Disturbing information for image editors and photo editors
Is anyone attempting to use windows Windows Vista for imaging ?
there are some interesting observations here
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/?p=430
"Graphics 2D - Ouch!
The most interesting result was the poor performance of the Graphics 2D
tests on Vista. ..On both dual-boot (test) machines, the best Vista
performance was an amazing 70% slower than XP. Put another way, XP was 3
times faster. Since these are common operations, that is worrying.
with a link to M$'s site:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173477.aspx
which suggests all 2D rendering (ie, non gaming imaging) is now rendered
quite differently to the way it has been on computers as we currently use
them, being handled more as a 2D emulation via a 3D engine.
Basically this means Vista has no real 2D image sup****t - and 2D imaging
is
what we do in photo editing
***********************
2D is bitmapped images of whatever colour depth (usually 8 bit) being
delivered to the monitor. Sharpness, colour accuracy and decent refresh
rates are what 2D are really all about.
3D is handled by the other part of modern video cards, the graphics
processing unit (GPU) which does all sorts of rendering based on the needs
of gamez.. sharpness and colour fidelity are usually discarded in the 3D
rendering to achieve other effects like high frame rates, textures,
shading
and fog effects (to name but a few) - the 3D engine does things like make
grass blow gently in the breeze in a computer game.
3D cards are often utterly rubbish for 2D in that they rarely can deliver
as
sharp an image or with anything approaching the colour accuracy of a true
2D
specific card.
Often the cards sound good because they have bucket loads of ram and
massively fast GPU clock speeds - all of which do utterly nothing for 2D
image rendering.. except compromise whatever 2D activities they can
perform.
It seems 2D specific cards (Matrox) for image editing are a bit of a
rarity
these days in the pro image editing environment which is a shame. a good
2D
card is a pleasure to work with, even though they're expensive.. not that
it
should be an issure for a professional who SHOULD be using the best tools
they can afford! after all, why view 8 bit colour images when you can
view
10 bit ..
more on 3D:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_computer_graphics
and more on what we use, 2D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2D_computer_graphics
**************************
Curious as I was about Apples methods, I looked into the Leopard OS and
found something nasty..
I've spoken to a few more people about the methods used by both Vista OS
and
now the Apple OS and was pointed to this page:
<http://developer.apple.com/do***entation/MacOSX/Conceptual/OSX_Technology_O
verview/GraphicsTechnologies/chapter_4_section_2.html>
which explains:
"Quartz 2D Features provides many im****tant features to user applications,
including the following: Anti-aliasing for all graphics and text"
more on anti-aliasing is to be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing
now that is downright depressing! - "Anti-aliasing for all graphics and
text"
*all*
And the mac geeks I've spoken to confirm this, but I'd like to know more
because this removes the current mac OS from the image editing ranks
altogether.
Anti-aliasing basically translates as 'fuzzing up the jaggedy bits in an
image to make them look more realistic'
For the viewer of the screen doing this trick, that makes images look nice
to them - but it's NOT what you'd want as an image editor. You upsample
your image, it looks nice to you, you load it to the web and to everyone
whos operating system diplays images as 2D (75+% of the world) sees
jaggies
or artifacts that your operating systems graphics rendering hid from you!
For the Windows users you can easily see an example of this, play any old
3D
game and hit print screen .. finish the game, open an image editor and hit
paste - look at the resulting image .. does it look at all like it did in
the game? no. it *IS* however exactly all the information that was
being
fed through the graphics engine - you're seeing ALL the image information
there ever way in the image - however anti-aliasing and other 3D engine
tools were being employed to make it look more realistic - and that's the
crux of it - it ('it' being the actual image data) was being prettied up
by
the graphics engine.
For the whole operating system to be rendering *ALL* images in such a
way
as to make them look prettier is a nice idea but NOT for people doing
image
editing! We need to see what's actually there, not an interpretation!!
No point using an optmized 2D card under such an operating system either,
if
the potential benefits are being eliminated by the OS
Now seriously, this strikes me as a huge flaw in the apple (marketing?)
design - the backbone of these computers was always image pros, for the
apple industry to have compromised their designs this way is as bad as the
Vista graphics engine design and also removes the Leopard OS as being
suitable for image editing altogether.
Final point: Neither Leopard or Windows Vista are of ANY use to image
editors, graphic designers or digital photographers as both operating
systems will never show you the full image data, instead they manipulate
the
presentation of the image to make it look nicer on your screen that it may
actually be.
This is not an interpretation of the facts, these ARE the facts, straight
from the vendors sites, from the links above.
karl
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