PDN story on photo agency retouching departments

In article ,
says…

I’m not attempting to start a Mac/PC debate here, I don’t care what computer platform anyone else uses and hopefully no one should give a damn what tool I choose either.

However, I was looking through the June issue of PDN magazine <http://www.pdnonline.com/index.html> and found something interesting in their "Altered Images" feature story.

It profiles the in-house retouching departments of the following powerhouse photo agencies: Magnum Photos
<http://www.magnumphotos.com>, National Geographic Image Collection <http://www.ngsimages.com>, Getty Images <http://www.getty.com>, Corbis (owned by Bill Gates) <http://www.corbis.com>, and Masterfile <http://www.masterfile.com>.

The interesting thing about all these photo agency’s retouching department is that they ALL use Macs for their work. I’m not making any judgemental statements on this, just stating facts.

Cheers,

Adrian

"A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Nerds."

http://www.amenfoto.com

don’t care
—
John O.
There is no slack in light attack.

I visited your portfolio, and loved your photographs. very expressive shots

🙂

Rastin

http://www.amenfoto.com

—
Rastin Mehr
—————————————————
rmd Studio
http://www.rmdStudio.com
http://www.netphotography.com/netphotography
—————————————————
"I like my coffee white and lesbian"

(Adrian) wrote in
news::

The interesting thing about all these photo agency’s retouching department is that they ALL use Macs for their work. I’m not making any judgemental statements on this, just stating facts.

Quark Xpress has between 80%-90% of the market, too, despite competition from InDesign. Stasis is the name of the game in the industry, despite QXP having competition that is undeniably superior…and mucho cheaper. The Mac
v.s. PC competition isn’t as clear cut.

Hell, an even better example is how many Quark users are still being bitten by a bug in a popular free plugin (XTension), depite the fact the bug was corrected by a revision *in 1992*.

Thanks, Rastin. Had a look at your sites as well – beautiful architecture shots. Are those buildings all in Vancouver? Liked your coffee product shots too.

Adrian

Rastin Mehr …

I visited your portfolio, and loved your photographs. very expressive shots
🙂

Rastin

http://www.amenfoto.com

Thank you Adrian, yes almost all of them are from Vancouver … I love this place there is so much character in Vancouver …

Rastin

Thanks, Rastin. Had a look at your sites as well – beautiful architecture shots. Are those buildings all in Vancouver? Liked your coffee product shots too.

Adrian

—
Rastin Mehr
—————————————————
rmd Studio
http://www.rmdStudio.com
http://www.netphotography.com/netphotography
—————————————————
"I like my coffee white and lesbian!"

On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 15:15:58 GMT, Eric Gill
wrote:

(Adrian) wrote in
news::

The interesting thing about all these photo agency’s retouching department is that they ALL use Macs for their work. I’m not making any judgemental statements on this, just stating facts.

Quark Xpress has between 80%-90% of the market, too, despite competition from InDesign. Stasis is the name of the game in the industry, despite QXP having competition that is undeniably superior…and mucho cheaper. The Mac
v.s. PC competition isn’t as clear cut.

Hell, an even better example is how many Quark users are still being bitten by a bug in a popular free plugin (XTension), depite the fact the bug was corrected by a revision *in 1992*.

LOL! I’ve always seen Quark as bug factory anyway. 😉 And that’s apart from their support desks who, frankly, need support 😉

And I notice that all those companies mentioned were American. Inertia obviously works for longer in the US than Europe 😉

—

Hecate
(Fried computers a specialty)

Hecate wrote in
news::

On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 15:15:58 GMT, Eric Gill
wrote:

(Adrian) wrote in
news::

The interesting thing about all these photo agency’s retouching department is that they ALL use Macs for their work. I’m not making any judgemental statements on this, just stating facts.

Quark Xpress has between 80%-90% of the market, too, despite competition from InDesign. Stasis is the name of the game in the industry, despite QXP having competition that is undeniably superior…and mucho cheaper. The Mac v.s. PC competition isn’t as clear cut.

Hell, an even better example is how many Quark users are still being bitten by a bug in a popular free plugin (XTension), depite the fact the bug was corrected by a revision *in 1992*.

LOL! I’ve always seen Quark as bug factory anyway. 😉

<shrug> It was always better than it’s competition (until Indy) as a general layout program, especially in the bug department.

But, in all seriousness, who the hell doesn’t update their software in more than a *decade*? Especially when it’s FREE?!?

And that’s
apart from their support desks who, frankly, need support 😉

Meds. They needs meds. Tranquilizers and thorazine, especially Fred Ibrahimi, one of the most hostile, arrogant jerks in the industry.

And I notice that all those companies mentioned were American. Inertia obviously works for longer in the US than Europe 😉

Well, yes and no. ‘Way back when the PC really wasn’t suited to graphics work, the Mac had competition from two other 68000 based machines, which were lots more popular in Europe than in the U.S. By the time they were a non-factor, the PC was a much better contender in the field.

"edjh" wrot

It may be that the Windows version of
Quark is buggier than the Mac version. I have heard people say that…

I don’t use a Mac, but I work where Quark is used on many Windows machines. It does tend to send Windows to a blue screen of death now and then. Part of the problem is that parts of Quark Win is still based on a Windows 3.11 technology. It relies on the win.ini file for managing soft fonts with printers and this seems to be where it has the most problems. Quark 5 can also be slow when using files stored on network drives. I was told that this is because Quark does some copy protection checking over a network, but don’t know that for certain. I know that prior versions of Quark did use network protocols to check to see if other installations of the same license are running, but that was many years ago.

I understand Quark 6 has been rewritten to use the registry to manage fonts and I am hoping that this may solve some of the problems. We also use InDesign to some degree, but don’t find many of the printers in our area offering the same level of support for that program. I suppose that is all part of the "inertia" mentioned in prior posts.

—
Fred Doyle
www.leafpublishing.com

"edjh" wrote in message

Hecate wrote:

On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 15:15:58 GMT, Eric Gill
wrote:

(Adrian) wrote in
news::

The interesting thing about all these photo agency’s retouching department is that they ALL use Macs for their work. I’m not making any judgemental statements on this, just stating facts.

Quark Xpress has between 80%-90% of the market, too, despite competition

from InDesign. Stasis is the name of the game in the industry, despite

QXP

having competition that is undeniably superior…and mucho cheaper. The

Mac

v.s. PC competition isn’t as clear cut.

Hell, an even better example is how many Quark users are still being

bitten

by a bug in a popular free plugin (XTension), depite the fact the bug

was

corrected by a revision *in 1992*.

LOL! I’ve always seen Quark as bug factory anyway. 😉 And that’s apart from their support desks who, frankly, need support 😉
And I notice that all those companies mentioned were American. Inertia obviously works for longer in the US than Europe 😉

—

Hecate
(Fried computers a specialty)

I don’t know if "inertia" is the right term. I don’t see any compelling reason to switch from Mac to PC in publishing or graphics and I can see some drawbacks in doing so. I can work with either platform but I much prefer Mac. I know several designers who would be very depressed if forced to give up their Macs.

As for Quark, I use Quark 4 every day and it doesn’t appear to be particularly bug-prone to me. I can’t think of one major bug that plagues us. It does have some aggravating "features" it’s true, but nothing crippling. InDesign might be better; I think "undeniably superior" is overstating it a bit. It may be that the Windows version of Quark is buggier than the Mac version. I have heard people say that… —
Comic book sketches and artwork:
http://www.sover.net/~hannigan/edjh.html

Eric Gill wrote:

I don’t know if "inertia" is the right term.

I believe it’s right on. Until Quark killed their forums when they released QXP 6 (I presume they were tired of their users waxing eloquent on how wonderful InDesign is) there were *still* users complaining of the bug in PasteboardXT. The 1991 version. As I noted above.

I’ve got plenty more examples. Prepress houses. Magazines. Major ad agencies uses QXP 3.3. Illustrator 7, 604e based Powermacs. Pagemaker.

I don’t see any
compelling reason to switch from Mac to PC in publishing or graphics and I can see some drawbacks in doing so. I can work with either platform but I much prefer Mac. I know several designers who would be very depressed if forced to give up their Macs.

And I would be depressed to give up a fast, cheaply and easily upgradeable platform if there were actually some real drawbacks in using a PC.
The G5 and Panther may change that. We’ll see once they arrive.

I’m not asking anyone to give up Windows if that’s what they use. I am just saying that there don’t seem to be any compelling reasons to didtch Mac for Windows. We seem not to have any problems upgrading our Macs.

As for Quark, I use Quark 4 every day and it doesn’t appear to be particularly bug-prone to me. I can’t think of one major bug that plagues us.

"Cannot find volume" on save.

Never get that.

It does have some aggravating "features" it’s true, but nothing crippling. InDesign might be better; I think "undeniably superior" is overstating it a bit.

I think you should try using it before you say that. Indy 2.x’s features read – and work -like my wish list for what QXP 5 should have been. Conversely, I don’t feel QXP 5 or 6 were serious attempts to address real users’ needs aside from making 6 OSX compatible – 2 years after the competition.

Take a look here:

http://users2.ev1.net/~nightskycreative/indy-screenshot.jpg
This is a fluff piece, really, but it shows off some of Indy’s capabilities. For example, "The Goddess" has two types of shadows and a gradient applied but is still live, editable type and moreover can be moved anywhere on the page without having to worry about the shadows.
The Accord headline is an Acrobat file from photoshop, with vector information intact.

The statuette is a PSD file with transparency instead of a clipping path.
The page full of palettes from my second monitor also gives you some idea of the range of options available, though many, such as universally customizeable keyboard shortcuts, automatic hanging indents and the multi- line composer, aren’t as obvious. Nor is the fact that the Acrobat export is three or four times faster than Quark + Distiller.

It may be that the Windows version
of Quark is buggier than the Mac version. I have heard people say that…

No, the opposite is true, at least in 4.x. No wandering guides issue, no "Cannot find volume" on save, no screen redraw corruption, no corrupted preferences, for example.

I have used ID a little and I agree it’s nice. I have not encountered the bugs you mention in Quark 4 and I’ve been using it for years. Maybe we just have good tech people where I work.

Comic book sketches and artwork:
http://www.sover.net/~hannigan/edjh.html

"Cannot find volume" on save.

You know, now that I think back on it I do remember this issue from years ago when Quark 4 was first released. But it was fixed with a patch or update. Never see it now. Do you have the latest updates? Do you have that Enhanced Preview extension enabled? I seem to remember that causing some problem as well.

—
Comic book sketches and artwork:
http://www.sover.net/~hannigan/edjh.html

"Eric Gill" wrote

Fred, I think you’re blaming QXP for a Win95/old ATM issue. Your life would probably be much simpler if you moved to Win2K/XP and ditched ATM altogether.

We have similar problems under XP (we went from 98 to XP so I don’t know about win2K). If you remove a soft font from a printer listing in the win.ini file, it does not download to a printer when using Quark (only) even under XP, so Quark’s underlying technology still relies on a Win 3.11 legacy system. The win.ini hasn’t been needed by Windows since Win95. You could be right about it being an ongoing win/atm issues, but the problems continue to show up under XP even tho’ we have dumped ATM under XP (of course) and the issues seem to be isolated to Quark as a program.

Quark 5 is an atrocity on both platforms. For example, they broke some of the linking features, and updating links is mucho slower.

Personally, I wouldn’t call Quark 5 an atrocity, just a buggy program under Windows, and an unnecessary upgrade that accomplished very little. (I can’t speak for Macs). I’m not sure what you mean by the broken linking features, please elaborate.

QXP has always been slow, both platforms, working over a network

Again, I can’t speak for the Mac platform, but that’s too true on the PC side. It forces us to keep all files locally when I’d much rather not.

Quark does no font management at all but rather relies on the OS or OS

patches like ATM.

Management is be the wrong word for what I am describing, I suppose. I’m not aware of any graphics program that "manages" fonts, per se. Quark, and only Quark as far as I know, still uses the win.ini file to deal, in some way, with downloaded PS fonts to a PS printer. Try taking a font out of the printer listing for downloaded fonts in the win.ini file. You’ll see what I mean. The font will print out of any program but Quark, at least by my experience. If you have any information that can work around this, please let me know. I’ll buy you the drink of your choice.

That’s what Acrobat is all about. And making submissions much easier with single files that you can apply light amounts of compression.

We do use Acrobat when it seems possible. The problem with that for my situation is we are all too often making changes up to the last minute, even after checking and approving blues. It’s not my choice but the reality I deal with. (Things like finding out a kid is graduating and must be added to a commencement program, or tuition and fee changes that happen after a piece is at the printers.) With few exceptions our printers don’t know how or won’t make simple edits in Acrobat files, so on many pieces we prefer to send collected Quark files. This has helped us meet deadlines more than once. Again, not my preferred way of working but it is my reality.

—
Fred Doyle
www.leafpublishing.com

"Eric Gill" wrote in message

"Fred Doyle" wrote in
news:I8fQa.4455$G%:

"edjh" wrot

It may be that the Windows version of
Quark is buggier than the Mac version. I have heard people say that…

I don’t use a Mac, but I work where Quark is used on many Windows machines. It does tend to send Windows to a blue screen of death now and then. Part of the problem is that parts of Quark Win is still based on a Windows 3.11 technology. It relies on the win.ini file for managing soft fonts with printers and this seems to be where it has the most problems.

Fred, I think you’re blaming QXP for a Win95/old ATM issue. Your life would probably be much simpler if you moved to Win2K/XP and ditched ATM altogether.

Quark 5 can also be slow when using files stored on
network drives.

Quark 5 is an atrocity on both platforms. For example, they broke some of the linking features, and updating links is mucho slower.
However, QXP has always been slow, both platforms, working over a network.

I was told that this is because Quark does some copy
protection checking over a network, but don’t know that for certain. I know that prior versions of Quark did use network protocols to check to see if other installations of the same license are running, but that was many years ago.

Still does. Tim Gill, the creative genius behind QXP, is long gone and Fred Ibrahimi is more paranoid than ever.

I understand Quark 6 has been rewritten to use the registry to manage fonts

Quark does no font management at all but rather relies on the OS or OS patches like ATM.

and I am hoping that this may solve some of the problems. We also use InDesign to some degree, but don’t find many of the printers in our area offering the same level of support for that program.

That’s what Acrobat is all about. And making submissions much easier with single files that you can apply light amounts of compression.

I
suppose that is all part of the "inertia" mentioned in prior posts.

Undoutedly. A lot of prepress shops still drop Acrobat files into Quark to output, because they understand how to output from QXP.

"Fred Doyle" wrote in
news:_7hQa.4471$G%:

"Eric Gill" wrote

Fred, I think you’re blaming QXP for a Win95/old ATM issue. Your life would probably be much simpler if you moved to Win2K/XP and ditched ATM altogether.

We have similar problems under XP (we went from 98 to XP so I don’t know about win2K). If you remove a soft font from a printer listing in the win.ini file, it does not download to a printer when using Quark (only) even under XP, so Quark’s underlying technology still relies on a Win 3.11 legacy system. The win.ini hasn’t been needed by Windows since Win95. You could be right about it being an ongoing win/atm issues, but the problems continue to show up under XP even tho’ we have dumped ATM under XP (of course) and the issues seem to be isolated to Quark as a program.

Fred, my win.ini is 828 *bytes* in size, all, AFAICT, for legacy 16-bit apps. I have about 800 fonts installed at this time, and still use QXP
4.11 for all my magazine contracts – a fair amount of work.

I may be misremembering the actual issue. I seem to recall older versions of the Postscript printer driver writing those entries.

Quark 5 is an atrocity on both platforms. For example, they broke some of the linking features, and updating links is mucho slower.

Personally, I wouldn’t call Quark 5 an atrocity, just a buggy program under Windows, and an unnecessary upgrade that accomplished very little.

….and broke compatibility with most XTensions, meaning the upgrade cost for anyone who relies on any significant number of them is quite high…just to maintain the feature set you are used to.

(I can’t speak for Macs).

Same comments apply, plus STILL not being OSX native.

I’m not sure what you mean by the
broken linking features, please elaborate.

Drop a Quark file into a directory full of the graphics needed for a publication and it re-links anything that is missing. QXP 5 does not do so reliably.

<snip>

Quark does no font management at all but rather relies on the OS or OS

patches like ATM.

Management is be the wrong word for what I am describing, I suppose. I’m not aware of any graphics program that "manages" fonts, per se. Quark, and only Quark as far as I know, still uses the win.ini file to deal, in some way, with downloaded PS fonts to a PS printer. Try taking a font out of the printer listing for downloaded fonts in the win.ini file.

I have *none at all*. And no printer listing, either.

I’d be happy to post the entirety of the file if you like. It’s not large.

You’ll see what I mean. The font will print out of any
program but Quark, at least by my experience. If you have any information that can work around this, please let me know. I’ll buy you the drink of your choice.

Scotch is nice, but Guinness will work just fine. Perhaps we should take this to e-mail.

That’s what Acrobat is all about. And making submissions much easier with single files that you can apply light amounts of compression.

We do use Acrobat when it seems possible. The problem with that for my situation is we are all too often making changes up to the last minute, even after checking and approving blues. It’s not my choice but the reality I deal with. (Things like finding out a kid is graduating and must be added to a commencement program, or tuition and fee changes that happen after a piece is at the printers.) With few exceptions our printers don’t know how or won’t make simple edits in Acrobat files, so on many pieces we prefer to send collected Quark files. This has helped us meet deadlines more than once. Again, not my preferred way of working but it is my reality.

I have similar issues on occasion. I insist the printer be able to accept files via the net, and send a patched page (or however much has changed). I find this saves more time and hassle than I’d ever imagined plus keeps my archives completely current, and won’t willingly go back to the native files + graphics + fonts method.

edjh wrote in news:cygQa.14969$_K5.6947
@fe01.atl2.webusenet.com:

"Cannot find volume" on save.

You know, now that I think back on it I do remember this issue from years ago when Quark 4 was first released. But it was fixed with a patch or update.

Actually, no, it never was, at least not in 4. The only workaround was turning on the Autosave/backup and waiting for it to save the first time. That (usually) worked.

I’m not sure they ever figured out exactly what was causing it.

Never see it now. Do you have the latest updates? Do you have that Enhanced Preview extension enabled? I seem to remember that causing some problem as well.

If that sets it off, that would be good to know. Kyocera doesn’t seem to be aware of that, though.

Eric Gill wrote:

Never see it now. Do you have the latest updates? Do you have that Enhanced Preview extension enabled? I seem to remember that causing some problem as well.

If that sets it off, that would be good to know. Kyocera doesn’t seem to be aware of that, though.

Maybe that was it then. All I can say is that I have not seen this (nor has anyone in my office–over 50 users)since just after Quark 4 was released.
—
Comic book sketches and artwork:
http://www.sover.net/~hannigan/edjh.html

On Sun, 13 Jul 2003 15:28:15 -0400, edjh wrote:

Eric Gill wrote:

Never see it now. Do you have the latest updates? Do you have that Enhanced Preview extension enabled? I seem to remember that causing some problem as well.

If that sets it off, that would be good to know. Kyocera doesn’t seem to be aware of that, though.

Maybe that was it then. All I can say is that I have not seen this (nor has anyone in my office–over 50 users)since just after Quark 4 was released.

OK. Read this all through. I agree with Eric. (who named exactly one of the bugs I was thinking of _ I only supported people using Quark for a short time – it just seemed like years <g>)I hope to be able to purchase ID in the near future.

As for the Mac v. PC thing. The reason Mac users would get depressed switching to Windows is because they are Mac users (and some would say don’t know any better, but I couldn’t possibly comment <g>). The same is true of PC users of course. 😉

—

Hecate
(Fried computers a specialty)

In article ,
says…

The interesting thing about all these photo agency’s retouching department is that they ALL use Macs for their work. I’m not making any judgemental statements on this, just stating facts.

It seems to be a mental thing. Here at NASA, all secretaries MUST use MAC’s. The photo people usually have both Mac’s and PC’s. Almost all researchers use PC’s. Doesn’t seem to make much difference around here as long as they can all talk to one another.

Glenn

On Sun, 13 Jul 2003 22:16:10 -0400, edjh wrote:

OK. Read this all through. I agree with Eric. (who named exactly one of the bugs I was thinking of _ I only supported people using Quark for a short time – it just seemed like years <g>)I hope to be able to purchase ID in the near future.

As for the Mac v. PC thing. The reason Mac users would get depressed switching to Windows is because they are Mac users (and some would say don’t know any better, but I couldn’t possibly comment <g>). The same is true of PC users of course. 😉

—

Hecate
(Fried computers a specialty)

Well, we’re not doing Mac vs PC so I’ll reserve my horse-laugh for another time. But which Quark bug are you referring to? If it’s the "volume not found" thing, I tell you that can be fixed on the Mac platform. As I said, Quark can be a pain in the ass, but I am just not experiencing these bugs.

Yes, that one. And we had exactly the same sort of experiences Eric did. On Mac and Win. (Except, of course, as is usual with Quark, the Windows version had even more bugs than the Mac version).

And the reason I only supported people using Quark for a short time? They discovered that Pagemaker could do everything they needed and switched to that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that given time, a fair wind, a bugless half and hour or so when the pigs are flying over the blue moon, that Quark could do more. But PM did everything that was needed, was stable and much easier to use, and had a support desk that didn’t make you want to personally go there and ram the phone down their throat. 😉

Don’t get me wrong. If they announced at my job tomorrow that we were switching to InDesign I would not shed a tear for Quark. I just don’t have much of a problem with it.

LOL! That’s fair enough. Peo[ple’s experiences will always be different. But from what I’ve heard and seen, you’ve been lucky. 🙂

—

Hecate
(Fried computers a specialty)

On Mon, 14 Jul 2003 13:57:38 +0000 (UTC),
glenn.a.woodell@*****nasa.gov (Glenn Woodell) wrote:

In article ,
says…

The interesting thing about all these photo agency’s retouching department is that they ALL use Macs for their work. I’m not making any judgemental statements on this, just stating facts.

It seems to be a mental thing. Here at NASA, all secretaries MUST use MAC’s. The photo people usually have both Mac’s and PC’s. Almost all researchers use PC’s. Doesn’t seem to make much difference around here as long as they can all talk to one another.

I’d agree. it’s definitely something to do with people’s psyche 🙂

—

Hecate
(Fried computers a specialty)