Originally Posted by Ted Harris
We have a similar config here at work to deal with some of our electron micrographs and it is an absolute joy -- and it runs CS3 beautifully.
Great machines.
JT
We have a similar config here at work to deal with some of our electron micrographs and it is an absolute joy -- and it runs CS3 beautifully.
Great machines.
JT
Same with my 'mini'. Working with a single 500mb file is a full day affair.
Live it up guys. I'm still slumming it with a PB G4 running Aperture and CS3. Lots of spinning beach-balls.
I have the same gear, and I have a few suggestions that might help - if not you, then perhaps someone else:
1) The Powerbook allows up to 2 GB RAM. Get the 2GB.
2) Don't give Photoshop all the available RAM. Give it up to 70%. That leaves enough for the OS to breathe. Otherwise, you wait on the OS itself (some of those beach-balls). See Preferences > Performance.
3) There is a very nice widget called DashQuit, which allows you to instantly turn off all the widgets that you run - and they all come back instantly when you want them. This is much better than manually killing all the widgets and then starting them all back up. All the settings are saved, so you don't have to configure them again (like setting your location in a weather widget, etc.)
4) Use another drive for a swap disk. It can be anything, including a Thumb drive or two. Without a separate swap disk, you are using the same disk to run the app and park the temporary files, which causes an I/O bottleneck.
5) Most important: downsize your image appropriately, before performing adjustments. Do as many adjustments as possible in Layers, so that you can perform them on another copy later if you need. It's better to do that - and stay in 16-bit mode during editing - than the other way around.
For example, my 4x5 images, 16-bit RGB @ 2500 ppi, take up 715 MB. That's a real strain to load, never mind adjust. (They are RGB even though they are monochrome - because I tone them). Downsizing them to 12x15 at 360 dpi, they shrink to 133 MB, which is well within the capacity of this setup. Having been scanned at such high res, and subsequently adjusted in 16-bit mode, they look superb, and are a breeze to edit.
Thank you, Ken! I've actually just moved up from 1.5GB RAM to 2GB 2 weeks ago to see if it would help, and it certainly did! I will use your downsizing tip, and have a look at 'Dashquit'. By 'swapdisk', I presume you mean what Adobe calls a 'scratch disk', right? I had planned to have a separate scratch disk as per Photoshop guru recommendations, but I saw that Adobe recommended using my main drive as a scratch disk for CS3 (contained in their CS3 instruction pdf). So I got confused and didn't try a separate drive.
Rory,
There is a subtle distinction between "swap disk" and "scratch disk" in this context. Normally, that would mean the same thing - an application moving the data it holds in RAM over to disk in order to free up RAM for more data. That would be any application, including the operating system, and each application would reserve its own section on disk for this purpose. The difference is that diffrent manufacturers are using different terminology - swap disk, page disk, virtual memory, etc. Adobe happens to be using the term "scratch disk".
The more continious the disk space available, the better the performance of each operation. But if there are several applications, the foremost being the OS itself, writing - swapping - memory to disk, the more fragmented it gets and the slower it becomes. That is why it is so beneficial to reserve a physically separate drive to Photoshop, so it can manage all the space on it and thus get maximum performance without having to jostle for it with other apps.
Try it - get the largest drive you can afford and if you see no improvement, you will end up with lots of storage which you can use for regular backups. Which is something else that everybody should be doing but few bother.
Thank you very much Marko. I'll try it with a 250GB drive I have sitting around here then.
Just remember that after you tell Photoshop about any additional scratch disk, you need to restart Photoshop. Otherwise, you won't see any difference.
Photoshop allows you to see the size of the scratch disk on the Info Palette, if you set the option on the tab correctly via Palette Options. In the attached image, the scratch disk is currently using 272.6 MB, and there is 1.07 MB or RAM available for Photoshop.
As you make adjustments to the file, you will see that the scratch disk continues to grow.
I'm wondering if there's a room for the second hard drive in iMacs? If not, then the only option for the separate scratch disk is FW/USB - and I'm not sure if external drive is any good for Photoshop scratch disk. Any opinion?
Also what do you guys think about those glossy screens?
I'm asking because I really need a new computer for my photo works and I'm looking for a "budget" solution. Can't afford MacPro + 24" monitor yet so I'm thinking about iMac.
An iMac will certainly do. It will just not do quite as fast nor quite as comfortably as the MacPro.
But on the other hand, an iMac you can afford will do much better than a MacPro that you can't.
Similarly, external FW drive would normally be slower than an internal SATA one, but since iMacs do not have a secondary disk slot, an external FW scratch disk will provide much better performance than no scratch drive at all. If you go that route, you need to pay attention to quit PS before you shut down the system or dismount the drive in order to allow it to properly close and clean up its scratch files.
An external FW )or USB2) disk works fine as a scratch disk on a laptop, and does make a big difference.
On the Powerbook G4 (2GB memory) I have an external disk connected via Firewire 800.
You could even get yourself a 4/8GB USB2 memory stick, and define that as the first of the scratch disks, then the external FW drive as the second scratch disk.
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