Photoshop CC observations

[paulr]

I've been playing around with CC. I'm firmly in the rage-against-the-prescription-model camp, but some of the technology is interesting.

Especially the expanded use of the GPU. In CS6, the GPU was called on for a few tasks, but it was mostly to speed screen redraw (real time brush effects, etc.) and had little to do with actual image processing. The exceptions are color space conversions and crop/rotate (important) and a bunch of goofy filters. Here's the list (https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cs6-gpu-faq.html).

CC adds more GPU accelerations (https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cs6-gpu-faq1.html)—with Smart Sharpen being far and away the most important to me.

I did a few quick tests on the sharpening layer of 2GB image. It was about 7300 pixels wide, 16-bit RGB.
With OpenCL turned off, Smart Sharpen took 11.6 seconds.
With OpenCL turned on, it took 3.5 seconds. The progress bar didn't even show up.

I did a few similar tests; in every case the GPU cut the time by a factor of 3 or more. The longest I had to wait was around 12 seconds on a 20,880 pixel-wide image.
I don't work on files that big all day long. I can wait 12 seconds! Not too many years ago I had to go make lunch and eat it while unsharp mask crunched away.

Settings used were lens blur, 1.4 pixels wide, 60% sharpening, noise reduction turned off.

EXCEPTION:
This was all with color files. When I tried with black and white images, there was NO DIFFERENCE with OpenCL turned on or off. It was equally slow both ways. This is counter-intuitive, since the b+w images have 16 bits per pixel vs. the color images' 48 bits. But it was repeatable. Converting a b+w image to RGB (and tripling the file size) actually reduced the sharpening time.

I'm guessing this is either a bug, or else b+w requires a different algorithm, and was not as high a priority. Either way, I'm guessing this will be a temporary snafu.

I'm using a 2010 mac pro, 6-core 3.33ghz, with 24GB ram. GPU is an ATI 5770. This is a midrange GPU from several years ago. Considering that all the real-time GPU accelerated effects happen instantly, and that the processing effects happen anywhere from instantly to plenty-fast-enough, there's probably no reason to covet a high end GPU for photoshop. Unless you're in a time=money production environment working on giant files, and you use a lot of the accelerated functions. The main thing is to have a supported GPU.

[Teodor Oprean]

It sounds like the color algorithms were optimized first and the optimization of the black and white counterparts were left for future implementation.

[Michael Rosenberg]

That is very interesting. I use CC for color and B/W images. When I use CC 2014 (Open CL) for my images it takes 3 times as long for any processing as does CC! I am running Win 7 64 bit with a hex core processor, ssd for scratch files, and 64 gb of RAM on the MB, and 16 gb RAM on a gigabyte video card. So the slow down is very noticeable.

My other complaint about CC is that updates are a real ordeal to download and install. It should be automatic, but it is not.

Mike

[paulr]

Michael, are you saying it takes longer when you have OpenCL acceleration turned on, or when you use the newer version of Photoshop?

Either way I wonder if it's a glitch with video card support.

[StoneNYC]

What is OpenCL? I don't really understand anything that's happening here, but I own CS6 pre CC I bought it outright. So maybe it's not an option for me?

[Matsushime]

What is OpenCL? I don't really understand anything that's happening here, but I own CS6 pre CC I bought it outright. So maybe it's not an option for me?

OpenCL is the new programming "library" or think of it as a newer technology if you want. Maybe you've heard of OpenGL? It's a giant collection of software that seemingly has been written for more native graphics card processing.

It's like talking to a person that doesn't speak the same language as you. Normally you can only get simple ideas across for communication. It's slow, frustrating, and you're very limited with what you can say. But if you have a translator (think of it as OpenCL) next to you, the communication process is faster, more efficient, and you're able to conversate more complicated ideas.

In my opinion, if you bought cs6 outright, you don't need to upgrade for a long while. Unless you're in dire need of a possibly faster software for editing your images. Don't worry too much about the tech side of things. chances are that unless you build your own computers with bleeding edge hardware, you'll be fine. It's in Adobes interest to make the software work with as much hardware as possible anyhow.

[StoneNYC]

OpenCL is the new programming "library" or think of it as a newer technology if you want. Maybe you've heard of OpenGL? It's a giant collection of software that seemingly has been written for more native graphics card processing.

It's like talking to a person that doesn't speak the same language as you. Normally you can only get simple ideas across for communication. It's slow, frustrating, and you're very limited with what you can say. But if you have a translator (think of it as OpenCL) next to you, the communication process is faster, more efficient, and you're able to conversate more complicated ideas.

In my opinion, if you bought cs6 outright, you don't need to upgrade for a long while. Unless you're in dire need of a possibly faster software for editing your images. Don't worry too much about the tech side of things. chances are that unless you build your own computers with bleeding edge hardware, you'll be fine. It's in Adobes interest to make the software work with as much hardware as possible anyhow.

Understood, very clear, thanks! And yes certainly don't need to upgrade (although usually the only thing I use CS6 for is stitching scans of film bigger than 8x10, so mostly 11x14 and soon possibly 14x17) so my file sizes are well beyond 2GB and I'm kind of shocked they haven't found a way to handle saving files bigger than 2GB yet and forcing me to use that "large image file save" option.

Somehow LR4 (really should probably upgrade to LR5 before they make that CC too) can handle the files faster and seemingly more efficiently than CS6 can.

*shrug* I'm just glad it works. I have a MacBookPro Retina (the first model) so I'll be good for a while and I'm moving even more toward physical printing and I might stop scanning altogether soon. Lol.

[Preston]

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

[Michael Rosenberg]

Paul,

Sorry I was not clear. I find that CC 2014 even with open CL to be slower than CC!

Mike

[Matsushime]

Understood, very clear, thanks! And yes certainly don't need to upgrade (although usually the only thing I use CS6 for is stitching scans of film bigger than 8x10, so mostly 11x14 and soon possibly 14x17) so my file sizes are well beyond 2GB and I'm kind of shocked they haven't found a way to handle saving files bigger than 2GB yet and forcing me to use that "large image file save" option.

Somehow LR4 (really should probably upgrade to LR5 before they make that CC too) can handle the files faster and seemingly more efficiently than CS6 can.

*shrug* I'm just glad it works. I have a MacBookPro Retina (the first model) so I'll be good for a while and I'm moving even more toward physical printing and I might stop scanning altogether soon. Lol.

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

[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.


https://vimeo.com/118802763

[toyotadesigner]

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


https://vimeo.com/123111373