Thread: Photo Editing set-up - Monitor Calabration Wows - Help Please

Originally Posted by Waldo

But also if you're doing graphic intensive work ala in Photoshop which might be apply in your case, you get what you pay for - you don't want to invest in screens etc. to be let down by a dodgy 2¢ card.

Photoshop is a trivial application when it comes to graphics card grunt; basically, its load on a card is:

'Here's some pixels; colour 'em, thanks. No real hurry.'

Compared to the average game that asks:

'Here's a 3D vector wireframe...I'd like it if you could create an occlusion model to exclude sides of the wireframe which are hidden, convert the wireframe to a bitmap, map a series of photos onto the visible bitmap coordinates while allowing for 3D distortion (reference the original 3D wireframe), then apply a bump map to the bitmap to create the illusion of texture so that lighting reflections/3D ray tracing look sorta natural (oh, you have to do the ray tracing too!), then add an extra texture/damage layer make it look even more real...and then can you anti-alias the jaggy edges to nice smooth edges...thanks. Ummmm - this needs to be done 60 times a second and your photo files will be around 100 megabytes per frame, and could you cache a few frames ahead so we don't get screen tearing....ok??"

As long as you have dual DVI outputs on the card, you can drive a 30 inch screen. (My screen is running from an Nvidia 7600 which is the 'budget' version of the 7900 - it happily runs a 24 inch and a 19 inch screen at the same time)

If I were you, I'd sit down at a 30 inch monitor for a while and see how you like it; I've got a 24 incher and to me, it is quite big enough - at average sitting distance it more than fills the area that my eyes can comfortably cover (if I'm looking at one corner, I almost have to physically move my head to see the diagonally opposite corner clearly; a 30 incher would make this a necessity).

Originally Posted by Master Splinter

Photoshop is a trivial application when it comes to graphics card grunt; basically, its load on a card is:

'Here's some pixels; colour 'em, thanks. No real hurry.'

Try a P/shop file with 20 odd layers about 1GB in size with stuff all RAM and a low end graphics card and you'll sit for ever waiting for it to do something.

But from reading your post you do a lot of gaming where you want a good screen with a high refresh rate and a card that supports it - exactly same applies to graphic intensive applications. Speed means things done quicker and more money.

Thanks Waldo and MS for your informed input to this thread. I am learning so much from your knowledge and experience and the additional research your comments encourage me to do.

I didn't make it to the Apple shop today and to be honest I am having some second thoughts about Apple Cinema. Rumor on the net implies that Apple is about to release new models with new technology - always a risk with computers and components I guess. Also I have been questioning why I want/need a 30" monitor just as MS has suggested I think about.

To my great surprise the LOML has tonight encouraged me to go for the Eizo ColorEdge CG241W if I think it the right solution. She's a good woman. I Just hope she will be in the same mood in about 18 months when I want to upgrade my table saw and purchase a jointer and thicknesser.

I leave Thursday for Qld, overnighting in Brisbane then 6 days with friends on the Gold Coast. I will use the time to think about the plunge into Eizo. It's a very specific graphics Monitor with little versatility - doesn't even have sound as standard and given the price difference to Apple it's a big leap for an amateur. The 5 year warrantee on Eizo is a significant plus.

I wont have access to the forum while I am away but look forward to any further comment/ advice you may have to offer.

Regards

Originally Posted by Waldo

.... good screen with a high refresh rate and a card that supports it - exactly same applies to graphic intensive applications. Speed means things done quicker and more money.

Until very, very recently (CS4) Photoshop has not done any processing on the graphics card, so if you've seen slowdowns, its been because of the CPU, available RAM and hard drive access speed.

Not even a crossfire linked quad processor card with liquid cooling and a $3,000 price tag is going to speed up Photoshop for average tasks such as multi layer large images. And you can only go to about 3 gig of RAM in 32-bit Windows, so with files that use a hefty amount of RAM you'll still get plenty of hard drive thrashing.

http://gizmodo.com/393137/photoshop-...ancy-3d-tricks

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pho...whatsnew_2.htm

To use your card for Photoshop, you'll need an OpenGL compatible graphics card, and you will only see a speedup when doing 3D type manipulation...so if you don't do a lot of playing with perspective, you're still not going to be touching the GPU for the majority of your Photoshop work.

(its only recently that the graphics card manufacturers have turned the GPU into more of a 'general purpose' style chip - the GPGPU. However, it still has limitations on what sort of data it can process and does not replace the even more general purpose design of your CPU - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU )

G'day,
I'm not going to argue on points as we've gone beyond what Hitch originally asked, some are blatantly wrong and I don't care to fart around on them.

Except to write, that yes CRT monitors had better colour, LCDs now equal and rival that. The plus for LCD screens is screen resolution and real estate.

I'm concerned Hitch is now going out to buy a monitor that is beyond what he needs and at twice the price and more than an Apple 23" Cinema Display which has the same gamut range.

I know of many professional Photoshop retouchers who have either a 23", most 30" Cinema Displays, industry leading commercial photographers among them. Now if they can get 100% colour on a Cinema Display - where colour is paramount why aren't they using something else?

When something does the same job equally as well, why spend more money?

Originally Posted by Waldo

G'day,
I'm not going to argue on points as we've gone beyond what Hitch originally asked, some are blatantly wrong and I don't care to fart around on them.

I'd like to know which statements are wrong so that I don't continue to mislead people.


Hitch asked what the good monitors were; I don't see a problem about telling him where the top end of the market is - in the same way, people see Miele or Festool or Lie-Nielson as their quality benchmarks, and some people aren't happy unless they have a Lie-Nielson instead of a Stanley. (Hitch already has a monitor calibration spider and has read technical articles by geeky Photoshop programmers on colour management...so that makes me think that he'd be heading more towards a L-N solution).

In the ad agencies/design studios (who use the photos lovingly crafted by professional photographers and retouchers) that I've had experience with, monitor selection seems to be dominated by what looks cool on the desk of the designer; colour accuracy is further down the list of priorities (if it is there at all...!). Generally, that sort of thing is worried about in pre-press.

Mind you, I don't think a monitor will solve Hitch's problem; the printed version is always going to have a smaller colour space than the on-screen version so there will always be gradient compression happening...a better solution would be to create a printer profile to use in Photoshop to view the image as it will print.

I'm bowing out of this, it's getting stupid.

Waldo and MS thanks again for your input. I used your comments together with heaps of additional research to come to a decision.

I have today ordered a ColorEdge CG242W - delivery will be about 4 to 6 weeks.

Regards

Ian

Don't know if anyone's interested, but the following site is useful when looking at video cards.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards....1=39&card2=566