Photoshoppers, question, how to drasticly up performance

[Entity_Razer]

Hi all

See the sig for specs on the workstation(s) (laptop is workstation also :) ) I'm doing some photoshopping on a few pics for my portfolio but I encounterd a 'problem'

my photoshop is sluggish when applying filters. Now I have to say the pics are BIG both in resolution as in size. Now I'm not a n00b at photoshop nor am I a wiz but I'm looking for the pros for an answer on how to drasticly up performance. i've got a raptop incomming (i'll have it monda) to use as boot disk but i'm looking into more performance. Would adding ram help a lot or not? If needed I can up this thing to 2GB (but I'd rather not because I can't really afford to spend that much at the moment


so i'm looking for some help. My boot and swap are defragged with disckeep from raxco and I do not have to much on my HDD/partition.

I do have a 100-size history but that shouldn't bog down the comp like this should it? applying a simmple filter such as pallet knife or something takes like 3 seconds for it to apply it in the preview window which is in my experience a relativly long time or am I just being a performance junkie here?

Any tips are duely appreciated on how to get this rig to run photoshop faster :)

[einCe]

it depends how big it is, i remember trying to do a 3000x3000 pic once doing a gaussian blur and having it take around 3 minutes. photoshop is very ram intensive.
what size image are you working with

[Cooper]

As I know more RAM is very good for PS - but you should tweak it to use more than 2 GB as scratch disk. IMO 2 GB is the smallest ammount with yr workhorse here - don`t need to go fancy - some value will do great

[[XC] moddolicous]

Tyr setting it to realtime? Ram is very important for photoshop. Your using the xeon, right?? Or your laptop. Cant tell by how you wrote it. The sonoma might be better at photoshop then your xeons depending on speed.

[sky]

...not? If needed I can up this thing to 2GB (but I'd rather not because I can't really afford to spend that much at the moment

so i'm looking for some help. My boot and swap are defragged with disckeep from raxco and I do not have to much on my HDD/partition.

I do have a 100-size history but that shouldn't bog down the comp like this should it? applying a simmple filter such as pallet knife or something takes like 3 seconds for it to apply it in the preview window which is in my experience a relativly long time or am I just being a performance junkie here?

hm, running it on a laptop (to be) is probably not the smartest thing to do -
i have done it at a time and it sucked (display being ghey and all). anyway
more ram is always a good thing with / for photoshop.
another thing worth mentioning is to use a separate partition (preferably
a separate drive) just for the scratch / swap partition. what do i mean
with this? easy. try setting up a partition to use for the windows-swapfile
(pagefile.sys) and maybe another for the photoshop workvolumes. when
you start ps for the first time it usually whines about the workvolumes (?
don't know what they call it in "en", that's just what *my* "de" photoshop
usually tells me) being on the same drive as windows itself. this costs some
performance, therefor a separate drive may do you good, a raid-setup
would be topps, but hey, let's not get over the top here. some people use
their pcs for other stuff besides photoshop as well...

ok then onto what you wrote above. note i set a certain thingy to bold -
for a very good reason. let's think about it (lecturer mode :D) .. you're
working on a 3000x3000x32bit pixel picture. that's 9mio pixel times 4
(r,g,b + alpha) -> piling up to ~36mb just for a single layer. now if you
are working on several big layers with lotsa stuff in it, the filesize will go
through the roof, 4 such layers and you're well past 140mb for that piccy.

here's where the undo-stack comes in. photoshop is a memory hog there.
i don't really know what it stores in the undo-buffer, whether it is the
complete pic (all layers and stuff) or just a delta set (just the changes
to the previous step it saved), but it must be something big, because
if you have been working on a big pic with lots of brush and smear action,
you're pc will come to a crawl, as it (ps) is busting its arse writing the up-
dated / changed picture data into the ram / scratch files... that SERIOUSLY
slows your rig down. i'm down to 50 steps and that is still plenty enough.
seriously, rather save your progress to disk somewhat more often than
use big undo buffers.
another thing to look at might be the tab of memory usage in preferences.
you can set the percentage of total ram used by photoshop. in the tab
previous to that one you can set where your workvolumes are to be...
you can define up to 4 of them iirc.


i hope this blabla was of some help to you :D ...

[sky]

it depends how big it is, i remember trying to do a 3000x3000 pic once doing a gaussian blur and having it take around 3 minutes. photoshop is very ram intensive.
what size image are you working with

for stability testing i once did this to a friends 3.0g ht p4 (non oc'ed) rig
with 1gig of ram rig...
made a new pic 8000x8000x32bit, put in some random noise and then ran
a radial blur with quality set to very high and the strength-value set to 100.
... it took about 30 mins to finish that one. its cpu temps went through the
roof doing that though :D - but it survived ehehe

[Entity_Razer]

Sonoma at 2Ghz and the Xeons at 2.6Ghz and I do work on both of them. The lappy is for when I'm away from home (which is a lot)

Now I get the scratchdiskpart and I reckon a .... 10GB or such partition should be good for it?(for the scratchdisk) seeing as I do like to keep a lot of undo's but I don't use it a lot. I mean, if I do use it i use it good (;)) but it's not like I undo 20steps every photoshop.

I have made a 10GB scratchdisk now and about the ram, well I guess there won't be anything besides upping the ram for my Xeon then (upping RAM on the laptop is a no go, don't have the money for it right now, it costs like 200euros to up it (got 2x512now and need 2x1Gb then)

Btw the pics are
2800x2000x32

still not 3000x3000 but I think it counts thusfar :D btw, I'm using CS2 premium edition. Is it me or is it a lot slower compared to CS? a lot more featurerich, but slower?