[kdeezy]

I read about people using 300dpi for their paintings in PS and the images are gigantic 5000x5000 and so on but the one thing that i dont get is HOW.

Not how i get the 300dpi but how ur computer can run without getting slow as a snail.

For me at 100dpi my computer slows down to a crawl after awhile of drawing anything. I got a gig of ram, athlon 2500xp, 120gb 8mb cache 7200rpm western digital hdd and an ATI 9600xt.

Anyone have any tips? im slowy getting more into painting in PS (almost done my first full out photoshopped painting) and id rather not have to wait a minute between brush strokes.

[sweetums]

Turn off the History thumbnails (and reduce Undos as much as possible. If you can get by with just one, do it.), disable previewing, go to a smaller size cache, defrag your HD once in awhile, and don't run any other applications (including your web browser) when PS is running. Those will help some, but you need to accept that at 300 ppi, any sizable command is simply going to take a lot of time due to the sheer number of pixels being adjusted. It's plain physics. CPU's, fast as they are STILL take time to move thousands of pixels. You'll have to shell out a LOT more money for a superfast processor, and you'll still end up waiting. It's the price you pay for large works at a high resolution.
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[Affected]

A good idea is to work at a lower resolution first and resize upwards as you need more detail. It does mean some reworking of edges etc. but I find that the smoothness of working with a small thumbnail on composition etc. is worth it.

[eyewoo]

Also, if you use layers, at 5000x5000, I GIG of RAM is not enough. On any image with more than a few layers, your scratch disk will kick in and everything slows down.
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[kdeezy]

thanks for the suggestions.


The main thing that keeps me away from resizing the image is well the fact that u have to go back and refine / redo parts like u stated..


I guess ill have to learn to live with that, until i get some money for a new computer.

What would u suggest, processor wise? dual proc? photoshop supports dual procs if i recall correctly, and ram? 2gigs+?

[Heysoos]

well, I'd venture to say that most things don't need that high of a resolution. Its nice to have it as high of a resolution as you can get because it gives you more flexibility in messin with it but if you take 300dpi image and print it then reduce it to 150dpi and print it the difference is virtually unnoticable. For publishing some places might want it at 300dpi I guess but unless thats the case for what your doing, I don't see why torture yourself. Especially if your just starting painting with photoshop, I'd say its more important to have it responsive than hi-res.
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[stacy]

If you're serious about going to the wall
to build a genuine Pro workstation,
start with this board. Or at the very least
one with an e7525 chipset.

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?DEPA=0&description=13-182-033&CMP=OTC-pr1c3watch&ATT=Motherboards

I know $549 seems like a lot to pop for a motherboard,
but the built-in features and controllers
like the Ultra320 SCSI would be over
$300 if you bought them and added
them as cards.

Run your WORK/SCRATCH disks on a striped
volume of SATAs or SCSIs in RAID-0.
2,3,4 or the more, the faster.
(You could get a big boost by doing that
with your current system)

Which reminds me... are you currently
running you scratch disk on a different
partition or preferably a different drive
than the OS/Application?

[B0b]

lol stacy talk about using a sledge hammer to crack a walnut

[stacy]

He wants a machine that can handle large files
and multiple layers. That's what it takes.

That's hardly a sledgehammer. That's a typical
layout to run VideoToaster and do 4,5 or 6 layers
of realtime uncompressed switching and editing.

I only have a SuperMicro e7505 X5DAL-TG2 and
I can do 4 in realtime, zero lag.

I have no idea at all where you got the notion
that adding a great deal of performance with
a two or three drive raid-0 is some kind of a big deal.
Anybody with half a brain can do it.
Drive costs are very low and it certainly doesn't
constitute a "hammer on a wallnut".
It's more like a wallnut in a nutcracker...or, "the .
right tool for the job."

Does he want a true professional workstation
or just a glorified kid's game machine...

[kdeezy]

Thanks for the link stacy,

Unfortunately i dont have the dough to go out and purchase a high end workstation , maybe in a year or so hell im not even outta highschool, hopefully the aunt will help me out when i get into an art school:P and by that time better tech will have come out and hopefully things will be cheaper.


Again thanks for the info people.

[stacy]

The machine you have now has decent specs.
Another 100 bucks worth of drives and a raid-0
would help a lot.

Yep, by that time that motherboard will be down
to $150 and the mainstream will be
nVidia nForce Pro chipsets, dual-core
processors and PCIe-SLI on every board.

[B0b]

i didn't see him mention wanting to do Video editing/effects

RAID 0 isn't going to help him paint.. just save him time when opening and saving fiiles..

SLI is only helpful when using Nvidia's Hardware and drivers to help render 3D scenes.. again useless when painting


anyway..
kdeezy, RAM is the key for your perfomance issue XP2500+ CPU is fast enough but the 1GB is what is probably letting you down, that and i'm guessing the lack of dedicated space for Photoshop Scratch. a 10GB Partition should be plenty of swap space for PS.

as has been stated before, turn the amount of history levels you have down, also in the channels and paths pallets turn off the preview, this will help with saving ram and should help speed up redraw times, if you have to see a preivew in the layers pallet turn it down to the smallest size.

give Photoshop 80% of your RAM, if you're running CS, it does have some performance issues which can be fixed by visiting Adobe's website and grabbing some patches.

also set your cache levels to 8

remember the way that Photoshop handles files vs RAM used is take your file size (before Layers) and multiply by 5 and this will give you the amount of physical RAM the file will take so for a 5000x5000px file you're talking 355MB physical RAM with 1 layer..

also remember that 5000x5000px @ 300 or 100 dpi is still 5000x5000px on your computer are you going to be printing this image 16x16 inches anyway?

be conservative with your layers with 1GB RAM, if you're running XP then thats going to take a hefty amount of your memory.. if you can, link several layers together that you haven't touched in a while and use the merge linked command. this will help save some memory

Dual CPU is good if you're constantly working with huge files, Capt Flush recently purchased himself a Dual Opteron with 2GB of RAM for PS7 and loves it when working with 7000+ px files, PS will only kick in when using filters that are Dual CPU aware, useful when working with photo's or you're looking at doing something with your painting
(the main reason to get a dual CPU system is if you want to be doing more than 1 thing at once, swapping from 1 application to another is seamless, as 1 CPU can be dealing with what the other app is doing while it swaps, sometimes get a little lag if PS is choka block with images and running a batch, running batch process on a folder full of photo's is gr8 with dual CPU don't even know its happening )

(i have a dual CPU system, but have been using them since '98 and can't stand using a single CPU system anymore, but then i've got 4 screens and find it hard using 1 )

Photoshop will only see a max of 2GB of RAM so i wouldn't bother trying to put more than this in your PC atm, prehaps when 64bit PS comes out they'll make it see more, i've been trauling the web trying to find out information but am coming up dry at the moment

another thought do you have a virus checker or adware installed?

[kdeezy]

very helpful bob, and i check for viruses/spyware etc on a regular basis so it most likely isnt either of those factors that is slowing down the comp in ps.


Also how would i go about creating the 10gb partition for PS?

thanks again.

[eyewoo]

I second what Bob wrote about your RAM... 1 gig is simply not enough for working easily on images that large, even if you have your scratch disk set up as fast as possible. Even 2 gig is not enough if many layers are being used. Unfortunately, as pointed out, Photoshop currently can only handle up to 2 gig.
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[stacy]

"i didn't see him mention wanting to do Video editing/effects "

What he wanted was performance... that's a performance system for video, 3D or 2D.



"RAID 0 isn't going to help him paint.. just save him time when opening and saving fiiles.."

Photoshop notes the changes in an image by swapping out little blocks of the image as they change. Only a portion of that happens in memory. Every time you undo/redo, make a choice of any kind from the menu, apply a filter, run a script, apply an action, or as you said, open or close a file to save it or grab one or multiples for referance or to apply to your workflow it hits storage. Photoshop's access to the scratch file and virtual memory is constant. It most CERTAINLY will help.




"SLI is only helpful when using Nvidia's Hardware and drivers to help render 3D scenes.. again useless when painting "

We were talking about the future at that point. By the time SLI is cheap and he's ready for it, no doubt, that much horsepower will be harnesed by many applications. As a 'fer instance, if you're familar with a little titling application called Bluff Titler, unlike all the other titling apps out there, including Zax Dow's amazing Invigorator Pro Animator, it ingeniously uses the same GPU and on-video-card rendering that high-end games use. It's VERY innovative for a graphics application, in that it takes advantage of the video card like it's never been used before. And... it provides first class output EXTREMELY fast. There's also no doubt that Zax Dow and a lot of graphics coders are going to follow suit and use the abilities of the graphics engines MUCH more in the VERY NEAR FUTURE... If paint programs want to keep up they WILL use more of that technique in the near future too. Especially big powerful dual arrangements like SLI. In case you hadn't noticed, the realism in games is getting better by the quarter. The line between chunky game graphics and realistically rendered graphics is getting mighty thin, if it hasn't been crossed already. Bluff demonstrates that high-end video cards can not only play advanced grapics but can create and render them too.

Download it and try it and see for yourself where fast, high quality graphics is headed. It's an amazing app.



"Photoshop will only see a max of 2GB of RAM..."

On this point you're right. The only way to get any one app running on Windoze to see more than 2 gigs is to use Windows Advanced Server.

Also I don't think Microsoft is going to change that ratio between their versions of windozes. They may increase the total amount of memory 64-bit can see, but the Advanced Server will always see more, or they couldn't charge ten times as much for it.

[B0b]

again painting is 2D and not 3D and as such is effected by the RAM DAC Speed and with redraw realtime now, i doubt SLI will increase it

and if you were going to go SLI i certainly wouldn't do it with the current generation of SLI motherboards..

i doubt that with the small chunks that get swapped, a speed difference will be noticed with a RAID system vs non-RAID .. i've only noticed a difference in opening and saving of files rather than painting speed when i swapped from a single drive to a RAID 0 system

the reason i went RAID is because i got fed up of the time it took batch processing images and when opening mulitple large images.. and i wanted to dabble in home video editing

certainly with the price that HDD are these days, putting a couple of 120GB drives in a RAID 0 array isn't that expensive anymore, but just have to ask if you can really justify it as you know backing up of files is very important with RAID 0 as if 1 drive fails, u loose everything

[B0b]

[kdeezy]

i see, so how would photoshop know to use that 10gigs for the scratch file?

[B0b]

you tell it to in the prefrences

[kdeezy]

simple enough lol, thanks.

[B0b]

was doing an experiment for someone seeing the effects of using the brush tool within photoshop and then effect it had on my CPU's and it looks like its a multithreaded tool! both CPU's are put under stress when painting with it!

i opened a 32"x32" @ 300dpi file thats 9600x9600px and started painting with a 500px brush while watching the CPU process within the task manager and noticed that both CPU's were hitting about the same 70% mark (peeking @ 89%) when i painted, so i stand corrected on the filters front, while looks like those who do large paintings will benefit from a dual rig

[spec for those interested: dual 1.26GHz PIII, 2GB PC133 RAM]

[stacy]

Again professional systems

e7525 chipset board:
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?DEPA=0&description=13-182-033&CMP=OTC-pr1c3watch&ATT=Motherboards

NVIDIA nForce PRO chipset board:
http://www.8anet.com/merchant.ihtml?pid=2417&lastcatid=5&step=4

[B0b]

u and ur SLI and Xeons

for those with a few thousand $$$ kicking about go Xeon

Opteron is faster in PS 7.01 + gives upgrade to PS 64 when its released
or the other cheaper multi CPU from AMD, the MP range of CPU's is another Dual route both are cheaper than an equiv Xeon system

i spec'd a Opteron 240 which will best a dual 3GHz Xeon 8 months ago i guess for �800 less than the 3GHz Xeon and �1,200 less than a dual G5 you can prolly get a better Chip now and still be less than a Xeon sys

and seeing as i can happily paint 9600x9600 pixels on my dual PIII i still think him getting a new system is over kill when he has more horse power in his xp2500+ anyway

[luggage]

And please please please stop the DPI talking madness.

DPI matters in printing while talking physical print sizes.

Talking about DPI and Pixels in the same breath is [censored] and just spreading the n00b confusion.

About scratchdisks - what matters more than partitions and raid (while working) in PS is to have them on separate spindles (aka physical harddrives)

If you have the RAM and use normal XP pro - sure put the first, either windows swap or ps scratch disc (test...) on a ram-drive.
After that have OS/Programs separated from windows swap AND PS scratch disc.
Use dedicated drives or at least dedicated partitions on drives for swap and scratch. Just putting a scratchfile or swapfile in another partition on the same drive as you have/use other stuff doesnt help more than locking the swap-size...

like so:
HD0: C:\ OS & programs // F:\ games, my documents, mail
Ram-Drive: primary windows swap (pagefile.sys) or/and primary PS Scratch
HD1: D:\ windows swap // G:\ whatever not used heavily while XP is paging
HD2: E:\ PS Scratch // H:\ whatever not used while using PS
HD3\HD4+ RAID1: J:\ workfiles

As for SLI/XEON/OPTERON - look at what runs best with the software you allready payed twice as much for (if we are talking 3D suits and Video...) and run with whats most bang for buck for you.
Upgradeability these days... uhm more ram, 1 new gen gfx-card perhaps, more disc? Anything else will probably cost you whole new system so dont plan for it.

[luggage]

found this: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/expert/optimizedsystem.mspx

Reading as I post this.

[edit] ok it was a ok-ish read, partly a bit out of date but it really covered a lot of basic stuff that everyone should know by now.
Eye it through and see if you missed anything, hardly see the need for antone here to read it all in detail tho.

[sweetums]

I've picked up so many working tips over the years, I can't remember where this one came from, but I do remember it was a "pro," who used PS to make his money.

When working on a large image that will be printed, 1. Draw out a rough at a regular 72 ppi resolution.
2. Work out your composition, basic color and values schema, etc.
3. Then, divide your work into sections, and work on them at a full 300 ppi. If it is a landscape, separate sky from land, mountains from water. If it is a portrait, the hair from the skin, from the clothes, from the features.
You use your rough, painted at 72 ppi for a reference of the overall work, but you compose and create the sections, then combining them (which can, and does take some processing time) into your final, hi-res, detailed piece.

I used this technique for a complex photo-montage contest entry that was 18 x 24", and it really worked quite well, and the computer I had back then was far less powerful than the one I work with now. I still use this process when creating detailed works.
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Life is short. Expect nothing, enjoy everything.
That which does not kill you should make you wiser...