Photoshop CC observations

[Tin Can]

Stone,

CS6 supports Open GL and Open CL if you have a compatible video card, but CS6 is limited in it's implementation of Open CL compared to CC or CC2014.

In CS6, go to Edit>Preferences>Performance. Look in the lower right corner and you'll see a section "Graphics Processor Settings". If your video card is compatible, the check box "Use Graphics Processor" will be checked. Below that is a button, "Advanced Settings" where you can choose how CS6 uses the graphics processor.

If "Use Graphics Processor" is greyed out, then you are either using on-board graphics (on the CPU) or your video card is not compatible with Photo Shop.

The Adobe "Help" article that Paul linked to in his original post is worth the read.

--P

Since I did not know this, I checked it with CC and it had automatically detected my discrete Video card, EVGA GeForce GTX 750 2GB FTW and was using it. CC also was automatically using 60% of my available 30GB ram.

No thinking or tweaking required.

First thing I did when I set up this computer with CC was to resize a scan to TB size, no problem and far quicker than I have ever seen.

[StoneNYC]

Glad I can help Stone. I love your work by the way.

Thanks

[paulr]

The moral of the story might be to run some quick tests on the features you use a lot. The fastest settings on someone else's machine might be a dog on yours.

[paulr]

Re: OpenCL ...

Another way to explain it as a software library that lets 2D graphics get accelerated by your graphics card's processors (which were designed for 3D graphics).

Adobe invented its own libraries for this, called CUDA, but this standard is Adobe-only, and only ran on Nvidia GPUs. OpenCL, being open, has been more widely adopted. Fortunately Adobe decided to embrace it.

[Ken Lee]

The graphics card is a computer in its own right, with its own memory.

Just as the computer has a CPU (central processing unit) the graphics card has a GPU (graphics processing unit).

Enabling these options allows Photoshop to off-load work to the graphics card that it would otherwise have to do itself. The graphics card can do the calculations in parallel using its own memory. Working in parallel, two computers can be faster than one.

My iMac is 4 years old, but the CC is new. I tried your experiment with the Smart Sharpen tool and got similar results: a very nice improvement.

[Nathan Potter]

The graphics card is a computer in its own right, with its own memory.

Just as the computer has a CPU (central processing unit) the graphics card has a GPU (graphics processing unit).

Enabling these options allows Photoshop to off-load work to the graphics card that it would otherwise have to do itself. The graphics card can do the calculations in parallel using its own memory. Working in parallel, two computers can be faster than one.

My iMac is 4 years old, but the CC is new. I tried your experiment with the Smart Sharpen tool and got similar results: a very nice improvement.

Ken, I'm not a computer guy so thanks for the above clarification.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[toyotadesigner]

Anyone tried Affinity Photo for Mac OS X?

It's still in Beta, but it is a dream: No cloud, no subscription. 16/48 bit engine, RAW developer (obviously DCRaw as a basis), fast, handles many data formats. I just love it - like Affinity Designer, the Illustrator killer app which works in real time.

[toyotadesigner]

This is Affinity Designer - comes with pixel editing as well: