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Posted on 09/06/19 3:47:03 PM |
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DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5661 Reply  |
Switching to a new iMac - Advantages and pitfalls - for Mac users
Taken down for edit. Back in a short while. _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 09/06/19 3:57:30 PM |
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DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5661 Reply |
Re: Switching to a new iMac - Advantages and pitfalls - for Mac users
Well I have finally almost finished transferring everything to my new iMac and setting up the old MacPro for Ingrid. I thought it might be interesting to other Mac users to set down some of the advantages and disadvantages of upgrading to a new machine. My last machine was purchased in late 2008. At that time I was a professional director of photography with a business with a VAT registration. This meant that with VAT refund and tax allowances I could recuperate about half the cost of the machine and of subsequent upgrades. For this reason I was able to buy a MacPro. It was wonderful and, with upgrades (SSD, Video card, extra memory, supplementary internal drives), has lasted me eleven years. But inevitably it can no longer run up to date OS or indeed many apps. CC19 performed very badly on it. I looked at the possibility of a re-conditioned MacPro but that was likely to go out of date very quickly too. The new MacPro is now announced with prices starting at about 5000$ for the basic machine without monitor. Add a bit more memory and disk capacity and hi res monitor and you arrive easily at 12000$+ !!! Now I am retired I get no VAT refund or tax allowance - I pay full retail. There is no way I can even dream about a new Pro …….. So it had to be iMac. Because I work some very, very large multi layered images certain minimums had to be met. First was a good display size - so the 27”. Next was fast processing - so six processor 3.7Ghz with turbo. Plenty of memory so 32GB. Next was a good video card with plenty of on board memory - Radeon Pro 580X with 8 GB. The next was an SSD primary drive. (I haven’t heard a single good word about fusion drives. The general consensus is not to bother with them.) I would have loved bigger but most I could afford was 500GB. That’s a high end spec for an iMac and it flies …… for the most part. The huge difference from the old MacPro with it's four internal drives is that you only get the one drive. Everything else has to be external. This means that all my image files are now on a large external drive. This means waiting for spin up and slower transfers than I had on the old MacPro’s internal drives. It’s scarcely a major drawback but it’s a bit disconcerting waiting for a few seconds for things like Finder windows to appear. The iMac has been designed and built with style very much in mind but the fact that the entire machine is desktop (rather than a box below the desk mostly out of sight) means that this is rather spoiled by a mass of cabling and dongles at the back spoiling its clean lines. (see picture). If your computer is back to a wall this is no problem but mine sits on an island desk where the back is as visible as the front. The other difficulty was that the radically different architecture and drive arrangements of the two machines made automated transfer of the old machine to the new by migration or time machine more or less impossible. I had to de-activate everything and re-install from scratch and then re register ....... and then move terabytes of data files to external disks. Finally of course I had to create new backups of the new systems. It has taken a very long time. The 27” 5K Retina screen is amazing. You quite literally cannot see pixels anymore. To my surprise I don’t miss my big old 32” Apple Cinema Display. The drawback is you have to completely re-think image sizing with such high pixel densities (5120 x 2880). “Actual Pixels” suddenly looks tiny! The software compensates for this and shows menus etc. at a ‘normal’ size. It also uses ‘pixel doubling’ to make web pages, for example, appear more or less as they always used to. However once you get into Photoshop, or Affinity, or Preview each has their own way of dealing with how pixels are mapped resulting in some very confusing results. I am still trying to get my head round this and how best to set the pixel options for each of these. I am not terribly in love with CC19 although it does perform beautifully on the new machine. Far better than CS6 on the old MacPro. I find the interface ugly and hard to read. Installing plugins and extensions from Adobe is calculated to shorten life-spans. Supposed to be ‘one click’ easy but quite simply doesn’t work a lot of the time. I had to completely give up on some. It offers a ton of cloud options which I simply don’t need ……. but that’s just me and my requirements, not a criticism. I definitely work slower in it but that will of course change as I get accustomed to it. This last bit is just about Mojave’s new dark mode. If, like me, you find this a bit of a mixed blessing then read on ………. I have made some discoveries ...... El Capitan already had a dark interface - but only the main menus. In Mojave’s dark mode everything, and I mean everything, is white on black. This is fine much of the time but can be very disconcerting when things like text editors and email have text windows that are black with white text (although Email has a setting whereby the mail text window can be kept light). Obviously one solution is to switch back and forth between light and dark modes but you need to go into the Systems preferences for this which is tedious. It is clear that lots of people want to be able to switch on the fly as the web is full of posts on how to write a short automator script that will do this on a single keypress. If there are any others among you who find the dark interface a mixed blessing I have found a really useful little donation ware app called NightOwl. (I get no commissions for recommending this. I simply think it's great.) It installs to the task bar and swaps between light and dark mode on single click. But the best thing is it allows you set individual apps to run in their own exclusive mode. So, for example, when I run TextEdit it automatically runs in light mode even when the system setting is dark mode. But the really good thing is it doesn’t switch the entire interface - it simply runs the text app itself in light mode within the context of the dark mode general environment. This is really great! Well there we are. I have wittered on at far too much length ...... but it's been an interesting week! 
_________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |