 Lillian S. George |
What system and software to by? I want to buy a new PC to use for storage, editing, etc. of digital photos. I recently bought the Nikon D200 and would like to work towards taking my photography hobby to the next level. I have read that the Adobe Photoshop CS2 is a great software package, but am a little overwhelmed by all of the hardware choices out there. Any advice at all would be appreciated. Thanks.
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- Carlton Ward Contact Carlton Ward Carlton Ward's Gallery |
Hi Lillian, You will want to get a really good processor (I have a 2 gig processor) on my laptop and RAM is crucial. I currently have 1 gig of ram but am adding another just so it will go a little faster. Photoshop needs lots of RAM to run well. I only have an 80 gig hard drive on my laptop but I have (3) 250 gig external hard drives so that I can keep everything backed up (I also burn everything to disk) because machines fail, hard drives fail and the thought of losing my precious photos is terrifying. I use my laptop hard drive as only a temporary storage place as 80 gig will fill up quickly especially when you take a 2 gig CF "camera storage card" of raw images and convert them to uncompressed Tiffs - it grows to 8 gig. When home I dock my laptop to a base station with my external hard drives connected and also a 19" monitor (see other monitor discussions on this board) and I have my monitors calibrated with Spyder2 software. Using both screens - I use my laptop screen for viewing thumbnails and use my 19" monitor for editing in Photoshop. If you are going with a desktop, you can get them with lots more storage and great processors for cheaper than the laptops. A lot of photographers use Macs and they are very effecient and fast with Photoshop. As far as brand names I have used HP for years and am happy with them but there are many good ones to choose from. There are many choices and opinions but this is what my current setup is and I am happy with it. You have just opened a very big door and there is a very large learning curve with just photoshop itself - just look at how many courses there are here at Better Photo about processing Raw images, editing photos, using layers and the wide array of tools in PS. I have taken 2 courses on photoshop and start another one next week. This one may interest you: http://www.betterphoto.com/courseOverview.php?cspID=63 Hope this helps Lillian. Happy New Year
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Lillian S. George |
Thank you Carlton, that does help. Happy New Year to you too!
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