This is a little off topic, but there's a lot of expertise here; maybe someone can help?
I am cleaning up very large scans of photos taken in the early 1900's. They'll be turned into large posters at a museum. The files are huge TIFFs: 1.3 - 1.9GBs in size. They require a lot of work: rotation, cropping, shadow/highlight, cloning and touch-up, at a minimum.
The problem I have is that CS3 is extremely slow applying these tools. Preview doesn't work, which makes it even more painful (Oops, not enough highlight reduction, run it again...). Actual times (minutes:seconds):
Apply Highlight tool 4:15
Apply Crop tool 3:05
Apply Arb. rotation 11:30
Save TIFF Format 4:00
I use a Mac Pro with dual 4-core CPUs running at 3 GHz, with 8GB of DRAM. I have the fastest hard drive I can find. I'm using Mac OS 10.5.6, which I think is the latest version.
Does anyone have suggestions for speeding things up?
To free up memory right away, go to Edit->Purge and choose to empty your Undo, Clipboard, History States, or everything at once (All). They’re in the order you should proceed, so first try purging your Undo and see if that frees up enough memory.
Do you have a scratch disk enabled?
If not, select a scratch disk on a drive that doesn't have PS or your OS on it. That way, PS will have an alternative to RAM should you use up those resources again.
Then lower the History States to a reasonable number (5 or so).
PS can require as much as 10 to 20 times your file size in RAM (or more!) to perform efficiently when it's saving history states.
How much RAM are you allocating to PS? Someone here mentioned a couple of weeks ago to try lowering the percentage down to 40%-50% and said that it worked a treat, as compared to the typical 75% allocation.
How much RAM do you have in your machine? You can get PS to recognize more than 2 GIG if you apply the following found in this link. It works great if you are careful in following the directions.
OOPS! I just noticed you are using MAC. I believe there is a fix for thisas well, but I don't know how to find it. Sorry!
Posted by Jim DeWitt on March 19, 2009 at 12:16 PM
Ed: An interesting tip, but I use a Mac. The Unix core on the Mac OS does memory allocation dynamically.
John: The scratch disk helped a little bit. I'm priving a second SATA-2 drive for a vacant bay, which should be faster as a scratch drive than the USB-2 drive I use now. i've already got history down to 5; I need the Undo.
Thanks to both of you for the suggestions.
Posted by David Bostedo on March 19, 2009 at 6:28 PM
Jim - Would it be possible to run Windows on Parallels or VMWare or something? Then you could possibly try CS4 64-bit, which should be able to address all of your memory. You'd have the extra overhead of Windows and the VM, but it might still be faster if you're being limited by memory. (And depending on what you already own, could be expensive to get up and running.)
Discussion
5 repliesI am cleaning up very large scans of photos taken in the early 1900's. They'll be turned into large posters at a museum. The files are huge TIFFs: 1.3 - 1.9GBs in size. They require a lot of work: rotation, cropping, shadow/highlight, cloning and touch-up, at a minimum.
The problem I have is that CS3 is extremely slow applying these tools. Preview doesn't work, which makes it even more painful (Oops, not enough highlight reduction, run it again...). Actual times (minutes:seconds):
Apply Highlight tool 4:15
Apply Crop tool 3:05
Apply Arb. rotation 11:30
Save TIFF Format 4:00
I use a Mac Pro with dual 4-core CPUs running at 3 GHz, with 8GB of DRAM. I have the fastest hard drive I can find. I'm using Mac OS 10.5.6, which I think is the latest version.
Does anyone have suggestions for speeding things up?
To free up memory right away, go to Edit->Purge and choose to empty your Undo, Clipboard, History States, or everything at once (All). They’re in the order you should proceed, so first try purging your Undo and see if that frees up enough memory.
Do you have a scratch disk enabled?
If not, select a scratch disk on a drive that doesn't have PS or your OS on it. That way, PS will have an alternative to RAM should you use up those resources again.
Then lower the History States to a reasonable number (5 or so).
PS can require as much as 10 to 20 times your file size in RAM (or more!) to perform efficiently when it's saving history states.
How much RAM are you allocating to PS? Someone here mentioned a couple of weeks ago to try lowering the percentage down to 40%-50% and said that it worked a treat, as compared to the typical 75% allocation.
Ed
http://www.naturescapes.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=54998&highlight=gig+switch
OOPS! I just noticed you are using MAC. I believe there is a fix for thisas well, but I don't know how to find it. Sorry!
John: The scratch disk helped a little bit. I'm priving a second SATA-2 drive for a vacant bay, which should be faster as a scratch drive than the USB-2 drive I use now. i've already got history down to 5; I need the Undo.
Thanks to both of you for the suggestions.
You might already have solved your problem but if not there might be some help for you here: http://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingPhotoshop-Intro.html