The First Name In Digital Photography

One of the most important things you can do to ensure the success of your photographic experience is to properly configure your computer. Computer configuration for digital photography is as critical to the long term health of your computer as it is to your sanity. If you computer is constantly crashing you will not be a happy camper for very long. Luckily, you can take steps to avoid problems. And when those problems arise (and they surely will) you will be in a position to rapidly and efficiently lessen their effect. While this is written with the Mac in mind, many of these concepts will apply to the Windows platform as well.

Partition your hard drive. This is a must. How many partitions you make is up to you. You’ll probably want at least three. The first partition, which we call Studio, should be around 1 gig. The second partition is called PS Scratch because it’s primary use is as a scratch disk for Photoshop. The third partition, called Images, is the entire rest of your hard drive. The Images volume would like to be 750 mb minimum and as large as 4-6 gigs.

If you are going to run your computer as a capture station only, make the Studio partition 500 mb. If you’re going to run Photoshoot, Photoshop, color management, and Quark; make the Studio partition around 750 mb. What you are interested in doing is, providing an intimate environment for your computer to operate within. The Studio volume wants to run the OS, the applications, and possess enough extra room to act as printer space (some printers like the scratch volume to reside where the OS is stored). Add up what you need and adjust the size of the partition so it will hold your software including the printer’s scratch space. The idea here is to separate the vast size of the Images volume from the tidy size of the Studio volume. That way the read/write head doesn’t have to look at the entire disk when you command the computer to perform some of the application’s functions. It looks to the large Images volume when it wants to save or open files and it looks toward the application in the size-optimized Studio volume when it needs to look at code to perform the chosen function.

PS Scratch is the second partition volume on your hard disk. This volume performs several functions, all of them temporary. It is essential that you do not use PS Scratch as a repository for saving image files. Do not fill it up with applications. Oddly enough, we want to keep it essentially empty. What we will install on PS Scratch is a small System Folder and Norton Utilities. The rest of the volume is intended to remain empty, for primary selection in Photoshop’s File>Preferences>Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks dialog box. Make PS Scratch the primary selection and Images the secondary selection. Once these two pieces of software are installed, PS Scratch may be selected under the Apple Icon>Control Panels>Startup Disk. Then choose Restart. The computer will restart and use the PS Scratch as the operating system. Verify that the computer is using PS Scratch by recognizing the topmost icon at the top, right corner of the monitor display. It should be PS Scratch. This will allow the repair and defragmentation of Studio and Images with Norton Utilities’ Disk Doctor. After running Norton, return to Studio using Apple>Control Panels>Startup Disk>Studio. This placing of Norton and a System Folder is the most important use for PS Scratch because it will help you to stay shooting when non-partitioned computer operators are searching for an emergency startup disk, because all computers eventually have startup problems. When your Mac has a problem you’ll know it because PS Scratch will display atop the icon stack at the right side of the monitor display. However if it does, you’re ready to begin immediate repairs on Studio because Norton is already installed on PS Scratch. Some repairs cannot be made to an operating system if the computer is currently running on that operating system. If you’re running on PS Scratch you can perform any available repair, with Norton, on the Studio volume. If shooting is critical, you can shoot the camera from PS Scratch’s operating system, just load the T2 driver into the Extensions folder.

Another temporary use for PS Scratch is the authoring of CD’s. You’ll need free space to write CD volumes. PS Scratch can be configured to allow the 650 mb that CD’s will hold. Remember to delete any CD authoring files before using Photoshop or you may get the Primary Scratch Disk Full error message.

Images is the third volume partition on your disk. There is nothing special here, it just holds the images you shoot. Now that modern computers are shipping with 4 gig drives you’ll be able to set aside at least 2 gigs for the Images volume.

Any additional volumes are up to the personal preference of the shooter. If you use your shooting computer for office type duties you may want to set aside a partition for the installation of PC emulation software, like SoftWindows.

When you install System software you may want to limit the installation to some degree. In general do not install the Easy Install version. The Custom Install option will allow you to pick and choose those features that you’re interested in installing. Install only features you’ll actually use. Some of the features tend to be problematic to the operation of certain applications and some seem problematic to the Mac’s general operation. When you install, try following this installation procedure: Choose the volume you want to install on, which for this example will be Studio. Accept all of the legalese and as soon as it’s available, click on the Customize option. Install only Mac OS 8 and Open Transport PPP(if you’re going to use PPP for internet service provider (ISP) connection. Choose Start. When the following dialog box comes up choose Custom Install. Install the following:

System Software for this Computer
Apple Menu Items
Control Panels
Extensions
Fonts

After the software loads on Studio, repeat the process for PS Scratch but install “Core System Software” rather than “System Software for this Computer”. On the PS Scratch volume, change the folder names to lower case, so that when you are copying between system folder windows you know which folder lives on which volume. It can be very confusing if you have several folders open on the desktop because the folders from both volumes have the same names.

Determine what uses your computer will perform. Delete any unused extensions. Speech software, and printers you’ll never use, come immediately to mind. If you’re not sure, move the extensions in question to a folder you make within the System Folder called Extensions Unused. That way if you need them at a later date, you can drag them into the Extensions folder to use them.

Choose a highlight color for changing filenames. Try to pick a color that is immediately apparent when you single click a filename. The default black highlight color is not different enough from a single click icon selection. This can have frustrating consequences if you inadvertently change, in haste, a filename in a folder containing a large number of files using similar but slightly different filenames. You have only to change one character in the file name to cause that file to change its position in the window, depending on how the Views parameters are configured in the Mac OS. If you view by name, for instance in a folder containing 100 sku titled files, one inadvertent filename change can bury the file. Choosing a highlight color such as the Mac’s green, will immediately attract the attention of the shooter, identifying an opportunity to change the filename. Pick a color that rarely appears as photographed reflectance. Green is good. If you do bury a file, View by date and find the file at the top of the window.

You may want to make alias icons of your applications and place them at the bottom of your monitor screen. These icons allow the opening of applications and the dropping of multiple selected files on the icon, which will open all the selected files at once. This opening of several files is very useful to the Photoshop worker working in a high volume production environment.

The color you choose for the background of the operating system interface is important. The careful and concerned shooter will choose, as his background color, a neutral gray. This will have the least intrusive impact on the emotional perception of the photographed image because an adjacent background color can influence the appearance of any photographed reflectance. In fact, the MegaVision Photoshoot interface is designed with this adjacency concept in mind because the software surrounds the image with white, because that’s the paper color most often surrounding an image on the printed page.