Speaking Digital

Sorry for the long lapse in getting the next installment in the workflow series out the door. Holidays, work and sickness have kept me busy. Enough of the excuses and on to more important matters – my computer hardware and software setup for photography. Let me get this out in the open right away – I’m a Mac guy through and through. While some of the things I will discuss pertain to Mac and Windows users, a good majority of this post will be Mac-focused.

Computer Hardware

Desktop

My desktop is a dual 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro with 12GB of RAM and 8TB of total on board storage (four 2TB drives.) I have a Promise SmartStor DS4600 external hard drive enclosure with 4TB (3TB usable in a RAID5) as my Time Machine backup drive. I currently have a dual monitor setup. One 30″ Apple Cinema Display (not sure for how much longer as it seems to be acting up) and one Dell 2009W 20″ display. I’ve got your typical Apple keyboard, but am using Apple’s Magic Mouse. It’s a very nice mouse, especially having the previous generation Mighty Mouse and it’s eventually-going-to-fail top roller ball. The whole top surface of the mouse is touch sensitive (think iPhone or iPod Touch) and supports multi-finger gestures.

Laptop

My laptop is a 15″, 2.66GHz Intel i7 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM and 500GB of internal storage. While this guy doesn’t see a whole lot of photographic action, I have used it a couple of times to shoot tethered (camera directly attached to the laptop) or work on photos while traveling. It’s a good size as the 17″ is a behemoth (in both physical size and weight) and the 13″ is too small for my liking. The new unibody Apple laptops have much higher battery life than previous generations (Apple claims 8-9 hours on a single charge for the 15″) which is a major plus for working away from the office (and outlets.)

Computer Software

Operating System

At the base level, I’m running Apple’s latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, on both computers. While there wasn’t a whole lot of on-the-surface upgrades in 10.6 over 10.5, Apple streamlined things under the hood. By making this version of the OS Intel Mac only, Apple was able to reduce the overall footprint of the OS on your hard drive (you should see about a 7GB gain in storage space after upgrade.) This OS is also 64-bit, so things should seem a bit snappier moving around the OS and using your apps (most recently updated apps are 64-bit capable.) Anybody running 10.5 on an Intel Mac should seriously consider upgrading to 10.6 (especially since it only costs $29.)

Photo Library Management Software

I use Apple’s Aperture to manage my photos (technically my photo library), all 27,912 items (Aperture 3 allows you to manage the videos shot on your camera as well as your photos) in my Library. I’ve been an Aperture user since day one (literally, I ordered a copy as soon as Aperture was announced back in 2005 or 2006.) I’ve tried using Adobe’s Lightroom (not since it was an initial release beta) but wasn’t a big fan of it. The layout didn’t seem as intuitive and I felt like I was clicking around way to much to get the same things done as in Aperture.

I have my Aperture Library on one drive in my Mac Pro and my Vault (Aperture allows for one-click backup of your library) is on another drive. I don’t use these drives for anything else except for my Library and Vault. A waste of two drives you say? It depends on how you look at it. I don’t want to have to worry about shuffling files around if my Library gets large enough. Plus, it gives me piece of mind knowing the only thing on those drives are my photos. Plus, I’ve got two other drives with 4TB of space.

Photo Editing Software

While Aperture allows for some editing, my workhorse is Adobe Photoshop CS5. Photoshop really doesn’t need an introduction since it’s been around seemingly forever (I used version 3 (I think) back in high school in the mid to late 90′s.) I will say if you’re using an older version of Photoshop, you may want to consider upgrading to CS5 as it is finally 64-bit (capable of addressing more memory) and much snappier.

I have Nik Software’s Viveza, Silver Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Sharpener Pro, and Dfine Aperture plugins. These plugins are phenomenal, especially Silver Efex Pro (black and white effects) and Color Efex Pro (color effects). You can see some of the results in the 2010 CHS Football Captains and Seniors album in my gallery. There are plenty of point and click effects that are easily tweaked to your liking in these plugins. Nik is also known for their U-Point technology, which allows you to specify specific areas to apply effects or adjustments to.

For working with HDR photos, I use Photomatix Pro from HDRsoft. This software gives you plenty of options for working with HDR in a very clean and simple interface. Nik has recently come out with HDR Efex Pro, and if it is anything like the rest of their software, it might be worth looking at. I may give it a try considering how much I like their other products.

Back Up Software

I have two methods of backing up my files – local and remote. Locally, I use Apple’s Time Machine, which is built into the operating system. It runs every hour and backs up everything (except for my Aperture Library and Vault) to my external hard drive. I don’t worry about having my Aperture Library or Vault on the external drive since they’re on different internal drives and the chance of both drives failing and destroying the data is slim.

Remotely, I use Backblaze to backup my Mac. Backblaze is constantly backing things up online, so be prepared to sacrifice some of your bandwidth. It’s a very simple piece of software. Run the installer and you’re done. You can fine tune things (specify what not to back up, adjust backup speed, etc.) if you so choose, but for most people it’s set it and forget it. Even better is the cost – $50 per year for unlimited storage. That’s truly unlimited storage – I’ve got about 612GB of data stored with them. Restoring your files is easy. Head to the web site, login, choose what you want to restore and download. If you have an enormous amount of data to restore, it may take some time to compress it for downloading or you may consider having to put on DVD(s) ($99) or USB hard drive(s) ($189).

In a nutshell, that’s my computer hardware and software. I didn’t want to go into too much detail with things as some items will be covered in future posts. I’d be glad to answer questions or clarify things, so just leave a comment below or drop me a line.