Digital darkroom

[johnbay]

I have been shooting for the past few years with a Hexar RF and have most recently acquired a Fed 2 and a Zorki 3S. Years ago I developed my own film and printed in a wet darkroom. I want return to developing my film, start scanning, and digitally post processing the images. After much research, with a good bit of it provided by members of the RFF, I am planning on purchasing a Nikon Coolscan VED and strongly considering an Imac pentium 2gig, 20". My questions revolve around the hard drive and external drive capacities. I do not shoot digital except for family snaps. Almost all of my work will be scanned black and white negatives or C-41 negatives. Any other advice will be most welcome especially regarding the photoediting end? As I am a beginner, photoshop elements, lightzone, others? Thanks in advance.


johnbay

 

[Ronald M]

Photoshop elements is well worth the $99. Full photoshop has a lot of graphic arts programs, which you probably will not use, bundled with it for a large additional cost. Yes the full ps has as few nice features, but not at 5x the cost.

Lightzone is good, but costs more.

PSE5 will not run on a Mac. Buy 4.

The computer you describe will be more than adequate.

 

[mwooten]

Remember that Adobe gives an outstanding discount to students on the full versions of its products. You don't have to be a full time student to qualify (at least I didn't). Since you do state that you are a beginner, then if available in your area, I would recommend taking a course on Photoshop at a local school/college. This would also give you the money saving status of "student."

As I read the current specs on the 20" iMac, I see that it has a couple of Firewire 400 ports. For external firewire drives a good source is at this site (LINK).

For output I print with an Epson C88 with after-market refillable ink tanks and black/grey ink. It has worked very well for me, and has proved to be rather economical.

 

[GeneW]

Photoshop Elements 5 is very good and not too expensive. The GIMP is good, free, but very quirky. Okay once you learn its idiosyncracies.

Yesterday I upgraded my Photoshop to CS3 and love it already. I personally use a lot of the advanced features but it's overkill for a lot of photographers.

Gene

 

[bigdog]

I don't know the pricing on hard drive storage right now but try to purchase at the sweet spot for pricing/gig size. When I lost my single hard drive last summer, I installed a second internal hard drive and an external USB connected Western Digital My Book hard drive...all 3 drives are 320 gigs. I use Acronis True Image software to do automatic back up of my drives. My color scans run about 120 meg each and black and white at 35 meg each. If you are going to do any video then you need even more disk space.

I use Silverfast for my Dimage 5400 scanner which I can recommend. I have the full blown version of Photoshop but I really only use dodge, burn, crop, highlight and contrast . If I shot more color then maybe I would use saturation and color correction features more.

I had the negatives when my hard drive got wiped out...thank God for film, but I still had to rescan many of my favorite shots which I had spent many hours in Photoshop and printing proofs to get them the way I wanted.

I can also recommend the Epson R2400 for printing, IMHO, beautiful black and white images. I print mostly on Epson's Velvet Fine Art paper which is matte finish.

 

[johnbay]

Thanks everyone for the valuable info. Regarding the internal hard drive for the imac, I assume that I should probably order the max available. Again, thanks.

johnbay

 

[robert blu]

Ronald: "PSE5 will not run on a Mac. Buy 4"

I just bought imac 24 with lightroom which is ok for general handling of my scans. But need sometimes to do some more sophisticated work. Do you know if PSE 4 (for mac) can support the 16 BIT files ? of course question is because CS3 is expensive, very expensive...
regards
robert

 

[jobo]

Regarding the internal hard drive for the imac, I assume that I should probably order the max available.

Plus an external one for quick backups, IMO; A lesson I learned after my second hard disk failure... :bang:

/J

 

[ClaremontPhoto]

With an iMac you should think about .Mac for backup to their servers.

Your computer can backup every day to .Mac, and restore if/when needed.

I think .Mac comes free with iMacs for a few months then you need to pay for it.

 

[johnbay]

Digital Darkroom

Digital Darkroom

Thanks for emphasizing the necessity for external hard drive(s). Part of my original question pertained to recommended capacities, simply how much to initially purchase. Again thanks for all of the input. Jon, I will certainly check into .Mac.


johnbay