Getting in the picture - on a Mac

Auckland photographer Andrew Hales, a commenter on Mac Planet (under a pseudonym), contacted me as he was keen to see a Mac in action, complete, I gather, with someone (me) who knew how it worked. He then wrote his thoughts down for me.

At first I was going to comment through Andrew's subsequent findings, but it's quite long at 1400 words (I like to keep my Mac Planet blogs under 1000) so I'm publishing it verbatim, after running the spell-checker over it. But I will post my reaction to it in a day or so as a separate blog, followed by another photographer's take on the iPhone - but more about that later:

There is a lot of talk about how great Apple computers are for creative work, especially design and photography. Being a photographer I have been quite heavily exposed to a lot of this talk, but since I consider myself a reasonably objective person, I have also ignored much of it as rhetoric and expressions of over zealous brand loyalty. While I have mostly been a 'PC' user, I have had some exposure to Macs in the workplace Sadly both experiences were filled with problems thanks to bad third-party software, so I was never really able to experience using a Mac in an objective way.

This all changed recently when I was able to meet Mark Webster, a local Mac guru, and tried using a Mac with his guidance to process some of my photos from a recent shoot.

I had initially wanted to try as accurate a comparison as possible, but we ended up using his 2008 model Mac Pro. Compared to my Q6600 Quad Core desktop it is not really a fair comparison hardware wise. My system has more than twice as much 'power'.

Given the big difference in hardware, I instead looked for things in OS X, Apple's own operating system, that might some how improve my workflow and allow me to be more creative.

Now I have used OS X before, and to be honest I found the experience to be little different to using Windows. You have icons, you have a mouse and applications open in Windows. You can switch between apps, move files from one app to another, use short cuts, view files in a variety of different ways etc. All the things we are all used to doing on a computer.

But having someone who actually knows OS X, what it can do, and how to make it do it, sit beside me, opened up a whole new world. Over a coffee Mark showed me keyboard short cuts and different techniques that displayed some rather nifty and clever features. Dragging files onto program icons opened that file in that application, pressing the space bar while a file was highlighted opened a quick preview pane, and there were some clever ways of viewing files in the different folders.

It definitely made my OS X experience more enjoyable, and I was able to make much better use of the system. Unfortunately I did not find anything that could improve my workflow, all it did was bring my knowledge of OS X up to a similar level to my knowledge of Windows, allowing me to use either system in the most efficient way.

Were I to go and replace my current system with a Mac, Mark's advice would have helped me adjust much quicker, but I could not find anything in OS X that would actually make owning a Mac any different to owning a PC.

Part of this has to do with how a photographer or a designer, or other creative person use's a computer. Quite simply we don't use the operating system. Instead we use a variety of programs to do the work, the most common being Adobe's Creative Suit, and if you're a photographer, Adobe Lightroom.

Despite running on a different OS, the Mac and Windows versions of both of these software packages are virtually identical. They look the same, they have the same options and menus and they perform the same on equivalent hardware (note, there is one difference, there is a 64-bit version of both CS4 and LR 2.0 for Windows systems only, and these do perform much better than the 32-bit version).

These programs get used to do everything related to my photos. Lightroom imports the images from the camera and stores them in folders in a database on the HDD. It converts the RAW images and Photoshop does localised edits and batch process all the images for export. The OS simply supplies a nice background image for this to happen in front of and controls things behind the scenes. Both OS-X and Windows Vista do a fantastic job of this, so it doesn't matter which one you use.

Someone doing design work would use Adobe Bridge to manage their files, and inDesign or Illustrator to create their work. Again, no interaction with the OS is required.

Apple produce their own equivalent to Lightroom call Aperture. Mark was also able to demonstrate this to me, and I have to say I quite liked it. We did not go to deep into how it works, but I understand it be similar to Lightroom in terms of features. But it is Mac only.

So if OS X is only as good as Windows for doing creative work, then is there something deeper in a Mac that makes them better?

Strip away the operating system are you are left with the hardware.

Once upon a time Macs were better for graphics based work, they were the first systems to use a separate processor and memory for graphics processing. But that was over 20 years ago, and since then both Macs and PCs have undergone huge changes in their hardware. So huge in fact that they run on the same basic architecture.

Macs now use the same Intel chips used in many PCs, they use the same memory, the same hard drives, the same memory controllers and even the same screens as PC. Well, not exactly the same. Rather than let OS X run on the thousands of different hardware options that Windows will run on, Apple has limited it to only a small selection. This ensures system stability by eliminating the chance of hardware or driver conflicts and allows Apple tighter control over quality, all good things for most Mac users. The problem comes when you start working on things that need powerful computers. One of those happens to be photography. Modern digital cameras are producing larger and larger files sizes as both resolution and bit depth increases. At the moment file sizes are doubling every 12 months or less.

The best way to deal with the ever increasing file sizes is to throw as fast a computer at them as you can find. In the PC world the options are huge, from self builds, custom builds or name brand work stations, the ability exists to get exactly what you need, customised to your exact demands. The Mac world, with it's limited hardware options suddenly looks very small and exclusive. The ability to customise systems is limited, and there is only one really powerful option.

The MacBook range, the Mac mini and the iMac are all based around laptop processors. Great for portability and power saving, but they are limited in their ability to handle large numbers of large files. The inability to use more than one hard drive also limits their usefulness to a creative type. I run both internal and external back ups, along with cache disks and keep my photos separate from everything else. That means 4 internal drives and 2 externals, something a MacBook or iMac simply cannot support.

This all changes when you take the huge leap from a consumer level iMac to the server grade Mac Pro. It holds its own aura of power and is an item of envy to many in the creative industries. The top of the line model is literally 10 times more powerful than the iMac. It is one of the most powerful computing solutions available in a desktop box. I would love to have one, but its performance comes at a cost, literally, and is simply more power than 90 per cent of creative people need, even with increasing file sizes.

Overall, I found my more in-depth introduction to OS X very helpful, but I didn't find anything in the operating system that some how makes Macs better for creative use, like wise I found nothing in the hardware either.

They are a great computing system, Apple laptops are extremely well designed, and the iMac is possibly one of the best consumer computers currently on the market, but they are not somehow 'better' for creative use. They do not come with a magic 'add creativity' button, or an 'aura of creativeness' that affects the user.

They are just another choice, to be added or removed from the list as your needs demand.

(Andrew's website is www.andrewhales.com)

- Mark Webster mac.nz