Digital BW, The Print

Matthew Wensing writes:

> I scan in 4x5 negatives at 4800 dpi, 16-bit grayscale,
> and am having a tough (read: slow) time of it with
> Photoshop 6.0 with the resulting files.  Actually, I
> can't even work with the 50-90 mg .jpeg's, but instead
> downsize to roughly 12 megapixels and then
> dodge/burn/tweak those.  Does anyone here work with
> digital files around 50-90 megs in Photoshop that is
> happy with the quickness of their setup in doing so? 
> Right now, with the machine I have, manipulating such
> files is impossible.

Buy more memory.

> My machine is an Athlon XP 1.46 Ghz with 1 gig of DDR
> RAM.  Two possible bottlenecks from what I know are
> memory bus speed (333 Mhz with my current motherboard)
> and also the version of PS I'm using.  CS might be
> faster from the get-go?

Install the maximum amount of memory your motherboard will support; that
should help considerably.  Memory is the biggest bottleneck with any
version of Photoshop.  A single gigabyte isn't very much for image
editing, at least not for large film formats.