View Single Post
      10-23-2012, 01:38 AM   #3936
E90Mario
Brigadier General
E90Mario's Avatar
Lebanon
395
Rep
3,639
Posts

Drives: ESS E90 M3
Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Los Angeles, CA

iTrader: (10)

Quote:
Originally Posted by gary88 View Post
Been using a Mac for 4 years, no plans on going back to PC.

I used to have a Vaio and the color profile was entirely too warm, it seems Macs are color calibrated nicely out of the box.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dcstep View Post
I use 64-bit PC. There used to be delays for the Apple versions of my software (DxO) but I think they've fixed that. I use calibrated monitors for both my desktop and laptop. Since you can now run several OS on the Apple machines, I could probably stand to use Apple, but I see no reason.

I think calibrated monitors are key to consistent images. At the end of last year I bought a Lenovo laptop that had a very cool, blueish screen tint and when I'd view images processed on it they were way too saturated on my calibrated monitor. I had to re-process several batches of images and I bought a Spyder to calibrate the laptop and avoid double processing.

In Shutterbug Magazine there was a discussion, one of the Macs, I think it was the old MacMini, had a monitor that wouldn't calibrate to most standards. I think that was an isolated case and related to one of their all-in-one boxes.

I'm wondering, has anyone worked with the Retina display on a MacBook Pro? I heard that the screen is pretty incredible, but was wondering how the color temp is for image processing. Will the available color Spyders correct it?

Dave
Quote:
Originally Posted by ddk632 View Post
I agree with others who stated this is most likely a monitor/LCD screen calibration issue. Also it very much depends on the hardware if going PC.

For example, a business oriented laptop will usually have less emphasis on screen and graphics (read: will have a crappy screen and graphics card ).

In contrast, a dedicated workstation machine may have an excellent LCD display, a killer graphics card, lots of memory, etc. The screen is #1 and in my experience only the high end laptops have decent screens. Macs are known for being graphics oriented historically, hence they don't skimp in this area.

Dedicated gaming laptops, such as Alienware, will be great for this because modern games are extremely demanding on hardware, particularly graphics, and gamers expect the best screens as well just like graphics artists and photographers do.

I run a Dell Precision M6500 "mobile workstation", which is my workhorse laptop as I am in a technical field of work, specifically software. I also wanted to use it for my photo editing as well. It seems to be one of the last of a dying breed of laptops that has a 17" screen with a native 1920x1200 resolution. Many newer models, including the Dell M6600 (replacement of mine a year newer) only have 1920x1080. Not a deal breaker and has no bearing on screen quality, but I like my screen real estate

It also has an LG LCD that was, as the laptop, designed for heavy oil and gas exploration industry, AutoCAD and similar, video editing, graphic design, and photography in mind. I find colors on my laptop similar to my external Dell 2707WFP monitor, which also is known for excellent color reproduction, as are all of the high end Dell screens.

I am also running Win 7 64bit, with an i7 920X processor (2 generations old now, I think, but still plenty fast), and currently 16GB of ram which I am going to upgrade to 32GB. Probably overkill for photo editing but I run virtual machines on my laptop for work which take up lots of RAM.

Two bits of advice -

1. As I think someone else mentioned, you can get a calibration device such as a Spyder, to calibrate your screens and normalize the color reproduction. It comes with software that you install which works with the device, it's pretty straight forward to use.

2. If you don't already have one, get a Solid State Drive (SSD) for your laptop. It is the single most awesome thing you can do to improve speed of most, if not all, of your workflow. Opening files, saving files, batch operations, etc., even opening Photoshop, is all blazing fast. Anything that involves reading or writing data to and from the hard drive is noticeably going to be faster over a standard hard drive. Extremely, not subtly, noticeable.

My laptop has 3 of them, 2 of which are in Raid0 which basically combines them into one, even faster drive

Ok done beating my chest about my laptop now. She's my baby, my wife hates her guts though.

Hope you find some of this helpful.
Quote:
Originally Posted by M_Six View Post
Agreed about the SSD. After seeing what it did for my laptop, I bought one for my workstation. Now it screams as well.
Thank you so much for the replies guys, and apologies for my late reply. As usual I find all your information to be extremely helpful, I'm going to do some research into Spyder, and hopefully it will be the solution for my problem!
__________________
Appreciate 0