Re: CMYK or RGB? Macintosh or Windows? How's a poor guy to upgrade?

Subject: Re: CMYK or RGB? Macintosh or Windows? How's a poor guy to upgrade?
From: cpwinter -at- rahul -dot- net
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 08:56:27 -0700


On 18 Oct 2002, at 10:33, hedley_finger -at- myob -dot- com -dot- au wrote:

>
> Keyboard tappers:
>
> My daughter's partner intends to leave the hospitality industry and change
> career to desktop publishing and multimedia. He intends to buy a new
> computer for his studies and therein lies the problem: Macintosh or Windows?
> From being in full employment with a steady income, he is about to become
> an impoverished student, so needs to spend his savings wisely on computer
> hardware.
>

Here in the US, in my experience, the choice of computer is often
determined by where one goes to school. When I took courses leading to
my tech writing certificate, Framemaker was taught on a PC, while the
Photoshop instructor used Macs. Note that these software applications,
both essential (IMO) to desktop publishing, are available for either
platform. I had some problems due to being unable to carry data files
from one platform to another. (True, this was mostly due to my lack of
experience.)

I mention this in case your daughter's partner doesn't yet know
whether he will run into a similar situation in his courses. However, if he
can buy a computer and then use that for all his coursework, he should
go for the less expensive option -- the PC -- and buy the software he
needs on academic discount.

> Macintosh does CMYK and Windows does RGB, so the unthinking decision would
> be to simply go for Macintosh. Yet Macintosh hardware comparable to similar
> Windows hardware is so much more expensive (remember, we are on a budget
> here).
>
> So is anybody out there using the full panoply of Adobe graphic arts
> products (InDesign, PageMaker, Photoshop, Illustrator) to produce
> publications for PRINT on Windows, with high-quality, fully separable CMYK
> PDFs or camera art? Is this possible? Is this desirable? Are the
> algorithms for converting Windows RGB to the CMYK for print sufficiently
> acceptable? Which hardware should this man buy?
>

For what it's worth I use Framemaker, Photoshop, Illustrator and
Pagemaker (along with the MS Office suite, communication apps, and
CAD software) on a second-hand Thinkpad 770 with 192MB of RAM. It's
not what I would call a production setup, but it works well for small jobs
like brochures, business cards and Web pages.

> I look forward to advice from the four-colour printing experts.
> Unfortunately, most of my work is B&W or two-colour, so I have no
> experience in this field.

I'm not an expert in color printing. I generally make a PDF version and
take that to Kinko's (a nationwide chain of service bureaus here) to have
it printed on their big laser printers. So far, I have not had a job for which
quality of color rendition is critical, so Kinko's has sufficed.

My first recommendation at this stage is to gather information. By that
I mean: search out tutorial sites on the Web; get on as many mailing
lists like this one as possible; and follow Usenet groups like
comp.publish.prepress. Also, there are a lot of good books out there.
One possibility is "Digital Prepress Complete", though it's out of print. I'm
sure there are modern equivalents.

Chris


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References:
CMYK or RGB? Macintosh or Windows? How's a poor guy to upgrade?: From: hedley_finger

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