Advice for Photoshop .psb large format

[Keldrilh]

Hello guys,

I'm working with large images in photoshop in .psb format: 160.000 pixels X 300.000 pixels. When saved on Hard Disk the file size is 4.7 GB, but while working on photoshop it says 110/120 GB.

Problem 1) With my current laptop it takes more than 20 hours to save it. (I saved it with compression thou)

Problem 2) The image also contains a lot of layers, and when I start to work on the file, like adding objects and moving layers (please consider I'm not using filters, i'm simply creating a kind of mosaic), at the begininng Photoshop responds fast. But more things I do, more time it takes to esecute the command. After 20/30 minutes it becomes very slow, taking up to 2/3 minutes to move a layer or to add a new object... And the time keep increasing up to 5 minutes... (I tried also to remove "undo actions" but improvement is marginal)

Problem 3) I stopped to work on it as was strenuos and as I decided I need a new desktop for this project. But when I will resume my work, i estimateed the images size may increase over 10 Gb.

This is my current Laptop: DELL INSPIRION 15-3521 (Pentium 2127U 1.9 GHz / RAM 4GB / HD 500GB / Win 8.1 64 bit)

So this is the new desktop configuration i would like to check with you:

CPU: i7-6850K 3,6 GHz
RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 64GB (4x16GB) 3.000
GPU: Sapphire AMD RX 480 8GB
STORAGE: Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD 500 GB
STORAGE: WD Black 3.5 7.200RMP 2TB

My goal is to reduce drastically the saving time and being able to work on the image without minutes idle time beetween commands.

According to your experience do you think will it be enough to work on my project?

Do you have any suggestions to change some of the components?

Thanks a lot,
Ciao
Kel

[jslabovitz]

I don't edit those kind of images, nor do I use Windows, but I can offer a few general suggestions.

You probably need as much RAM as possible. It may not be much more expensive to just go with 128GB (4x32GB) rather than 64GB.

Are you planning on using the SSD for editing images, or just for the OS/apps/etc.? If your workflow supports it, you might consider copying your PSB files to the SSD and working on them there, then copying them back to the HD for long-term storage.

If you are going to use the HD for editing, then you'll want to maximize the speed of that storage. Look into a RAID controller with a SAS-2 interface, and then two or more hard drives that support SAS-2. If you stripe them (RAID0) you can get to about the same speed as an SSD drive, but at a much lower cost (relative to capacity).

You might want to look into what video folks are doing to edit 4K content. Those folks have worked out the bottlenecks, and are dealing with huge data all the time.

Don't forget backups!

[Keldrilh]

You probably need as much RAM as possible. It may not be much more expensive to just go with 128GB (4x32GB) rather than 64GB.

Actually I was thinking the same, but I will have to add 350euro for 128GB. So I can start with 64GB, see how it goes, and eventually increasing it later.


Are you planning on using the SSD for editing images, or just for the OS/apps/etc.? If your workflow supports it, you might consider copying your PSB files to the SSD and working on them there, then copying them back to the HD for long-term storage.

If you are going to use the HD for editing, then you'll want to maximize the speed of that storage. Look into a RAID controller with a SAS-2 interface, and then two or more hard drives that support SAS-2. If you stripe them (RAID0) you can get to about the same speed as an SSD drive, but at a much lower cost (relative to capacity).

My original post was incomplete. I correct it here. Both the storage drive are SSD.

STORAGE1: Samsung 960 EVO M.2 NVMe SSD 500GB is with M.2. For OS / running apps.
STORAGE: WD Black 3.5 SSD 7.200RMP 2TB is also SSD. Used as Scratch disk for photoshop.



You might want to look into what video folks are doing to edit 4K content. Those folks have worked out the bottlenecks, and are dealing with huge data all the time.

This is what i hope for! :) Maybe somebody into this kind of work will see this post and will give me his feedback!


Don't forget backups!

Yes, I already have an hard disk for this!

Thanks for your feedback,
Kel

[angusparker]

The M2 SSDs are very cheap and generally fast because they are attached straight to the main bus of the computer. For sure get a motherboard that has a high speed bus. On my now old MacPro desktop I get blazing speeds with them - consider one for OS/Apps and one for scratch. If I remember they aren't that good at being used as RAID because the bus starts to become a bottleneck if you have two of them in Raid 0 configuration so just go for the largest one (or two) you can afford - there isn't much penalty for a larger sized disk unlike with real HDs. Maximizing RAM is always a good idea up to a point. If I'm not mistaken and you should check with others on this, a fancy GPUs may not offer a huge performance boost for PS - that's I think because you aren't using a lot of vector data like with 4K video or video games - so that may not be the place to invest a great deal.

[locutus]

M.2 SSD is definitely nice to have, keep your scratch images there, it really helps with speed. Once you are done with a project you can 'archive' them to slow storage.

Note: that WD Black is *not* a SSD, but perfect for bulk data.

[Jac@stafford.net]

Photoshop likes plenty of RAM. Go for what you can afford.
Adobe designs PS to use the GPU for certain routines, so get a good one.
Photoshop does it's own 'page management' and it likes multiple scratch discs.

And go to Preferences/Performance to tell PS how many scratch discs to use, check to see if it's using the RAM available, set history and cache states to a reasonable figure, and of course it should recognize the GPU. Try that now before upgrading. It might help.

[Keldrilh]

M.2 SSD is definitely nice to have, keep your scratch images there, it really helps with speed. Once you are done with a project you can 'archive' them to slow storage.

Note: that WD Black is *not* a SSD, but perfect for bulk data.

I thought it was SSD. Got confused.

M.2 SSD are very expensive. I can afford a 500GB. Than it becomes excessive expensive.

So I was thinking One M.2 SSD 500GB to run OS/apps and One Regular SSD 1TB for Scratch. Will it work?

P.S.
I will check now for a regular good SSD instead of the WD Black.

[adelorenzo]

That system you are using now is really underpowered in terms of processor, RAM and GPU. What you are proposing will be screaming fast in comparison. I would not change anything.

[Keldrilh]

Photoshop likes plenty of RAM. Go for what you can afford.
Adobe designs PS to use the GPU for certain routines, so get a good one.
Photoshop does it's own 'page management' and it likes multiple scratch discs.

And go to Preferences/Performance to tell PS how many scratch discs to use, check to see if it's using the RAM available, set history and cache states to a reasonable figure, and of course it should recognize the GPU. Try that now before upgrading. It might help.

How much should be the scratch disk size?

[Preston]

Keldrilh,

The specs you have provided look good, but I do have a few things to share...

The video card you specced is overkill for Photo Shop. PS, at the moment, supports only a limited number of GPU accelerated functions, so you can save money (and generated heat) by going with a card in the 4 GB VRAM range.

As mentioned in post #2, it is a good idea to keep your 'working' *.PSB files on the SSD. The performance will be much improved over editing files stored on the WD Black. While RAID 0 is nice from a performance standpoint, if one of the disks fails, you lose all the data. Therefore, If you go this route, you will need a robust backup setup (you should have this anyway, as a matter of course).

One more thing about drives: M2 PCIe SSD's will throttle performance when they heat up. Therefore, I would stay with the Samsung 960, which is an excellent drive.

You will need a fairly hefty power supply. I suggest an 850W.

One final note: Your system as specced is going to generate a lot of heat, so be absolutely sure you have enough intake and exhaust fans.

I do not usually recommend PC builders, but you might want to check out Puget Systems (https://www.pugetsystems.com/) in Auburn WA. They know their stuff.
--P

[Amedeus]

I do work with large images (5-7GB) in Photoshop.

My "standard" retouching system is a 2011 iMac (top of the line then ;-) ... ) with 32GB ram, one (external) 500GB Samsung SSD as scratch disk and two 8-bay Drobos for storage/back up. 1 T drive in the computer.

Although the above setup is adequate for images up to 2GB, once over that, things become very slow ... THe last 7GB image I worked on took about 7 days of work to finish the last complex filtering action. I was biting nails the power wouldn't drop out .. lol

My current system is not much younger but is a MacPro with 2 quad cores running at 2.4Ghz, 64GB and two (internal) 500GB Samsung SSD as scratch disk, the rest is unchanged ... let's say that this made my life much more pleasant.

I do try to keep the layers to a minimum by flattening as soon as I believe the desired intermediate goal is achieved.

Just an FYI.

Rudi A.

[Keldrilh]

Keldrilh,

The specs you have provided look good, but I do have a few things to share...

The video card you specced is overkill for Photo Shop. PS, at the moment, supports only a limited number of GPU accelerated functions, so you can save money (and generated heat) by going with a card in the 4 GB VRAM range.

As mentioned in post #2, it is a good idea to keep your 'working' *.PSB files on the SSD. The performance will be much improved over editing files stored on the WD Black. While RAID 0 is nice from a performance standpoint, if one of the disks fails, you lose all the data. Therefore, If you go this route, you will need a robust backup setup (you should have this anyway, as a matter of course).

One more thing about drives: M2 PCIe SSD's will throttle performance when they heat up. Therefore, I would stay with the Samsung 960, which is an excellent drive.

You will need a fairly hefty power supply. I suggest an 850W.

One final note: Your system as specced is going to generate a lot of heat, so be absolutely sure you have enough intake and exhaust fans.

I do not usually recommend PC builders, but you might want to check out Puget Systems (https://www.pugetsystems.com/) in Auburn WA. They know their stuff.
--P

Thanks a lot, i really appreciate your feedback. Your suggestions are helping me to find the right configuration.

I already stepped on Pudget system website few days ago. Actually they have some article very good and usefull articles about Destoktop configuration for Photoshop. But they are in far away Australia! and I'm in Italy!! :)

Just one more question.

The mother board has only one M.2 connection. If I take an adaptor for the second M.2 Drive, will it loose quality the transfer rate?

[jp]

Your laptop is good for solitaire, word processing, and light Internet browsing. The quoted desktop is probably 25x the computer and much more appropriate.
I'd agree that a 4gb video card will probably be fine and save a couple hundred you can use elsewhere.

It's possible you don't need quite so large a file, but I'm not privy to the nature of your tasks. Each layer basically doubles the original memory requirements in PS as it needs before/after renderings for turning layers on and off quickly.

You'll want a 4k IPS display as well. That too will be much nicer and more appropriate than a consumer laptop display which changes tones depending on the angle you look at it.

[Preston]

But they are in far away Australia! and I'm in Italy!!


No, they are located in Washington state, USA. That is a bit closer to Italy. :D I am not sure what their policy is for international shipments, though. You would need to check with them. If you send an e-mail, they will get back to you in short order.


The mother board has only one M.2 connection. If I take an adaptor for the second M.2 Drive, will it loose quality the transfer rate?

I am not sure. However, my 'prime directive' is Keep It Simple. As I said above, your choices for drives are solid, and will get the job done. If you need additional storage space, or a scratch drive, you can always add another HD, assuming the case and mother board will handle it.
--P

[locutus]

Don't get to hung up on needing a M.2 PCI-e SSD, they are screaming fast but a normal midrange SATA connected drive will be fast enough for your uses.

To put it in perspective; A decent Samsung SATA SSD will do the initial read of the size of files you are working on in 9 seconds, the M.2 one in 4, if the software is any smart it wont read/writeout the whole fileset on each manipulation after that.

So spending more money on saving that part is not the most efficient place, more memory will be a better use of that money and if you are using Adobe tools that support GPU acceleration a dedicated graphics card helps.

[Keldrilh]

Thank you all for the suggestions! :)

[Jim Andrada]

And since it was suggested you look into it, the 4k (and other size) "video guys" edit low(er) resolution "proxy" files that are linked to the original files so all the editing actions can be applied to the high resolution files when it's time to render the final video. I "only" record 2.5k video and even so it will fill a 500GB SSD in 40 minutes or so. And it's possible to do something similar in PS, although I've never had to try it.

https://www.videomaker.com/videonews/2010/06/the-mysterious-world-of-proxy-editing-and-how-to-improve-your-workflow

http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?69687-Working-with-Large-images-in-Photoshop-Using-a-quot-proxy-Image-quot

[Keldrilh]

And since it was suggested you look into it, the 4k (and other size) "video guys" edit low(er) resolution "proxy" files that are linked to the original files so all the editing actions can be applied to the high resolution files when it's time to render the final video. I "only" record 2.5k video and even so it will fill a 500GB SSD in 40 minutes or so. And it's possible to do something similar in PS, although I've never had to try it.

https://www.videomaker.com/videonews/2010/06/the-mysterious-world-of-proxy-editing-and-how-to-improve-your-workflow

http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?69687-Working-with-Large-images-in-Photoshop-Using-a-quot-proxy-Image-quot

I'll give a look. thx

[locutus]

Software like Lightroom or Silverfast do this proxy editing by default already, they work on a screen sized copy and then once you are happy they will render out full resolution results.

I dont think Photoshop can do this though.

Another item; if you can stretch it (and honestly its expensive) the Dell 2715k monitor is pretty much the best thing ever since sliced bread for working on high resolution files, you get 15 megapixels of onscreen resolution (a 1920x1080 monitor is about 2) it gets very close to looking at a large format slide....

[Jac@stafford.net]

Here is Adobe's page on PS optimization (https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html). Hope this helps.

[Keldrilh]

Here is Adobe's page on PS optimization (https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html). Hope this helps.

thx!!