DSLRUsers.com

Check it out 4xprocessors:

http://www.apple.com/au/powermac/


Aperture - new mac photo software

http://www.apple.com/aperture/

EDIT - also, the Powerbooks have been upgraded as well. Screens are important to note - more pixels and brighter

http://store.apple.com/133-622/WebObjects/australiastore.woa/80105/wo/7l613yIyztvx21uH6gJ1QNSRv72/0.SLID?nclm=PowerBook&mco=83457E8E

Thanks for the heads up Heath,

Certainly very interesting stuff happening there. I stopped short of buying a G5 tower for just now because of the imminent change to Intel processing in Macs by the second-quarter next year - plus, as fast as the 2.7GHz tower may be, a mate who built himself a PC tower for less money is getting things done much quicker. Just last weekend we timed opening a 22MP capture on the G5 and his home made jobbie. The PC took 3 seconds, the G5 took 12 seconds.

Aperture also looks interesting. I am too inexperienced with all this as yet to have a firm grip on things but what I am finding is that Bridge, ACR and PhotoShop are not as useful to me as the recently upgraded Canon DPP. If Aperture does what I think they are saying it will do it would certainly be well worth a look. Being set in my working methods I get everything right at the time of capture - Colour Temperature Meter, Light Meter, manual focus with a mind to depth of field, tripod, mirror-up, cable release, etc. In my first editorial assignment with the Canon last week I found that all I needed to do was convert the captured files, add a little sharpening (which DPP does incredibly well ... disappointing in a way after forking out for Photo Kit Sharpener) and save as an 8-bit TIFF. Only one shot went into PhotoShop for some healing brush work on a reflection of a cable on the floor in the chrome oil-tank cover of the bike.

Now Heath, I need some education by a young genius like yourself - What the flop is 76.6 gigaflops all about?

Cheers,

I won't even pretend to know .

Mac's certainly can't win a bang for buck argument. I prefer the best of both worlds, PC and Mac. PC for play, MAC for work.

Thank you for your candour Heath, it is appreciated.

Sheetshooter wrote:I need some education by a young genius like yourself - What the flop is 76.6 gigaflops all about?

I'm not as young as Heath, but I can help...

A gigaflop is a measure of the speed of a processor... It is one billion floating point operations per second. Therefore this processor can handle 76.6 billion floating point calculations per second. Pretty impressive if, like me, you can remember wardrobe sized processors being measured in megaflops...

Thanks very much John,

It seems everthing is getting so much smaller and faster that an entire new vocabulary of the infinitesimal is called for. Just the other day I heard explained what a pico-litre is - a far cry from the three gallon deep-tank of my youth or even the 1 litre bottles of the Jobo.

Cheers,

In addition to what John says - flops were invented as universal CPU speed measurement scale to compare processors of different architecture because while speed in MHz might be close, real productivity might be quite different

To the mac users out there:

When Aperture ships (6-8 weeks) I'll see if i can get evaluation copy and post a review of how it performs both on a 15" Powerbook at a dual CPU G5.

Looks like an exciting product though - more pro and more capable than iPhoto, probably will perform better than Nikon Crapture. Now I need to just buy some more external disk for my powerbook

Thanks Daniel, I will do the same test on similar machines to lessen irregularities in our results.

Sheetshooter wrote:release, etc. In my first editorial assignment with the Canon last week I found that all I needed to do was convert the captured files, add a little sharpening (which DPP does incredibly well ... disappointing in a way after forking out for Photo Kit Sharpener) and save as an 8-bit TIFF.

Sorry to hijack, but I didn't know there was an upgrade to DPP! Some sniffing round revealed v2.0.3 is out of DPP. I only have v1.6.1. Must download it and play with it. I use DPP for everything except PS for sharpening ... sounds like I don't even need now ..

Another review relating to APERTURE.

http://forums.photographyreview.com/sho ... hp?t=15160

This is very exciting, yes, but I'm not sure it'll sway me from Photoshop - I only see Aperture as a "helper" application rather than a full-blown photo processing suite. And it's certainly a lot of money just for a helper application!

Until it is seen, who can say, but I get the imporession that in thwe right hands it is far more than just a 'helper' programme, as you put it. Frankly, I would be more than happy to get away from what little I do with Photoshop. It is full of school sand-pit stuff that serves little purpose in my world. An application that would facilitate file preparation for delivery to clients in a no-nonsense fashion with the utmost preservation of the undamaged file data is what I am seeking.

Cheers,

You make an interesting point there Shooter, PS is one big program the vast majority of which is of academic interest to me only. I think I would be like a lot of amateurs in that we only use a fraction of the program.

There's a useful <a href="http://www.macintouch.com/aperture.html">discussion</a> of Aperture on Macintouch, including an initial impression from someone who used it briefly.

--Chuan

Further discussion of Apple APERTURE here:

http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/23554.html

and here:


http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/conten ... -7887-8063

Sheetshooter wrote:Thanks for the heads up Heath,

Certainly very interesting stuff happening there. I stopped short of buying a G5 tower for just now because of the imminent change to Intel processing in Macs by the second-quarter next year - plus, as fast as the 2.7GHz tower may be, a mate who built himself a PC tower for less money is getting things done much quicker. Just last weekend we timed opening a 22MP capture on the G5 and his home made jobbie. The PC took 3 seconds, the G5 took 12 seconds.

Aperture also looks interesting. I am too inexperienced with all this as yet to have a firm grip on things but what I am finding is that Bridge, ACR and PhotoShop are not as useful to me as the recently upgraded Canon DPP. If Aperture does what I think they are saying it will do it would certainly be well worth a look. Being set in my working methods I get everything right at the time of capture - Colour Temperature Meter, Light Meter, manual focus with a mind to depth of field, tripod, mirror-up, cable release, etc. In my first editorial assignment with the Canon last week I found that all I needed to do was convert the captured files, add a little sharpening (which DPP does incredibly well ... disappointing in a way after forking out for Photo Kit Sharpener) and save as an 8-bit TIFF. Only one shot went into PhotoShop for some healing brush work on a reflection of a cable on the floor in the chrome oil-tank cover of the bike.

Now Heath, I need some education by a young genius like yourself - What the flop is 76.6 gigaflops all about?

Cheers,

sheetshooter

giga: = billion
flops = floating point operations per second, mathematical instructions

the G5 64bit altivec unit processes floating point operations fast because it utilizes a 64bit processor that is twice as fast as a 32bit processor with a few enhancements, but what apple neglects to mention even if it's processor is 64-bit capable, the bus speed is stuck at 66 Mhz making a datapath bottleneck, like having a v8 engine in a toyota echo

MACOSX is fully 64 bit compatible but apple also neglects to mention that only certain applications can take full advantage of 64-bit processing like select enhanced photoshop filters(guassian blue) and 64-bit processing only effectively works on computers that can address more than 2 gigabytes of memory at any one time, photoshop cant do that.
I know i have been using a dual 64-bit G5 at work for the last year and my $1000 crap box athlon PC is faster than the mac in application switching and some photoshop actions.

so all this roar about gigaflops is just marketing crap

if you want serious gigaflops buy a paralell processing supercomputer like Silicon Graphics from which i have real experiewnce with 64-bit processors, applications and operating systems now that's kick ass, join a couple of sgi's togehter in parallel and you can get some serious terraflops at the expense of a years powerbill in a day.

yes i used to be a geek but not anymore.