New Macbook Pro question

[Peter Langham]

I am going to get a new MBP 15". Is it worth the $200 to get the model with the Nvidia 9600 video card. The only graphic intensive use is large scans of 4x5 negs (greyscale) using a layers based workflow using Photoshop.

Thanks,
Peter

[Doug Dolde]

I doubt if the graphics card will matter much with Photoshop but you may find the MBP a bit slow. I traded mine on a Mac Pro and its much faster and more versatile.

[Richard Wall]

I have an older MBP 15" 2.33Ghz Core II duo, OS-X 10.6.2. Photoshop CS4 Extended still runs well on it. Although, I only have 2Gb of RAM and larger files, 200Mb and higher, do tend to slow the machine down. Photoshop is a memory hog, so I think more memory would be more beneficial than a faster processor or more cores. If you're planning to run PS CS4 on it, you might want the better video card. Photoshop CS4 utilizes OpenGL and pushes several functions off on the GPU, so a better card might help performance. Take a look at what Adobe says:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404898.html

Richard

[Matus Kalisky]

In general - for still images the graphic card does not matter much. If you were working with videos or 3D graphics that is a different story. Get more RAM as suggested. I have a 13" MacBook (the first aluminum version - not the Pro) and CS3 runs fine. But with 2 GB of RAM everything takes long with large files.

I have recently (finally) adopted the strategy where you scale down the original image (as a copy - you keep the original master file of course), do all your adjustment (levels, curves, adjustment levels, masks, etc ...) and once you are happy with that you scale it up again and paste the original image in as a new layer - so only the very last steps (final cropping, sharpening, etc) will take long. It really helps when your original image is 2000 dpi scan from 4x5 (cca 70 Mpix image - 400MB in 48bit color mode)