If you are going to be doing some professional photo editing, then I might recommend that you get a fairly heavy duty computer- but during your eBay career I highly doubt you will be dealing with anything massive. If you use really large images, you’ll need to consider the costs of bandwidth for hosting images, and the added hassle of uploading large files to the Internet. Also consider, if you are going to be making a business out of this, you really don’t want to be hassledwith doing large amounts of editing to large files which inevitably take a long amount of time to upload. Images on eBay are usually quite small, normally no larger than 500x500 pixels (dots across and down). 500x500 is almost half the size of a typical screen, so anything more is really a waste. If you want to go all out on an item, be my guest-but it’s nice to know that you really won’t have to go buying a photo editing monster to do some serious eBaying. A medium one will do.
Next, we’re going to use Photoshop as an example of a program we need for editing photos.
The latest edition of Photoshop, version CS2, has hideously high system requirements that even my fairly high ended PCs are currently looking worriedly at. While I’m fairly sure that their system requirements are overdoing it slightly, I’m going to give you the requirements for a slightly older edition of Photoshop (version 7). Photoshop 7 is readily available and cheaply, too-it has all of the features you could ever care for during the course of basic photo manipulation, and will do everything the average user will need it to do. A lot of people would also recommend that you use a cut down version of Photoshopnlike Photoshop Elements-but I disagree, as I still think you will find that this is more expensive than a copy of Photoshop 7, and less efficient too. Read on.
Photoshop 7 Minimum System Requirements
- CPU : Pentium 4, 750 ( or equivalent), PowerPC (750 MHz)
- Operating System : Windows ( 98,2000,XP)-Mac ( System 9+,OSX)
- RAM : 512 MB
- Hard Drive : 200 Mb Available Hard Disk Space
- Video : SVGA at 1024 x 768, 16 Bit Colour
I’ve seen Photoshop 7 running on Pentium 3 500. It works perfectly, if not just a little slowly. So, these requirements may not necessarily prevent you form using a program, however the farther you travel from the recommended setup, the more your user experience is likely to suffer.
Onething to carefully note is that the hard drive space requirements that are being listed for each system requirements are simply required for it to run. Without meeting that requirement, the program won’t work. If you actually want to do anything ambitious with your photo manipulation software, you are going to have to have more space than that.
To be fair, we’ll also include The Gimp for Windows, which is a wonderful Open Source photo editing program (Open Source programs are completely free and are the product of acommunity effort).
The Gimp Minimum Requirements
- Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
- Pentium II 300 Mhz / K6-2 300Mhz
- 128 MB Internal memory
- 120 MB free space on hard drive
Please keepin mind that The GIMP (or GNU Image Manipulation Program) does not strictly have any system requirements. However, this is a vague set of guidelines that I’ve set down for it so that you won’t have to wait for hours (‘til dinner, perhaps!) to see what your high-res picture looks like after running a filter or manipulation on it.
RSS Feed (xml)
