Bangui, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This image shows a Bangui butterfly from the Central African Republic. I captured it for reflectivity rather than transparency, and then cross-processed the resulting image.

The fire power required to cross process is considerable. I’m running Photoshop CS2 on a Mac Pro with dual core Intel Xeon processers. In other words, four CPUs. The system runs at a top-of-the line 3GHz.

I’m now up to 5 Gigabytes of DDR2 RAM, which is danged fast memory, and a heck of a lot of it. The memory modules have their own heat sinks and look like minature nuclear reactors.

Even so, when I have a large-sized image open with multiple layers and masks, my system starts to crawl. Probably performance will improve once Adobe releases a version of their Creative Suite designed to run natively (rather than via a simulation layer) on the Intel Xeon processors.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my system, particularly the 30″ monitor. The whole thing is beautifully engineered. And, I can see my photographs to edit them in a way I never could on my Windows system.

That said, I am also surprised to get fairly frequent application crashes. Both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Bridge hang on me at least once a day, and I’m forced to rely on Apple’s Forced Quit, the analog to the Windows “three-fingered salute.”

When this happens, I often get a window on the screen asking whether I want to file a report on my problem with Apple. I hadn’t been bothering with this until I was told recently by “someone who should know” that Apple does actually follow-up on these problem reports.

I remain a little skeptical (I KNOW that Microsoft ignores problems reported to them), but on the off chance that someone at Apple is listening and passing the reports on to Adobe, I have taken to writing a haiku each time I have an Adobe application crash on my wonderful Apple box. For example:

My Photoshop crash:
Lost post-processing indeed.
Please Adobe help me!

Or, somewhat more poetically:

RAW photo opens
Stormy landscape will not budge:
Silence in the rain.