[darkaxum]

Finding the Sijun forums is like finding the holy grail of digital painting. I can't thank everyone enough for making this such an awesome place.

I recently had a revelation that led me to Sijun, but that's another post.

OK... to the point:

I posted a question over at my daily forum mattepainting.org http://www.mattepainting.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3416

But I felt like no-one (cept maybe a few pros) who replied had actually digitally painted back in the days when the ibook g3 was an actual production computer.

Here's what I asked:

[B0b]

i recently help Capt Flush upgrade his system to a Quad Core2 Duo..

the one thing that we will all get when we've had our systems a while is complacent about the speed (even if you had the fastest system in the world, after a couple of months you'd want something faster! simply because you'd push it that much more and expect it to run the same)

ok, so you have a 700Mhz Mac, this is very slow compaired to machines of today and i'm not supprised that you feel its time to upgrade! you'll see a marked improvement when you get your new MacBook, but to take full advantage of the Core2 you'll need to upgrade CS2 to CS3..

make sure you have 2GB of RAM with ur new MacBook as well

[darkaxum]

I realize how much of an idiot I might sound like. Most serious digital artists would never put up with such a slow computer, I have 3 PC's, and I bought the ibook about a half a year ago for 600 bucks. And I love it. It's slower but much more reliable than my pc's.

I also do alot of painting on a Pentium 4 3ghz with 2GB of Ram. There's not a huge difference between the two computers in terms of performance (when I'm painting 2k images).

But what I am really trying to get to the bottom of: Old hands at digital painting...what was painting like on an older machine? Has processing power changed how well you work?

[Mikko K]

I can't say much about Macs since I'm a pc guy, but it sounds like your P4 3ghz with 2GB RAM should be fairly good for running Photoshop. I don't use CS3 yet, but my home computer has similar specs and the performance is ok.

It's not perfect, but I'd rather invest in a good screen and an A4 Intuos tablet.

The size of the tablet is important because it gives more accuracy to your brush strokes, and the Intuos series has superior stylus pressure recognition compared to the Graphire ones. That results in better control over the brush settings, like width of the strokes or opacity.

Get a big screen so you have more space to paint on. My Apple Cinema 23" has been good enough so I can work on larger images. I usually use some 3000-4000px wide images when I paint, and those fit on the screen pretty well when zoomed out to 50%. And you still got enough res to add some finer touches.

I'd also recommend having a lot of free disk space and doing defragmentation and everything you can to reduce hard disk swapping. I'm no expert on this, but PS really slows down everytime your hard disk kicks in I also use registry clean ups and whatnot to optimize my rather low-end home pc.

Hope this helps!

[darkaxum]

Helps alot. I can find a connection with how your details look with how you have your hardware setup.

My details are never quite as crisp as I want. Even when I paint at 3k and scale to 2k. I thought it might have something to do with how I work on my crappy graphire.

BTW Do you work in something besides 72 dpi?

[Mikko K]

It can be useful to run the Sharpen filter on your images once you've resized them for web viewing.

For instance, I often scale my pics down to some 1500 pixels wide/high, run the sharpen TWICE, then scale again to some 1300 which is the final size.
You can also do this by using sharpen once in the final size, and using Edit> Fade to reduce the effect if it's too much.

The dpi settings are just for print. I reckon every screen is 72 dpi these days.

[darkaxum]

Right. So as you can see when much to my amazement I found out that spooge said in an interview that he works in 300 dpi regardless of print or web..Whcih makes sense since you would get a little bit of extra detail out of working at a higher dpi despite it's output to web, print, or silver screen.

I personally prefer 600 dpi for all my print work since 300 is often too grainy for my tastes

(I'm a web designer that's done some personal art prints on my 12 x 18 in-house printer...my wife is a scrapbook page designer...hence the need for a large printer)

[Sukhoi]

DPI? Dots Pr. Inch.....how does this relate to pixels? I mean you can have two images that's 2000x2000 Pixels and identical but one's in 50DPI the other is 2DPI....I don't get whay you are using DPI as an indicator for size when it's only relevant in print. Is it becauce a monitor generally displays 72 DPI? Confused....

Anyways.

If you paint in photoshop at uneven zoom levels lke 55Pct. or 20Pct. your strokes get all funked up. Photoshop likes straight and even 50 - 100 - 200 pct. zoom levels. Just like it can't really interpolate properly on uneven zoom percentages. Propably related to speed I guess.

I'm on a 1.6Ghz Powerbook. Too slow for my likes, even though I get by just fine. If I'm doing an image and I get lost in it, spending hours on end, I don't really notice the speed of the computer anyways.

Sukhoi

[Affected]

Maybe Mullins is just used to inputting canvas size in inches or centimetres, and uses DPI because of that. If you set size in pixels, the DPI doesn't make any difference on-screen.

[Mikko K]

Or he has adapted to the "graphic designer of the 70's" state of mind when doing interviews.

Kinda like Leigh said at Cgtalk, that someone claimed Macs better than PC's "because they have more fonts". Old patterns of thought die hard I guess..

[Jabo]

Yeah, and as we're expert-talking 72dpi here: NOT CORRECT! My monitor has 98ppi, not 72. Your's probably has higher resolution than 72ppi as well.

Digital Camera's are advertised by megapixels in brochures and tv spots, but nobody realizes that megapixels are one of the least important things on a camera. Big mp-scales actually harm the image quality, as the sensors on the chip have to become smaller to get more pixels. And reduction of size can only be received by loss of quality.

So much for misunderstandings in the era of technical superiority.

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On-Topic: Processing power isn't that important I think. Most tablet+computer solutions run smoothly if you don't go over the top. It's more important to have matching screen/tablet sizes. For example, the 17" macbook pro might need an Intuos A4, while the MacBook 13" will do perfectly with a Graphire A5 or even A6. Besides that, maybe pressure sensivity might have some effect on your decision.

What has changed over time is the software. Photoshop7 was a rather slick, yet powerful application. CS changed it all. Adobe began to implement all kinds of new tools and functions, partly by buying innovative code from garage-programmers (as currently seen with the infamous retargeting app.) Now PS CS2 loads a minute on my 3GHz machine to load dozens of tools I won't ever use in my life.

On the paint-side of PS, the custom brush system has been refined significantly and is a power-sucker. Painting with the standard brush goes smoothly (even on an old PC or Mac), but try it again with a photo-brush that has some jitters activated.

So, things to keep an eye on are: screens, tablets, RAM and finally: hard disc space for the ever growing amount of data.
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