[Capt.FlushGarden]

I've always wondered how strong computer u must have to work in very high resolutions, I've heard Spooge Demon talk about resolutions up to 6-10 000 pixels, I have a rather strong computer but I can't work properly on higher than about 2000 pixels wide, what's the trick, do people split up images to smaller sections and put them back together in the big canvas?

well thanx in advanse dudes and dudettes!

John

[Gort]

Hmmm...if it were me I would not split an image up. If you're serious about digital painting you'll want to beef your machine up as much as possible. Dual cpus and as much memory as the slots will hold - max it out. Consider a RAID controller for the motherboard too.

Having dual monitors wont hurt either; crts are insanely cheap these days, and you can easily buy two for less than what one cost 3 - 5 years ago.

Platform can based on preference - Mac or PC - just learn the tool.

Loki's website has some useful info on machine setup for the PC, but if Apple is your gig, I am certain there are some here to assist you.

All of this is of course defined by how much money you have, but if you're serious you'll do it.

"Get busy livin'"
_________________
- Tom Carter

"You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf" - Jack Kornfield

[Socar MYLES]

Here is how I do it, when required:

1. Make the underpainting at maybe 1,000 X 600, for 10,000 X 6,000 pixel piece.

2. Blow up the underpainting, and work it over at full-res. Works better if you use one or two layers. More layers eat too much memory and saving takes ages.

My computer is not THAT fabulous--only a gig of RAM, and I don't even know how fast the CPU is...but I got the computer for about 20,000 kronor, so it can't be that good. And it's last year's model and all. Hope that helps.
_________________
Dignity isn't important. It's everything.

www.gorblimey.com - art

[B0b]

ok this is the way photoshop works:

take your file size, for arguements sake a A4 image (210x297mm) CMYK @ 300dpi (standard 200lpi print size) or 2480x3508 pixels = 24.9Mb in size..

to edit this in photoshop in RAM will take 5x that amount because of the way Photoshop works so in total you will need 124.5Mb of Physical RAM for photoshop not to use Photoshop Scratch, so on a Windows platform if you have 256Mb in your computer without anything open your system will just about cope with this image, that is until you start messing with stuff , adding layers etc, then the amount of RAM needed will increase and Photoshop will start using Scratch..

basically anything 512Mb+ and your talking happy days

on a Mac based sys allocating 307200k to Photoshop will make it happy if you have more RAM spare and don't use anything else, give it..

i have a seperate 2Gb Partition for Photoshop Scratch, this is if i start working on 'large format dispays' usually the basic file b4 i start working on anything is on average 220Mb, even tho' i have 2Gb RAM i hit the Scratch hard on most large format jobs..

846x508mm or 10,000 x 6,000 = 171.8Mb or 859Mb of RAM needed by PS

hope this helps..

[Inspector Lee]

Bob, dumb question maybe but, what does it mean when you say photoshop uses scratch?
_________________
Smokey, this is not 'Nam this is bowling. There are rules.

[B0b]

ok theres Windows Pagefile and Photoshop Scratch (can't remember what Apple call it, think its Virtual Mem)

Pagefile is what windows uses when it runs out of Physical RAM and Photoshop Scratch is what Photoshop uses when it runs out of Physical RAM, basically if you only have 128Mb of RAM and your working with a 15Mb File, your RAM will run out really fast, so PS looks elsewhere and thats @ the PS Scratch, so it uses a portion of the HDD, where you set it in the prefs (Plug-ins & Scratch) for me this is the 2Gb Partition i have specially allocated for PS, this is how you can work on large files with so little RAM, and can explain for some peoples machines grinding to a slow walk when working on such large files.. basically PS eats RAM , the more RAM you have the happier it is..

its always wise to have a section of your HDD set as a PS Scratch, the fastest sectors on my HDD just happen to fall where my PS Sctatch is i format this bout once a week to make sure it stays clean..

[glody]

i would say the big thing benefitting spooge is the fact from what i remember is that he works on a Macintosh based computer, which...handles photoshop MUUUUUUUUUUUUCH better than PC's handle photoshop.....(correct me if im wrong craig) I deal mostly with graphic design, and when i use any loaded g4, compared to any current loaded Pc

macintosh definitely outperforms in the photoshop area of things.....now 3d on the other hand...i feel is a different story....


if im wrong anyone please....bitchslap me

photoshop was originally developed and intended for macintosh's.....

[B0b]

/me bitch slaps glody

my machine will outperform a Dual G4 in PS and was 1/3 the price

the reason why Photoshop was first developed for the mac was because the mac used to own the publishing world (and ILM used Macintosh II's, and still did upto i think it was the first Jurassic Park, when they switched to SGI, Adobe had made PS for the SGI by then because they'd ported it to the PC also), that is til winblows 95 / NT3.5.1, i used to be a mac sucker as well.. still got my Quadra 950 sitting under my desk.. the only thing that stopped me moving totally to PC for everything was the fact that organising Type was much better on a Mac based sys, Adobe Type Manager and Extensus Suitcase made font (type) managing so much better than on a Win sys, being able to open up what typeface u wanted and shut it down again, saved massive memory overheads and endless font names appearing in the menu, this however is no longer the case as Suitcase is available on the PC, this heavily affected my descision making when i made my Workstation, as i knew that i could make a PC that was more powerful than the biggest G4 at the time and for 1/3 the cost.. + the fact i want to get into 3D modeling/animation.

Apple are on a dying path of Hardware, Motarola are looking at pulling out of the G4/5 chip building and calling it a day, IBM will pic up all the pieces and continue to make their chips (don't know whats going to happen to Apples piece of the pie) , thats why i think apple are buying up so much software atm..

[Capt.FlushGarden]

Oh thanx for the tip everyone! Bob, dude still got problems with my computer, but thanx for all your help with the update and the program, I owe u!

Glody, I am seruiously thinking of buying a macintosh to paint on, they seem alot simpler to play with, and they're beautiful aswell! do u use a mac for painting`?

Socarmyles: that's good, I've tried that but I get all these blurry edges hehe
and you got alot more RAM than I have, 512 DDR =(, I think 20 000 is quite alot, you should have gotten a very strong computer for that, well well, computers computers, cant live with em cant live without them, they're just like girls dammit (sorry girls)

Tom Carter, thanx for the info man! cheers!

Capt.Flushgarden: well, you really should know some about this, are you stupid or what? 2000 pixels, 10 000 pixels, the art you do will suck anyway man, and you spell like a broken crayon, learn some english before posting here, I HATE YOU you dahmn Mo fo!!!

[Snakebyte]

I think I do things the most ineffecint way there is, but it works for me.
I make my canvas at least 6400 wide if it is landscape, that way I can zoom out to 25% and view it full screen and not have it have any "jagged edge" on a 1600x1200 display. Also, I almost always end up with 80-120+ layers.

My current picture is TOO big for me to work on right now, just to open it consumes 2Gig's of ram (I have 1.5Gigs), but I'm building a new Super Photoshop Box now so its no bother.

Personly I like BIG canvases and putting my puter to work, makes me feal like I'm doing something constructive...
_________________
Kevin Moore
www.darkesthorizons.com

[Socar MYLES]

120 layers??? What do you have on 120 layers? And how do you avoid confusion? Auuuuuugh! *fear*
_________________
Dignity isn't important. It's everything.

www.gorblimey.com - art

[proper fuel]

120 layers?????!
lol, you're cracking me up, you've got to be crazy

[rdgraffix]

120 Layers isn't that rediculous guys - for one of my recent World Wildlife Fund billboards I had a school of about 120 or so individual fish and had to have each and every one of them on a seperate layer for flexibility, as the exact composition of the school was very important to the concept. That's why I was glad I wasn't still working on PS 5.5, which had a layer limit of 99 (which I only hit once )

For a standard job, I'd probably be looking at something more like 20-50 layers, but to do some jobs properly you just need more flexibility. After all, Art Directors love changing their mind and I HATE having to start again just because I flattened some layers earlier on. Maybe that's just my advertising experience speaking though.
_________________
Rowan Dodds
inksplat studios
www.inksplat.net

[Snakebyte]

This pic is a screen shot from something I did almost 2 years ago, it is about 150 layers... well it did use 200 layers but not all at once
http://www.fantasy-anime.org/pub/layers.jpg I would just post it hear but its a bit tall (half size)

Actually, dipite the nature of Photoshop hogging up Ram, If you have 1.5+ gigs installed it isnt that bad. Many layers are very small, sometimes an alternate version of another layer. Since Photoshop 6 added folders it makes sorting easy(er).
Often, I look back at something and deside I dont like it, with it being an a layer of its own all I have to do is delete the layer, or change it.
_________________
Kevin Moore
www.darkesthorizons.com

[spooge demon]

I paint on a Mac dual gig with 1.5 gig ram running osx. I have a 5 year old dell, 400 mhz dual running nt4 with 256 mb ram.

As far as everything besides PS, I much prefer a PC. It is much faster and more stable, the interface is much more to my liking. I think this has to do with the easy "maximize" function on windows. Everything is always in the same place. On a mac, the windows float about and nothing is ever in the same place. And speed is not just how fast a machine can run a filter, it is how fast you can interact with it. 2000 commands a day, if you save just a little bit on each one, it is a large savings. Macs still have that walking in molasses feel to everything as well as everything floating around. A good graphics card is really important too.

Even on OSX PS crashes or behaves strangely on a regular basis. I have had macs for years (I have been around them since 1984) and this has always been the case. Because (I suppose) PS was developed on a mac, it used to run better on a mac than a PC, especially with large, complex files. My wife has a cheap pc running PS and it has not crashed once in two months. Her machine is fast and stable and she gets a lot of work done.

I have been trying for years to find out the difference between a maxed out pc and mac as far as PS is concerned. I spent some time recently with a client (big effects house doing massive number of very complex shots for some film you have heard about) and they have ditched the SGIs in favor of a whole bunch of Dells. I am sure Linux figures in there somewhere, but most machines were running win2k.

There was a pal of mine who I knew at square and he used a mac there for a year or two. He now has a maxed out dell, and he cannot find the words to describe how much happier he is. I played with his machine, it is very nice, much faster than mine, and he says it does not crash. And he is working on big nasty files.

Up to this point, it has seemed that mac PS handled very large files a lot better. This is not the case anymore, as I get the "spinning beach ball" a lot when pushing my OSX mac.

My vote - get a refurbished dell (my 5 year old dell was refurbished and it is flawless) and lotsa ram, win2k or XP pro. build it yourself if you have more time than money.

The partitioning advice that others have given and backing up the registry is really good advice, but a pain. It is the one big drawback to windows. I don't know if the "reinstall windowsand then reinstall every freaking app" can be avoided. If you keep the system and apps on separate partitions, and backup your registry can you avoid it? Installing on OSX is just drag a file to a directory, done. I have not had to reinstall anything yet, so that is still an unknown if it stays that simple.

One more thought, painter works much better on a PC. On my mac it is unusable except for tiny stuff.

oh yeah, the canvas stuff. Patience! Try to paint 2k on a 28 mhz quadra 700 with 32 mb ram. with a mouse on one 13 inch monitor. no layers or fancy undos. It took 15 minutes to open! geez, kids today... Seriously, start as big as you can, bump up as soon as you can.

[Ian Jones]

Fantastic advice Spooge. It's nice to hear from your experience. 28mhz... eek! I have owned an IBM 386, but thats as far back as I go. haha. The good 'ole days.

[B0b]

capt, we'll sort the rest of your machine out when ur back home.. don't bother with a Mac its a really expensive option for alot more hastle than u really want

[Eric Pommer]

On a related note, how big and what resolution do you usually have to do for
cover projects (book or gamebox, I was thinking)? I've done interior work at 300dpi, but that was b&w. Is it the same for colour covers?
_________________
-=-=-=-
Mindplaces: Artwork by Eric Pommer
http://www.mindplaces.com

[Socar MYLES]

Eric, it depends entirely on the company. I've been asked to work at as low as 200 dpi and as high as 1200. 300-600 seems to be the norm for book illustration (cover or interior), comics, et cetera. Not sure about video game covers. Never done one of those.

Hm. I should draw more explosions so I can get offered some work like that...yeah.... (Just kidding.)

Seriously, though, 300 dpi is perfectly fine for most print projects, colour or b/w. Always just ask the publisher what resolution they want before you start. Most people seem to have a specific standard size in mind.
_________________
Dignity isn't important. It's everything.

www.gorblimey.com - art

[Danny]

On the issue of partitioning and backing up the registry to avoid a cluttered system, there are much better and complete solutions. You can get programs nowadays that make mirror images off of any partition you want. OS, applications, work data... everything gets backed up to a destination of your choice. This can also include CDR's. So when you've just finished installing all your software anew, you run the program to create a system backup. Then after some time when you find your system starts chugging, you kick off the program again and it'll restore the image of your clean system in minutes. It goes without saying that you need to store all your work on a seperate partition to prevent it from being 'restored' to a state of several months ago.

Here are some links to apps that'll allow you to do this:

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/
http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/

I guess the ideal system has the OS and apps on one HD (perhaps separated between two partitions), all work files on another HD and then yet another HD for those pesky scratch files.
_________________
Trust in Trance

[glody]

Buuuumper boat!

[B0b]

yeah i ghosted my system when i had it running smooth, every now and then i put it back on my C:

[eyewoo]

RAMs gotta be about the most important link in the chain... certainly if you want to work at high resolutions it is totally necessary.

One of my tricks when I was working with little RAM 6 or 7 years ago (using PShop) was to create a rectangle mask around an area that I wanted to do detail work on, like a head, hand expression, whatever. Then I'd select the area, copy it and open it in a new file. Then I'd save the rectangle area as a channel in the original file and close the file. In the new file with just the rectangle area, I'd bump it up big and do the fine detail work. Then I'd drop it back to it's normal size and paste it back into the original by loading the channel which creates the rectangler as a selected area right where it should be. As long as I didn't make any changes near the edges of the retangular area, it would fall right into place without a hitch. Of course the fine details would get lost, but the line work, etc would be far better than if I had tried to do the detail work at the low resolution... Hope that makes sense... It worked for me...

I also use many, many layers... very many layers... that's one of the digital things that make digital what it is... use 'em! ... Socar... you do know about placing the cursor on an area and pressing Ctrl-Alt and the right mouse button -- it instantly makes the layer active that that area resides upon. Very easy way to work with layers...

As they say, you can never be too thin or have too much RAM.
_________________
HonePie.com
tumblr blog
digtal art

[Socar MYLES]

Yes, I do know that shortcut, eyewoo...can't say I really remember to use it while painting, though. I do for the first half hour or so, but then I forget about layers completely. Layers don't fit too well with my usual painting method--maybe you find them useful, but I just find that they get in the way.

I mean, in the end, as long as I get the result I want...does it really matter if I did it all on one layer? If it's just a painting which won't ever have to be separated into parts for any reason, I don't see the problem. Sometimes, when I do something for work, it is requested that I put the characters on a separate layer from the background, so they can be used separately for advertising purposes, but apart from that, I've never had much call for layers.
_________________
Dignity isn't important. It's everything.

www.gorblimey.com - art

[eyewoo]

[Socar MYLES]

Hm...I don't actually agree with EITHER of those statements. I don't think layers are a crutch at all--you can get some really interesting effects with them, and they're great for some types of art, especially if you need to move objects around your canvas a lot.

However, I don't think they're integral to the digital medium either--integral to YOUR method of working, maybe--but not to mine, and I also use digital media a lot. My process is very straightforward: I like to have my composition planned and blocked in in advance, so I don't really have much call for moving stuff around independently of the rest of the painting. I also like to be nitpickily controlling when it comes to colours, so I don't like the layer compositing modes that much either.

Of course, it could be argued that I'm not using Photoshop to its full potential, or being very innovative, and I'd probably have to admit that it's true. PS has loads of tools, and I use maybe three or four of them per painting. I guess I look at digital painting as a quick and unsmelly way of...well...painting...and haven't moved too far beyond the traditional. I'm slowly picking up new tricks, though...I've never been one of those people who can just adapt easily to new media. So it's taking me a while to get into the whole digital deal. Still, I find myself doing things like tapping the Wacom pen on the side of the tablet after selecting a new colour (as though to degunk my paintbrush after dipping in paint).

Hell, I could probably benefit from a Photoshop class or two, had I the cash to spare!
_________________
Dignity isn't important. It's everything.

www.gorblimey.com - art

[Daniel Lieske]

I actually like to paint on very small resolutions. One thing that holds me from going big is that painting on larger canvas requires to use bigger brushes. Now, on my system the brushes begin to lag when they get bigger than 100 pixels and that�s a pain in the ass. I run a 2Ghz PC with 1 Gb RAM. I have my photoshop scratch on a seperate HD so I don�t think that this is the problem.
That�s what I�m really interested in: when You all paint on large canvases don�t You suffer from brush lag?
_________________
�Que la fuerza te acompa�e!

[eyewoo]

[Danny]

Right.. Daniel Lieske here raises an interesting point. Something not necesarilly related to canvas size is brush size. I've noticed my system is not capable enough anymore with my increased demands of photoshop brushes. I'm using an old dual p3 500Mhz with 512MB of ram. The airbrush and burn and dodge especially seem to become unusable with anything bigger than 100-120px @ 100% soft feathered and 25% spacing. This is regardless of canvas size.
I'm considering building a new box that'll sort this out. I'd love to hear from other painters here how their pc's perform with large brush sizes. Are modern day top of the line PC's capable of handling 500+ px airbrushes at all? Would purchasing PS7 improve on this (I'm still using PS5.5)?
Please post your experiences....
_________________
Trust in Trance

[B0b]