Digital BW, The Print

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony Atkielski" <atkielski@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 3:38 AM
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Re: 4x5 Neg Scan Resolution


> Mitch writes:
>
> > That's a pretty cryptic statement. How does one
> > deal easily with 500MB files in PS?
>
> If you have 1.5 GB or more of RAM on the machine, there is no particular
> difficulty in dealing with 500 MB files in Photoshop.
>

I don't know. I have a 1.2GHz AMD with 1.5 GB RAM and dedicated scratch disk
but things get pretty slow when even doing simple things like rotations when
the file size hits 500+MB and at 1.6GB-1.8GB 16-bit RGB files it would take
forever to get through a series of basic actions. Moving up to a 2100XP CPU
and PC2700 memory would help but probably less than 50%.

One of the problems is that PS seems to basically have an antiquated memory
management system that does not mesh well with OS memory management. Even
with 1.5+GB of RAM PS will preferentially spool data out of memory to disk.
It is not uncommon to open a large file and have it all go into RAM but at
the first action PS spools it to disk and only uses a fraction of available
RAM.

I think there is more to gain by going to stripped disk arrays than by
adding memory beyond the 1.5 to 2GB range. Even dual CPU's offer a benefit
in only a small number of PS actions such as filtering. Seems like the
biggest speed barrier in PS is Adobe who is more interested in new tools and
Web functions than in revamping the core software and adding the ability to
use layers in 16-bit.

Martin Wesley

http://www.borderless-photos.de/guests.html