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Photoshop for Mac or PC?

Angelica Oung

New member
After seeing all the neat thing one can do on photoshop, I've decided that it is a necessary purchase. However, before I take the plunge I need to figure one thing out -- whether to get the mac or pc version.

I currently have a Mac iBook G4 which I love. If I had my way my next computer would be a MacBook pro. However, I also live in Taiwan, where mac owners are a bit of an embattled minority (even more so than elsewhere) and many sites, softwares and peripherals (including the human resources website of my own company) are stubbornly incompatible with macs. Therefore I am going to purchase a light PC laptop (with a nice subsidy from my company) which I plan to use as my "road" computer while parking my iBook G4 in my bedroom to surf the net, listen to music, store my pictures and for mac-only applications I've come to love.

My instinct was to buy mac version of photoshop. After all, I am planning to store my pictures on the mac and can imagine doing photo editing mostly in my bedroom after hours. But I'm also wondering whether or not it would be more advantageous to get the expensive software for the newer computer.

Another factor is whether photoshop files are easily swapped between the mac and pc version. I have many friends who know photoshop and might be prevailed upon to help me out with pictures...if they can be easily mailed.

I really could have posted this either in the PC or Mac forums, but chose the Mac one because it seems to be more active. But I really am trying to keep an open mind...

My apologies if I have asked any really obvious questions. I am, what you say, a noob.
 

Anil Mungal

New member
Angelica,

You should first take a look at the Photoshop CS3 system requirements and see if your current iBook or your future PC laptop meet them. Also note that these are minimum requirements and that you'll probably need more RAM for photoshop to run smoothly.

pc or mac? There's no correct answer ... choose the one that fits you, based on your overall computer needs.
 

Aaron Strasburg

New member
I'm a Mac user, but like Anil I'll avoid the religious arguments and just say that transferring files between Mac and PC is no problem, especially if everyone is using recent versions of Photoshop. That should be the least of your concerns. Many Adobe products allow you to legally use a single license for a desktop and a laptop, but some (including Photoshop) do not allow one license to be Mac and one PC.

It seems like a newer Mac laptop with Parallels or VMware, or even Boot Camp, may be a good option.

How you deal with sharing the large files is a much bigger question. A single CR2 file from my 20D is about 7MB, 3x that when saved as PSD. Both are too large for practical email sharing, and many cameras have even larger files.
 
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