Is a Mac really superior in running CS5 ?


Amateur108

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Sep 16, 2011
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Hi,

just wanna enquire about running CS5 on a Mac.

1) Is it really superior in terms of performance ?

2) Why are the pictures/colours on a Mac brighter and more vibrant ?

Thanks in advance :)
 

1) Not necessary unless you would like to invest in Mac Pro. You might wanna wait for a later revision with thunderbolt and probably usb 3.0 ?

2) One thing is the gamma correction on Mac display are different from PC(Windows). Since Mac 10.6 SL, the gamma correction have been changed to 2.2. So it shouldn't make much difference. In any case, colours on display differentiated by the quality of the display and the graphic card. It shouldn't be due to the system branding. Of course, OS and software compatibility also part significant part in ensuring good quality display output. For well calibrated systems, there should not be significant differences between the computers should they restrictedly follow a well defined calibration process.

For history purpose, there is a good reason why Apple Mac are the de-facto for graphic and creative design. One is good software support from expert software such as Adobe though you can find it's not the case nowadays. They don't incline towards Mac anymore. Next is the early adoption of colour management which Microsoft did not start incorporate until Windows 95 and even then, the support from software and device vendors are not popular until much later from Windows XP onwards. Based on wiki information, ColorSync in Apple provided colour management since 1993, while Windows begins since 1997 with its Windows XP

Hi,

just wanna enquire about running CS5 on a Mac.

1) Is it really superior in terms of performance ?

2) Why are the pictures/colours on a Mac brighter and more vibrant ?

Thanks in advance :)
 

The article is biased based IMHO. Seriously it is typically still a fanboy talk when there is only brief illustration on how Mac just works and PC doesn't. Before any of whom read this article jump to conclusion, did I mention I am a all time Mac user since year 2003 using iBook g3? and I have changed up to a record of 4 MacBook pro till now a MacBook pro uni 2010. But still I do not totally agree with the statement that Mac just works. It has it own fair share of quirkiness too.Though it is pretty true that apple products are what steve jobs will say "it is the product that I use myself", I totally buy in that it is aesthetically nice and capable too. If TS wanna go for one, I totally agree with him or her. But the article does not say much about the difference except general statements. So I won't recommend it as a justified reading material to plainly promote apple product only.2 cents worth.
Read This it may help you...:)
 

Hi,

just wanna enquire about running CS5 on a Mac.

1) Is it really superior in terms of performance ?

2) Why are the pictures/colours on a Mac brighter and more vibrant ?

Thanks in advance :)

1. Nope. Uses the same parts as PCs, and in fact you can get a better, faster PC for the same price as a Mac.

2. Because of the glossy display. It may look more vibrant, but it can be TOO vibrant - you want to make sure what you see is what others will see, and so the Mac screens need calibration as well. A good PC display can easily give the same "pop" as the Mac displays.
 

To be fair, a Windows based computer will work fine and will certainly get the job done, but the majority of emails I receive do reveal a rather frustrating story. They normally go something like this... ''Dear David, I have spent the last two hours trying to install xx application. After doing this and applying the updates, a Windows update became available. This is so so frustrating, after spending all this time and restarting my laptop, it now says I have a missing DLL file of something. How can I fix it?'' or ''I turned it off last night and it worked fine, yet this morning it simply refuses to start and puts me in some safe mode. I tried turning it off and back on again, but still nothing''. You can see a trend in these emails, revealing so many users being frustrated with the tools they are trying to use either on a hobbyist basis or a more professional way to produce something for a client. It must be very discouraging for the average user and certainly does not encourage any degree of enthusiasm.

Running Windows since forever.

Never had this problem.

:bsmilie:

On another note:

blue%20screen%20of%20death%20mac%5B2%5D.jpg


Ho ho ho. :bsmilie:
 

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No, Mac doesn't run Photoshop faster than PC. What make Mac the choice for pro-Photoshop user is the colour. Mac is calibrated to CMY and Windows uses RGB by default. So the colour u see on Mac screen is exactly what will be printed out.
 

No, Mac doesn't run Photoshop faster than PC. What make Mac the choice for pro-Photoshop user is the colour. Mac is calibrated to CMY and Windows uses RGB by default. So the colour u see on Mac screen is exactly what will be printed out.

That's not accurate. Your display is in RGB.
Print uses CYMK - and not all the colors from RGB can be printed/reproduced accurately on paper (CYMK).

Mac's ColorSync helps match RGB to CYMK for printing, but the display is still in RGB.
 

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The article is biased based IMHO. Seriously it is typically still a fanboy talk when there is only brief illustration on how Mac just works and PC doesn't. Before any of whom read this article jump to conclusion, did I mention I am a all time Mac user since year 2003 using iBook g3? and I have changed up to a record of 4 MacBook pro till now a MacBook pro uni 2010. But still I do not totally agree with the statement that Mac just works. It has it own fair share of quirkiness too.Though it is pretty true that apple products are what steve jobs will say "it is the product that I use myself", I totally buy in that it is aesthetically nice and capable too. If TS wanna go for one, I totally agree with him or her. But the article does not say much about the difference except general statements. So I won't recommend it as a justified reading material to plainly promote apple product only.2 cents worth.

Lame reasons.

Sorry for sharing such a lame article....:embrass:
 

No offense, but you could read up more on colour management before advising this.
No, Mac doesn't run Photoshop faster than PC. What make Mac the choice for pro-Photoshop user is the colour. Mac is calibrated to CMY and Windows uses RGB by default. So the colour u see on Mac screen is exactly what will be printed out.
 

Quite right though not entirely in the terminology. Match is pretty much the naive way of looking at colour management. If you happen to have a copy of photoshop, try the soft profiling on a CMYK profile. It doesn't match. It basically squeeze or cut your source gamut to within what can be achieved by your target device via various possible algorithms. Each result in slightly different output depending on the source image type. Some algorithm preserve the colours while clipping to the output while some proportionally squeeze the whole colour gamut to fit into the smaller one, which are good for tones images such as photographs.Ultimately while working in a simulated target profile, the display will not show colours that are not achievable by the target device. Even if you choose a 100% red, the colour shown is not the same. It will be something similar not orangey as oppose to without colour management.

That being said, in current times, there is no longer much advantage of Mac over PC, because colour management is quite mature on Windows over the years. Even Linux windows manager environments such as KDE and Gnome are picking it up, using littlecms library for some softwares.Colour management aside, I see TS can get a probably cheaper but not that much cheaper alternatives with PC counterparts. Apple has been very aggressive with the pricing and if you look at what you get for the price, I say it's a good buy.

Earlier bsod is actually a windows os running on Mac hardware. Mac has it's own death screen which is a slow scrolling down effect of screen darkening which I have occurred multiple times.If TS wants to jump ship into Mac, it's a good choice in my opinion. Having uses several good or bad or enterprising operating system, I have experienced and witness the pro and cons of it's choice. I was once a die hard supporter for PC when Mac was just Mac OS 9. But times have changed since Mac adopted a unix platform based on bsd known as Darwin. With both beauty And stability fuse into the same product, I see no reason for one to not get attracted by it.

I also run parallels desktop in Mac to run my office and project and visio. I know Mac has office equiv but seriously it lack the impact in usage workflow that windows has to offer. After all it's a ms product, why should they make the Mac version better. Mac has pages? Think twice when people you are dealing with are windows corporate project managers and they are not interested with your page document when they use office 97. Open office is a piece of crap IMHO.

If you are on Mac, you have to start looking at a deeper pocket for you wouldn't find piracy for Mac as wild as PC. Not that there isn't, but I think the PC community in this area truly excel due to legacy. Lolx. Oh I love piracy btw.

That's not accurate. Your display is in RGB.Print uses CYMK - and not all the colors from RGB can be printed/reproduced accurately on paper (CYMK).Mac's ColorSync helps match RGB to CYMK for printing, but the display is still in RGB.
 

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My answer is NO.
just switch to Mac this June.
i feel a bit regretted now.
 

Because i can build a way better specs PC system with the same amount of money.
 

I'm sure you can, but I hope you can build the same better spec PC system with the same stable OS with the same asethetically nice casing that mac offers you. When is design cheap, not unless you can live with a rectangular box with a large fan next to it and you call it a computer.

Lets put it this way, there are a lot of people that I have seen willing to buy a LV wallet cost a few thousand dollars versus someone like me who uses something less than $100 and have the rest of the few thousands packed inside it. Based on such an argument, it basically boils down to what you want. If you want a raw machine doing its job, I suppose you can live without a casing too, that would be somewhat cheaper too. Isn't it ?

At the same time, I also happen to have a dual xeon system running windows server 2008 at home. You are not entirely wrong when you are coming from a machine spec point of view, mac does ask for a premium price. Then it also boils down to another perspective, for the same money a photographer spend on Fuji X100 or Ricoh and Leica branding, can he/she not purchase a totally different setup with the same price and much better quality ?

Because i can build a way better specs PC system with the same amount of money.
 

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The design is not so important to me, performance and ease of using is the main factors.
I hope it will run smoothly for long time unlike PC which slow down quite a lot in 2-3 years time.
 

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If what you want is performance, then what you should be looking at is the hardware spec and then re-visit your expectation.
I have been using mac for years and I don't find it is actually slow. Then again, slow is a relative term. You can't expect a hard disk
to run at an SSD when what you get is the the former.

PC doesn't slow down unless you have not been particular selective on what you install. Slow down are not entirely OS, and can be
due to wear and tear of hardware. Silicon degrades over time and will contribute to slower throughput. When you fill up your hard disk more,
data at the inner cylinder will be slower to access and also makes you feel slower. Over time when you upgrade your software and they
becomes more demanding in resources and your hardware spec stays, it also get slower.

A lot of time, this is a misconception that OS is responsible when your computing environment changes over the years which most did not
take into account and blindly made an apple to apple comparison which is untrue.

Back to the topic on slow, perhaps you wanna be more indicative on how you feel mac is slow. Is it the interface ? Is it the speed at which you launch your application etc ? It is unfair to make an unjustified exclamation to something which has no sufficient evidence to back it up.

The design is not so important to me, performance and ease of using is the main factors.
I hope it will run smoothly for long time unlike PC which slow down quite a lot in 2-3 years time.
 

:D
Quite right though not entirely in the terminology. Match is pretty much the naive way of looking at colour management. If you happen to have a copy of photoshop, try the soft profiling on a CMYK profile. It doesn't match. It basically squeeze or cut your source gamut to within what can be achieved by your target device via various possible algorithms. Each result in slightly different output depending on the source image type. Some algorithm preserve the colours while clipping to the output while some proportionally squeeze the whole colour gamut to fit into the smaller one, which are good for tones images such as photographs.Ultimately while working in a simulated target profile, the display will not show colours that are not achievable by the target device. Even if you choose a 100% red, the colour shown is not the same. It will be something similar not orangey as oppose to without colour management.

That being said, in current times, there is no longer much advantage of Mac over PC, because colour management is quite mature on Windows over the years. Even Linux windows manager environments such as KDE and Gnome are picking it up, using littlecms library for some softwares.Colour management aside, I see TS can get a probably cheaper but not that much cheaper alternatives with PC counterparts. Apple has been very aggressive with the pricing and if you look at what you get for the price, I say it's a good buy.

Earlier bsod is actually a windows os running on Mac hardware. Mac has it's own death screen which is a slow scrolling down effect of screen darkening which I have occurred multiple times.If TS wants to jump ship into Mac, it's a good choice in my opinion. Having uses several good or bad or enterprising operating system, I have experienced and witness the pro and cons of it's choice. I was once a die hard supporter for PC when Mac was just Mac OS 9. But times have changed since Mac adopted a unix platform based on bsd known as Darwin. With both beauty And stability fuse into the same product, I see no reason for one to not get attracted by it.

I also run parallels desktop in Mac to run my office and project and visio. I know Mac has office equiv but seriously it lack the impact in usage workflow that windows has to offer. After all it's a ms product, why should they make the Mac version better. Mac has pages? Think twice when people you are dealing with are windows corporate project managers and they are not interested with your page document when they use office 97. Open office is a piece of crap IMHO.

If you are on Mac, you have to start looking at a deeper pocket for you wouldn't find piracy for Mac as wild as PC. Not that there isn't, but I think the PC community in this area truly excel due to legacy. Lolx. Oh I love piracy btw.

Master has spoken.