Tony Cooper
Another poster has suggested availability of more apps. For this to be the case, there would have to be apps on the market that are not already available cross-platform, and that these apps would offer some significant advantages to the apps that are available cross-platform.

What would these apps be?

Floyd L. Davidson
I could care less. It's just not important.

Tony Cooper
It's also been suggested, in a roundabout way, that reducing post-processing time allows the user to spend more time photographing things. There's some validity to that concept, but taking more photographs doesn't mean taking better photographs unless you consider that more photographs means better chances of taking a good photography by accident.

Floyd L. Davidson
Another bogus argument.

What does make a difference is realizing that Ansel Adams was right, we take exposures and *make* photographs. Of course better tools do help to make better photographs. And learning those better tools allows one to be more creative with pre-visualization in the preliminary steps of creating a photograph, when we are engaged in taking the exposures.

Tony Cooper
For the high-volume photographer, organization for selection is the most time-consuming aspect. If that photographer took 1,000 shots of an event, reviewing those 1,000 shots and determining which are worthy of efforts in post is the part that takes up time. The actual post work on the individual shots is minimal if the photographer has decent skills using the camera.

Floyd L. Davidson
Bullshit son. I use a highly modified version of a very old program called XV to sort images. Going through 1000 pictures takes about 15 to 20 minutes at most. Just about 1 per second, more or less.

The actual processing of most of the selected images might take many minutes each.

It of course depends on what the images are used for. When I shoot events I might well shoot up to 1000 exposures, and of those there might be 90% that get batch processed in a relative uncritical way. For that particular part of the production processing and previewing might, at best, happen to be nearly equal.

But then the selected 50 or so images that I want to create photographic art from may take 20 minutes each, or 2 hours or more each for the best of those.

Regardless, processing is always far more time consuming than previewing. That is probably due to both the tools and talent used for sorting, and certainly relates to the artistic intent for processing.

The more skill one has with a camera the more likely there will be images that take more than an hour to process.

I don't shoot with the intention of ever using a camera produced JPEG image, I shoot to collect data targeted at being processed very precisely and I make every effort to provide a data set appropriate to my workflow.

Tony Cooper
If one OS means the organization can be done faster or simpler, then you'd have a point for a limited number of photographers. But, is it the OS that would allow this?

Floyd L. Davidson
It is.

Tony Cooper
So, how can a different OS make a person a better photographer?

Floyd L. Davidson
There are other requirements. One is being able to *use* an OS to *make* better tools.

If selecting what has been made by others is the upper limit, it perhaps doesn't make a lot of difference. Of course there are variations on that too, and while some people can never visualize how to put three or four primitives together, or how to generalize a procedure to create a useful tool, others can do that to varying degrees. There are people who write scripts at the drop of a hat, others compile plugins with no hesitation, and some can throw together an entire application. Different OS's make that process more or less difficult, in varying ways at different levels!