn MAC Osx, which to be honest takes no time at all.

It all boils down to preference at the end of the day, I used to be a hardcore PC fan. Jumping at the opportunity to upgrade it with the latest hardware on the market. However since having the Mac I haven't upgraded it nor have I ever felt the need.
Click to expand...


Whilst I agree with "It all boils down to preference", I have a desktop PC as well as a macbook. I wouldn't say at all that MacOS is particularly faster or more "slick".

Ever heard of the swirly thing of death? I've had that. What else...today my battery was dead, I plugged the power in to charge it up, it took about ten minutes before it decided it wasn't going to take 20 hours to charge my battery up, it's also told me before I need to replace my battery, and then the next time I switch it on it changes its mind. Oh and to top it off today it took a good 30 seconds to load firefox...very strange.

So far as the more stable thing is concerned, of course it'll be more stable due to the fact that they have a controlled ecosystem of hardware. Apple knows what hardware will be in their machines so the chances of things going wrong is much smaller. MS on the other hand have a massive amount of hardware to have to deal with. Granted to the average user it doesn't matter why something freezes, or why we're lucky that Microsoft's OS's don't crash every 5 minutes (Mine hasn't crashed in years!), or why it'd be insane if Apple's OS's ever crashed at all.

Anyway, like you said, it's down to preference xD

EDIT: FYI I haven't upgraded my desktop in coming up on 2 years is concerned now, and the only thing it struggles with sometimes is Lightroom 3, that's it. If you're wondering, I have gone off Apple as of late, their censoring of their app store as well as giving the overpriced iPad a smartphone OS instead of a computer OS (It's supposed to be a tablet COMPUTER, not a tablet smartphone) really urks me. I find it ironic that they had that 1984 ads all those years ago and now they feel the need to protect us from works such as Ulysses.
 
I thought this was supposed to be an easy Question and Answer.

Regards.
 
ianbarber said:
It is interesting to hear that Lightroom 3 struggles on a Mac as this was the main reason for getting one.
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Sorry, that's on my desktop *PC* with a Q6600 and 4GB of RAM...However I'm sure a similarly specced Mac would struggle just the same! :P

I imagine anything with an Intel i7, be it Mac or PC would cope with lightroom 3 just fine.
 
Boopop said:
What else...today my battery was dead, I plugged the power in to charge it up, it took about ten minutes before it decided it wasn't going to take 20 hours to charge my battery up, it's also told me before I need to replace my battery, and then the next time I switch it on it changes its mind.
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Apple Menu > About this Mac > More Info...

Select Power in System Profiler. Check the Charge Information section and Health Information sections.

Cycle Count and Condition are of particular interest. If your cycle count is getting over 300-400, you'll likely start to see degradation in the battery's performance and some erratic behaviour.

Also take a read of this note about recalibrating your battery.

Did the message you saw tell you to 'service battery' rather than 'replace' it?

As an aside, running any Lithium-based battery cell right down to dead, especially on a regular basis, is liable to shorten its life (this applies to any device, not just Macs).

Sorry about the interruption to the thread. Continue via PM if necessary :)
 
ianbarber said:
It is interesting to hear that Lightroom 3 struggles on a Mac as this was the main reason for getting one.
Click to expand...

It's the Windows version that I hear is having performance issues more generally.

BTW, I make no claims about platform superiority on the basis of a .0 release of one product. :)
 
Boopop said:
Sorry, that's on my desktop *PC* with a Q6600 and 4GB of RAM...However I'm sure a similarly specced Mac would struggle just the same! :P

I imagine anything with an Intel i7, be it Mac or PC would cope with lightroom 3 just fine.
Click to expand...

Thats strange! I'm running an E6600 (Dual core version of yours) with 3Gig RAM and Lightroom 3 runs just fine!
 
Let me first clarify that I have no brand allegiance and I'm in no way a fanboy one way or the other. PC's and Mac's both have benefits and drawbacks.

I've used PC's for years and that is what I'm most competent with. I regularly get called around friends and friends of friends to rectify their problems because I'm known to be good with PC's. The thing that drives me up the wall is the constant need for maintenance to keep a PC running well. I hate rooting around menus, fiddling with settings and tuning things just to keep performance up. My absolute pet hate is how programs in windows just assign themselves to run on startup. That slows the process down so much it becomes unusable and worst of all the names of the autorun programs are so non-descript it takes a marathon effort to track down what can and can't be removed and do so without screwing the machine over. This eventually drove me to switch over to Mac around 10 months ago because I'd heard they were much more trouble-free. True to what I'd heard my Mac runs smoother and quicker than my PC ever did and doesn't require the constant virus scans, defragmentations, clean-ups etc. that my PC always needed.

The beauty of the the mac is in their simplicity. You switch it on for the first time, make a few simple changes from the preferences panel - which is infinitely more user friendly than window's control panel - and you're pretty much good to go. Drivers etc. are pre-installed meaning most devices are plug and play. Ideal. With my Mac I've never needed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the system just to get it to work. I don't want a computer that I feel as though I'm battling with I just want something that flows and allows me to do what I want. I could never get that from PC.

BUT there are limitations to the OSX. You're more restricted with software options but I've yet to have a need that can't be met. Gaming is pretty much a no go. On the plus side where you do encounter limitations there's always bootcamp which comes with OSX and allows you to dual install the windows operating system. I've done this for the convenience of playing one game with friends but otherwise I've never wanted or felt the need to use it. Incidentally in the little use I got from my windows partition I picked up a virus. I'm yet to have that problem with OSX. I've also got Microsoft Office for Mac which works pretty reliably meaning I'm fully integrated with all of my university work resources. Having said that Word has crashed on me a couple of times which cost me about 30 minutes work on more than one occasion. Fortunately I save regularly and Word is good at recovering most of the work you do should it crash.

If I had to buy a new computer tomorrow for personal use I'd go Mac in a flash. If I needed it to integrate into a work type environment or satisfy gaming needs I'd still go Mac but factor in the purchase of Windows into how I spent my money.

Not a fan boy? Maybe :lol:
 
personally i support mac and pc at work and see no more reliability from the apple camp. in fact in some ways on a corporate network it is actually a drawback.

so essentially it boils down to personal preference on layout of operating system as essentially thats the only difference.
 
TriggerHappy said:
I'd go Mac in a flash
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Sorry I can't help myself but...it's just as well you didn't say "I'd go for an Apple in a flash!" 'cause to that I'd say "Better not get an iPad or iPhone if you want an Apple product *with* flash!"

:D

With regards to the battery health/cycle thing, the thing is I use the iStat pro widget on the dashboard, and the battery health on it is very unpredictable. Most the time it says 95% or so, right now it says 100%... I've had the thing for 3 years!

Edit: Well said Neil!
 
ianbarber said:
It is interesting to hear that Lightroom 3 struggles on a Mac as this was the main reason for getting one.
Click to expand...

My mac spec is a macbook pro 2.8ghz dual core, 4gb ram and geforce 9600m GT and doesn't struggle with lightroom in any way.
 
Boopop said:
Sorry I can't help myself but...it's just as well you didn't say "I'd go for an Apple in a flash!" 'cause to that I'd say "Better not get an iPad or iPhone if you want an Apple product *with* flash!"

:D
Click to expand...

Mac fanboy perhaps but definitely not an apple fanboy. My only other apple product is an ipod video that's probably 6 years old. I have no desire for either the iphone, ipod touch or the ipad.
 
Boopop said:
With regards to the battery health/cycle thing, the thing is I use the iStat pro widget on the dashboard, and the battery health on it is very unpredictable. Most the time it says 95% or so, right now it says 100%... I've had the thing for 3 years!
Click to expand...

TBH, I'd be expecting to need a replacement battery soon if it were 3 years old. Lithium batteries have a limited shelf life (in the exact sense of the term, due to their internal chemistry) and that's heading toward the tail end of the usable life, even if it had never been used.
 
PCs - Cheaper, more powerful, more configurable, more expandable, more software choice, more comatibility, more open.

MACs - Simpler, Prettier.


Personally, my PC sits under my desk so I don't care what it looks like and I have no trouble using a PC, so for me there is only one choice and you'd never get me to use a Mac.
 
Ugh, I'm sick of that "Just work" mantra. For a start, the only reason the OS works more often is because of the small amount of hardware Apple have to support. Quite honestly, if it ever crashed at all it would be unforgivable. Apple moved to Intel architecture 5 years ago now, and have dropped support for PowerPC Macs now. So that's five years of hardware which only Apple released that they have to make sure works on their operating system. They know exactly what hardware is expected to run on their platform.

Microsoft on the other hand, have thousands of different motherboards, graphics cards, and processors to deal with, from at least the same 5 years. For the most part, they never see the drivers written for this hardware, so they don't have that much control over it really.

As I've said, it's just as well Apple's OS doesn't crash, as it'd be an embarrassment if it did! Think of it as trying to keep a tower of 3 cubes stood up compared to trying to build Blackpool tower with 100,000 cubes instead.

Now, of course, to the end user all of the above is a moot point, but that doesn't stop the "just works" thing from getting on my nerves! Sure the OS rarely crashes (I've had one problem since I got my Macbook), but the applications running on it do! I've had the swirly cursor of death many a time!
 
The curtain that comes down the screen when it does crash as well is quite freaky...
 
The software you use is available on both and does the same job. Its all about which you prefer then underlying OS of (W7 and snow leopard are pretty much on a par) and if you can afford the jobs tax on a mac. You will get a much higher spec windows PC (especially desktop) than you will a mac for your money.

Oh and LR3 is fine on my old dual core (E6750) with 4GB of memory.
 
I bought a MacBook Pro last year, I had a small windows 7 partition set up with Boot Camp for emergencies....but found myself ending up using windows most of the time so I ended up wiping the HDD and setting up a minimal OSX install with the rest of the disk Windows 7. I haven't fired up OSX since.

If we are comparing like for like (i.e. Windows 7 and OSX 10.whatever it is)...there's very little in it. The only real difference in productivity is going to be whatever platform you are more comfortable with. I got tired of having to rummage around looking for little settings and applications that I took for granted, but couldn't find/weren't available on OSX, so it didn't make any sense sticking with it for the sake of it. No appreciable difference in performance between the two. Stick with whatever you are comfortable with.

This coming from an iPad/MacbookPro/iPhone owner by the way.
 
menthel said:
The software you use is available on both and does the same job. Its all about which you prefer then underlying OS of (W7 and snow leopard are pretty much on a par) and if you can afford the jobs tax on a mac. You will get a much higher spec windows PC (especially desktop) than you will a mac for your money.

Oh and LR3 is fine on my old dual core (E6750) with 4GB of memory.
Click to expand...

But even so it will never be a Mac.

Im interested to know how many members who use PCs have ever tried a Mac for some length of time?

Many PC users that comment on using a mac do so after only trying it for 5 minutes whilst stood in the Apple store, sure its going to be different, awkward and you not going to see much difference.

Apple should give a 30 day money back guarantee, this way the "Darkside" may see some light and if not us Mac lovers can buy the used machines back off Apple at a fraction.

Nathan
 
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