Question. What kind of a computer are you all doing your photo editing and processing on?

What kind of a computer are you all doing your editing and processing on?

Is it a laptop or a desktop?

Mac or PC?

If a desktop, did you build it yourself, by buying a kit or parts, or is it as you bought it off the shelf at the store, or have you modified it in some way, and how much?

If you modified it or built it, what did you do?

Did you add a graphics card? If so, was it a gamers graphics/video card, or a professional graphics card.

Just curious as to what others are using for a work station and maybe others are also.

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Permalink Reply by Gary Vernon on March 10, 2011 at 8:37am

Bog standard Desktop Compaq Presario's with maxed out RAM, larger internal HD's, external back up drives, added pro graphics cards, dual monitor setup and Wacom A3 pressure tablet.

I put more emphasis on accurate display colour running a Spectra View and Sony GDM-FW900 for the xtra screen real estate using CS tools.

Laptops aren't really designed for imaging, quite apart from the small screen size they have poor color consistency and are almost impossible to calibrate properly.

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Permalink Reply by Larry Van Valkenburgh on March 10, 2011 at 8:44am

What's "Bog"?

What pro graphics cards are you running? I was just looking at ATI FirePro this morning.

Why dual monitors?

Is the Sony GDM-FW900, software for running dual monitors? I see eyefinity all the time for gamers.

Are you running 64 bit Windows 7?

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Permalink Reply by Gary Vernon on March 10, 2011 at 10:59am

Hi Larry,

we use the ATI Firepro V5800's (1GB memory) because we can if necessary calibrate two displays independently although the NEC is hardware calibrated.

Bog standard is UK lingo for normal without options :-)

I still run XP pro because of an ongoing ICC problem with Vista - soon will change to Win 7.

Dual monitors simply because we do a lot of editing and need the real estate of two screens essentialy the smaller 24inch Sony GDM-FW900 reserved for Photoshop CS tools as i mentioned above already.

The Spectra View is also calibrated for the Adobe 98 color space and the Sony for SRGB.

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Permalink Reply by Larry Van Valkenburgh on March 10, 2011 at 9:00am

I'm running a maxed out Desktop Compaq Presario and a maxed out Desktop Dell Dimention and both have a PCI graphics card. Both have 2nd hard drives and I'm also storing on external hard drives.

Both are 32 bit Windows XP.

I originally had intentions of building a great new super computer, but in the meantime I bought a newer motherboard and processor to put in the Dell Dimention case. That just wasn't a good plan at all, so I did buy a new case and the rest, to actually put together a complete computer. As is it's way better that both my old one's, but not what I originally wanted to build. So I'll be putting a much better motherboard in it just to start.

I've been looking at the gamers graphics/video cards, but today I discovered the professional graphics cards like the ATI FirePro and I started wondering what others are using to catalog and process their photos.

The DELL, processor wise, just could no longer handle the size of my photo catalog.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Kumagai on March 10, 2011 at 10:01am

I'm using my Sony Vaio laptop with Win7 x64 with 6GB of memory. It has a dedicated 1GB nVidia graphics card.

The only thing I changed on my system was to take out the 640 GB 5400 RPM hard drive and replaced it with a 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive.

The key to any system is memory, a fast processor and how fast you can get the data off the the disk.

Having a dedicated graphics card with a lot of memory does help in rendering the image on the screen and takes the demand off the CPU to render the image.

Depending on what software you use, will dictate what type of system you will need.

Generally speaking, most systems you buy today are powerfull enought to run Photoshop, Lightroom, and pretty much any graphics application.

The only time I see a hit in performance is if I'm rendering HDR images. HDR rendering takes a lot of CPU power. So if you are into HDR, you will want a machine with a very fast processor.

Paul K

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Permalink Reply by CameraClicker on March 10, 2011 at 1:13pm

I use a notebook and Elements when I travel, plus the Canon software. When at home I use a Gateway machine with Intel i7 processor, 12GB RAM, an ATI video card with 1GB RAM and it addresses 5 TB of drive. I am using Vista 64 bit, I have the Windows 7 upgrade but Vista has not given me any problems so I have not fixed what is not broken. It has a trackball and 2 tablets, a Wacom and one for writing Chinese. I can use the tablets interchangeably but the Chinese software looks for the tablet so it has to be plugged in. I use Samsung monitors.