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Does anyone use Windows and Photoshop CC?

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I'm interested in learning about your expereince with Photoshop CC 2014 run under windows 7 or 8.

(Incidentally, then, the question of 8 BIT versus 10 BIT workflow comes up! Theoretically, 10 bit calibrated workflow is now possible for users of Photoshop CC 2014 and monitors now like the Eizo Color Edge series have color look up, LUT, tables in 14 BIT. this means that the color calibration or profiling of a monitor can be extraordinarily accurate and billions and not just millions of colors are possible. The human eye can appreciate a far wider gamut than even Adobe RGB and that adds an especially generous set of saturated greens and yellows beyond the Adobe 1988 boundaries. An increasing number of these can be also printed in the latest pigment ink printers from Epson, HP, Canon and others. So the benefits may not be merely theoretical.

10 BIT color is not just a simple switch over from 8 BIT. In fact much of 8 BIT that we are happy with is actually 6 BIT and the last 2 BITS are dithered. Still, I must emphasize that modern true 8 BIT color should be recognized as a superbly capable standard for a professional workflow and 10 BIT color is really for the brave of heart, the enthusiast or the obsessional photographer wanting the Nirvana of color possibilities. I do not know whether or not my eyes would recognize the improvements brought by 10 BIT color, but in any case, I work with a Mac system. Apple hardware can support 10 BIT color but not the software, as yet. In a windows 7 or 8 system, however, a scant few programs, Photoshop, for one, can handle 10 BIT color well, with the caveat that some filters are in 8 BIT only. This can cause unresolved color conflicts. Despite, this some folk have switched to a 10 BIT workflow.)


I'd love to know if anyone has any personal experience or knows of a colleague or source where opinions are shared about any possible advantages or difficulties running Photoshop CC 2014 on a PC. I'm considering a new computer and am aghast at the commoditization of the Mac, where there's now little to no room for added cards or drives, putting everything that was inside on the outside. it's a brilliant move - they get to ship a compact product at 20% of weight and volume and so dramatically increase further their margins of profit!

The PC is still an open system and so I now wonder about Photoshop running under windows!

Asher
 
I'm interested in learning about your expereince with Photoshop CC 2014 run under windows 7 or 8.
[...]
I'd love to know if anyone has any personal experience or knows of a colleague or source where opinions are shared about any possible advantages or difficulties running Photoshop CC 2014 on a PC.

Hi Asher,

I think both platforms have their drawbacks and benefits. I've been running Photoshop up to CS6 (no CC for me if I can avoid it) and Lightroom (and a slew of other programs) on Windows for a long time, without significant drawbacks. The only potential issue I can think of is with large high PPI displays, because they will display Photoshop's icons and text in too small a size to be comfortable in use.

The benefit of Windows seems to be with the availability of the latest graphics cards and frequently updated drivers. Apparently Apple doesn't update drivers much (if any) but rather sells new hardware. The importance of that difference is that modern image processing software increasingly depends on the graphic card's GPUs to handle lots of the time-consuming image-processing tasks.

Therefore newer versions of software will need up-to-date drivers and/or cards to work fluently, and a new release of Photoshop may result in a poor user experience with sluggish screen updates and buggy processing if the graphics hardware / drivers are not recent.

For the best performance/color depth, the nVidia Quadro cards seem to work well together with Photoshop. Not all cards allow proper high bit color display, but these do. I believe AMD Sapphire FirePro (Professional Graphics Solutions) also has a range of cards that allow that, but I'm not familiar with those myself. I've been using nVidia cards for long time, also because they are innovative chip designers themselves and heavily involved in promoting (open) standards (OpenGL, OpenCL, DirectX) for graphics software.

If 10-bit per channel color is important, be careful because not all of them really deliver that for Color, and not all displays do that either ...

Cheers,
Bart
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Bart,

Thanks for the helpful response. Did you build your PC from parts or just specified and added yourself that Quadro graphics card? I wonder whether the building of a PC is just a matter of assembly in the defined slots of the mother board, or does one have to do some soldering too and setting of pins?

Asher
 
Bart,

Thanks for the helpful response. Did you build your PC from parts or just specified and added yourself that Quadro graphics card? I wonder whether the building of a PC is just a matter of assembly in the defined slots of the mother board, or does one have to do some soldering too and setting of pins?

Hi Asher,

I bought my Dell workstation pre-installed with the Quadro card. Assembling a PC from scratch usually requires no soldering, but it does mean having to get good matching components (like motherboard and memory modules) which may take some expertise or good advice.

I wouldn't try building my own if I had little experience or technological backup. I remember even someone as experienced as Cem, requiring several component swaps when he built his PC, because there was some instability issue which, if I recall correctly, turned out to be a bad memory match between different memory modules (despite compatible specs).

Once things are running, it's usually simple to only upgrade a single component like a graphics card by swapping it after first getting all drivers for the new unit.

I don't like Windows 8.1, but Windows 7 (Ultimate) may become harder to get since Windows 10 (I believe they may skip 9) is supposed to be launched next year. That version is supposedly again better suited for non-touch screen users.

Cheers,
Bart
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Do you use touch screen, Bart?

I see slick Microsoft Ads, poking fun at Mac laptops "demonstrating" the Mac "touchscreen" which just indents when it gets poked or stroked, LOL!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Yes, I can imagine that one would get arm ache unless the monitor was set up like an easel. The LCD Wacom monitor screens look nice, but are they the quality of the like of Eizo and NEC?

I can imagine using such a screen for Photoshop editing, but at an angle on a special desk with elbow room to rest on!

Asher
 

Tom dinning

Registrant*
Hi Asher.
The physio calls it 'Ape Arm Syndrome'. He says if you're an ape its OK to pick bananas all day but if you are human, pointing at things will give you a pain in the neck. Stick with the mouse or tablet.
I've been using CC and W8 since CC was set up. No problems here, but then again, I'm not looking for them. Should I? Nothing fancy about the computer either. Just your stock and standard HP Omni straight out of Harvey Norman. HAve I offended anyone?
Cheers
Tom
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hi Asher.

The physio calls it 'Ape Arm Syndrome'. He says if you're an ape its OK to pick bananas all day but if you are human, pointing at things will give you a pain in the neck.

Never heard of that Aussie affection! Here, human and ape are blended into one genome!


I've been using CC and W8 since CC was set up. No problems here, but then again, I'm not looking for them. Should I? Nothing fancy about the computer either. Just your stock and standard HP Omni straight out of Harvey Norman. HAve I offended anyone?

That's good to hear. What anti-virus do you use? It's been so long since I was in PC territory.

I'll start looking at pricing.

Asher
 
Hi Asher,

I use both Lightroom 5.6 and Photoshop CC 2014 on a PC.

My pc is not new and it is assembled piecemeal either when I need a new part of if my son is upgrading his computer, I get his better than mine left overs. :)

At first when I switched from CS6 to CC, I found it to be very slow in Photoshop and although many seemed to be having a similar problem, I kept hearing Adobe say there wasn't one. I would work and after working on a big file, I would have problems as Adobe holds on to memory and wouldn't release it even after you closed your files, so things would slow to a crawl and I would have to shut down PS and reboot it.

I couldn't understand what was happening but then recently discovered that Photoshop CC has an autosave feature and this (to me) seems to have been the culprit. I have shut that off and also took off many gradient styles that I had created and saved in Photoshop. I can still access them but they are no longer stored in memory even when I don't need them. Now PS seems to breeze along nicely.

The computer I'm using is not anything very strong. I use Windows 7, not eager to upgrade as many I know are still not happy with it even after all this time. I have 2 core 2 duos each 2.2GH and I have 8 GIGS of Ram. I used to have Nvidea as my graphics card but exchanged it for the AMD Radeion 6800 series. Not new but still really good.

With this system, I use Photoshop and Lightroom both at the same time, flowing between one and the other and I always also have my browser open with tabs open, Skype is open and I am probably also listening to music and even sometimes I also have the printer running. So plenty.

All this to say, I don't believe you would have a problem with a PC, and if you decide to build one on your own and need info about what type of RAM you would need etc for a specific board, it is quite easy to find the information online especially if you are buying new parts, usually the information of what type of Ram or what type of processor you can use on your motherboard is available to you. An intel processor will not work on an AMD motherboard, but will on an Nvidea one. Stuff like that.

Building a PC today is not very difficult as everything has just plugs and clicks into place. Internal hard drives already have bays where you simply slide them in. Even the processor just needs a tiny dab of thermal paste that will come with it. If you have no idea at all what you are doing, obviously, getting one already decked out with everything is easy, non-stressful and not very expensive. Any computer with enough RAM, quad-core which is quite basic today and upgrading to a good amount of hard drive space is not that expensive either. I would suggest an extra hard drive (or external hard drive) that can keep backups but also to use as your scratch disk. I have several; the original 250GB C drive, a 3TB D drive (for backups and scratch disk) a 1GB F drive with older files and a 2GB G drive (for movies, music etc., and original uploading of photos etc., ) and I have a 2TB external that I put an extra backup of any images that are for print.

Good luck with your search! :)
Maggie
 
Hi Asher

I have a high-end custom PC that’s about four years old. I researched and bought the components and got a friend who is a hardware specialist to build it for me.

It has what was then a high-end i7 chip, 24GB RAM and an SSD for the C Drive (now 256GB and recently upgraded). My data drive is 4x2GB RAID 10 (WD Red) and I have a further 1TB drive for such things as Lightroom cache and Photoshop scratch file. Maybe I will change that to an SSD at some stage. I back up to a 5x3TB DroboS.

I do recall initially having a problem with memory and needing to replace the chips but generally it has been pretty reliable.

My monitors are NEC 2690 and NEC 2090, older generation so 8 bit per channel. I am tentatively tempted to upgrade at some time to a forthcoming 4K NEC monitor but I haven’t checked to see whether my motherboard will support an appropriate video card.

I use Lightroom and Photoshop CC 2014 on Windows 8.1. These work fine. I think 8.1 is fine and improved over 7. They made some unfortunate decisions on the interface but you quickly get used to that.

You may find these links of interest:
 

Tom dinning

Registrant*
Never heard of that Aussie affection! Here, human and ape are blended into one genome!




That's good to hear. What anti-virus do you use? It's been so long since I was in PC territory.

I'll start looking at pricing.

Asher

I don't know a lot about computers. 'Black Box Theory' applies. What I do know is the computer needs to keep up with the software and file size. I upgrade my computer every 3years, along with my car. That way I can keep up with the traffic both ways.
When I bought the D800 my old computer couldn't cope. It moved like a granny in a green grocer. I upgraded to CC and went to 16RAM (whatever that is) and problem solved. I have a bank of external hard drives (about 12T )attached for storage and backup and a drawer full of portables for traveling. When I travel I use my SSD laptop with Lightroom. Perfect.
Seems like it's all apples. You just need to decide how many apples you can afford and which flavour you like.
McAfee seem to suit the bill for keeping me safe. Only once in 15years have I had a bug sneak by and they sorted it out for me. Mind you, I trust no one. It was probably a porn site link. I love it when McAfee send me a message. "Red alert. Do you really want to open this web page? " what a stupid question. I'm stark naked and covered in lubricant and they want to know if I want to go there. Their morals are a bit too high is all.
Cheers
Tom
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hello Folks

I don't know if this article pertains to this subject but it is of interest and some of you may find it helpful.

http://simon.tindemans.eu/cm/webcm


Jim,

I've opened the pool cover - it's about to rain. A distinction of architecture following in the footsteps of Frank Lloyd Wright. All buildings have at elast one major leak!

Yes, even in Southern California, and having just got off the ladder to seal a very troublesome window, a good read is my way of resting. I've printed out several of Simon Tinderman's articles and that's now my reward. That and a great cup of English tea!

Thanks for the rich link!

Asher
 
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