The SO wants a laptop for the new camera and his personal use. A primary use would be to edit his photos for printing and/or publishing online. Other than that, probably websurfing, maybe playing a little music.
He doesn’t want GIMP because it’s too complicated for what he’s doing right now. Of course, he may want to move up to that later but that’s another day.
He’s got another software he likes that apparently allows a lot of editing without getting as complex. Of course, he’s been supposed to let me know what it was and hasn’t yet.
He wants to spend around $200 for said laptop. You can stop laughing now. There’s a reason I’m the one looking for a computer. At any rate, it’s going to be a used laptop rather than brand-new top-of-the-line.
I don’t do art stuff and the minimum specs for software rarely tell you what you actually need, so I come to the TM.
In general, what’s the most important things he’ll need for photo editing? I know he’ll probably want a separate monitor and mouse, but I think most have ports for that. Is memory or processing power more important, if I have to choose one or the other? What else should I be looking for?
Well he’ll definitely need to get either a laptop with an SD slot installed (for importing photos directly from the camera’s SD card) or get a converter that will hook up to a USB port. I’m not sure I understand why he wants a separate monitor though. At that point he should just get a desktop pc and get more bang for his buck. But if he’s insisting on a laptop, I saw a pretty decent one at Walmart for like $350. Twice as good as mine and half the cost lol Of course mine’s about five years old… But definitely shop around for the best deal.
And from what it sounds like, he’s not going to be doing anything intensive enough to require loads of memory or a super fast processor. I do tons of high res photo editing on my little lappy and it’s only a 1.4ghz and has 1gb of ram.
Most Cameras can plug directly into the computer without removing the card. My Canon DSLR can connect via USB to my computer, and transfer All Photos, New Photos, or selected photos without even touching the computer or opening the software. Don’t buy a card reader until you know if you will even need it.
I second the “get a desktop” suggestion, unless he wants the laptop for use in the field. in that case, go for a large screen to view those high-res images on, and lots of HD space.
Yes, I believe the camera will transfer directly via USB. It’s a new DSLR, Nikon I think.
He doesn’t think he’ll want a monitor; I think he will once he starts working with stuff, unless we can find something cheap with a really good screen. I could be wrong, we’ll wait and see. My experience with laptops hasn’t been very pretty.
Two reasons for the laptop - one, he wants to be able to take it to work and play with his stuff on break, and two, we’re going wireless when we get a network at home and he wants to be able to take it to different locations to play.
I’m really leaning hard towards setting up a fileserver for storage once I actually get around to getting a network up. Otherwise, something bad will happen to his computer and he won’t have backed anything up and…you know the tale.
AngelSoft, may I ask what software you’re using? I know he’s looked around a little bit, but I’m not very familiar with what’s available (and not interested enough to devote the time to trying stuff out right now).
I use Photoshop CS2. It’s older so you may be able to get a good deal on a used version. I got mine about 2 years ago for $100. But if he doesn’t want GIMP because it’s too complicated, well then Photoshop CS2 is definitely out of the question.
He may want to consider Photoshop Elements 7 (the newest version). It’s a very scaled back version that’s aimed more at the casual user and is very user friendly. It’s not a bad price if you buy from like Amazon or something. They’ve got it for $80 there and you may be able to find it cheaper if you shop around.
I use Adobe Elements which is a good bang for the buck. I would recommend that you think in terms of RAM which will be able to handle multiple levels of “undo” while editing. Since it’s going to be a used laptop then it will be loaded with windows XP so 2 to 3 gb of memory would be nice. If Vista is used then 3 to 4 gb.
It’s been a long time since I used Elements so I can’t say how the new versions are but I seem to remember the layout and user interface as being completely different from CS2. It’s good though for becoming familiar with things like layers, hue, contrast, all those fun things. All of the Photoshop programs have many many good books on getting to know them. It just all depends on how much of a learning curve you’re willing to deal with.
Wow, what a marketing mistake. They should use the same general layout between the 2 programs as an incentive to step up. At least with a Microsoft product they all have the same general layout and feel to them even if the coding is different.
Well not really because Elements and CS4 (crap they’re up to 4 already?) are aimed at two different markets. Elements is for the casual, everyday Joe who wants something basic to edit their photos with. It’s even somewhat usable for intermediate users as long as they don’t want to do anything too crazy.
CS4 is more for professionals and people who want to do intense things with their photos. At nearly $700, the price alone is usually enough to make people really think about how much they really need to do. Most people are perfectly happy with Elements because it does everything they need it to.
The marketing strategy is to give future professionals a stepping stone into the better software. It even allows for modularization of Elements to build into/and eventually trade up to CS4.
Aha! So he’s been using the Paint.Net software. Seems to do what he wants, which is pretty minimal right now. He’s really only looking for a way to do cropping and minor adjustments - his focus right now is on getting the composition and lighting correct in the photo rather than on the backend. It does have layers and some features like that, so he can start to learn how to use those, while still remaining very simple to use if you don’t want to mess with them.
He absolutely doesn’t want to deal with PhotoShop, he’s been quite clear about that.
It looks like that program stores undo info on the drive rather than in RAM, but it sounds like more RAM is better.
It occurs to me this morning that I should make him do some editing on my work laptop, so he can see how small the laptop screens can be to work on. It looks like it’s pretty easy to find a good deal on a 15", but I suspect he won’t be very happy with that when trying to do photo editing.
I’m hoping to find one with XP, I really don’t want to mess with Vista. I know it has worked well for some, but I just don’t have the energy to deal with the drawbacks and difficulties it can cause.
A calibrator measures the accuracy of your display, and then changes the response to fit a color profile so what you see is accurate (or as accurate as your monitor can be). I think you’d need imaging software that respects color profiles. The idea is that your imaging program and printer all use profiles, so what you see on the screen matches what you see on the printed image. The calibrators I’ve seen all use a measuring device that you attach directly to your monitor, then it runs a little measuring code, and makes the color profile.
Just a tip…my friend was using Adobe Elements on her new Mac Mini do to pretty much exactly what your husband wants to do. She’s an amateur photographer wanting to crop/adjust photos and print them out occasionally.
One thing that really tripped her up at the beginning was that her version of Elements for Mac did not have a CMYK mode, and a few people she was sending prints to needed CMYK mode (I think that’s the publishing standard?)
It seems that Paint.net does not have a native CMYK mode BUT, if you Google “paint.net cmyk” you come up with plugins like this.
I just checked out Paint.net out of curiosity. For a free app, its not bad. It is really slow for some operations, though, and can’t do even some simple things the Photoshop does, like select something and move it around the image, at least not easily. It does seem to have okay crop and adjustment tools. Tell your husband to figure out the Levels and Curves dialogs if he’s interested in punching up photos; these dialogs are also available (and invaluable) in Photoshop, and the knock-offs in Paint.net seem fairly serviceable (although there’s no way to set the white point! WTF?). Go find an online tutorial of the Photoshop versions of these dialogs, and a lot of it may apply to the Paint.net versions.
There’s a scaled down version of Photoshop called Adobe ImageReady. It’s mainly intended for putting photos on the web, but you can use it for print as well. Your hubby can crop, add text, play with color settings, and publish his photos as web pages without having to insert them.
ImageReady is an extra app put in CSx packages, and you can google around and find it somewhere in Cyberspace. I don’t think I’m allowed to say where.
Ooh. That’s bad and weird. There are millions of ‘flavors’ of CMYK with at least a dozen or so possible ‘standard’ CMYK spaces. CMYK for newsprint is wildly different from CMYK for an art book printed offset is wildly different from CMYK for the printer down the hall. Then add the confusion that CMYK inksets are different in Europe and Asia and you have a mess. Don’t convert to CMYK unless you absolutely have to, and then only if the recipient specifies the appropriate CMYK colorspace to convert to. And keep the master docs in RGB.
At any rate, it’s going to be a used laptop rather than brand-new top-of-the-line.
