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Discussion Board -> Desktop Wallpaper, Art, etc. -> Will Photoshop ever grow up to b a real editing program?

Will Photoshop ever grow up to b a real editing program?

&prismmagic
10/31/05 5:03 PM GMT
I am beginning to wonder if that Photoshop is more and more an armature editing program!
They constantly give it face lifts with out really improving a thing; they constantly say how much better the new version is with out really upgrading it.

When will they give it the ability to except larger amount of ram and catch for the graphics artist who needs to utilize this feature for large image at 600, 1200 and 2400 DPI images with out having errors at the 1.76 ram range and give you the ability to design an image with out walking away while you wait for a render to take effect or and action to follow through.
I am now to the point of completely giving up on Photoshop and sticking with Corel which will accepts almost any amount of ram and catch that you feed it. I am presently in the process of building a server board with two Optiron processors and 12 gigs of ram which out of those 12 gigs 4 gigs will be designated for a scratch drive. I will run this on the window Xp 64 that will recognize up 128 gigs of Ram. Along wih the two monitor graphics card this should prove to be a amassing system.

This will eliminate the need for an image process to have to go to virtual memory on the hard drive. Pulmonary tests show that Corel, Picture Perfect and MGI photo suites run at almost a lighting rate, even Bryce and Carerra 4 run at a surprising speed. But yet Photoshop runs at the same limited rate when rendering. This is very disappointing to me for a professional editing program.

Are there any suggestion that may solve this problem, or another way around producing a larger higher quality image with out large amonts of ram please tell me.

Also if the test proves out show two promise, a freind of mine who is building the system will be going inot building these system for CAd and Graphics artist users. The systems has much promise and as usual the only hold ups are compatable software.
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Art is the perception of the creator. Meaning is the perception of the viewer. acceptance is the perception of society.

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::philcUK
10/31/05 5:12 PM GMT
well im running CS2 on 4GB of RAM on a Dual G5 Mac which seams to work just fine for me thanks :-)

the cap was only removed in CS version 2 and it was indeed a welcome change.
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"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps"
::philcUK
10/31/05 5:13 PM GMT
so yes, it's all grown up now :-)
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"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps"
&prismmagic
10/31/05 5:19 PM GMT
I know that you are a graphics artist. I know that Macs are specifically designed for the music and graphics interface user. But they are still limited in program us and compatibility issues. I considered that route but for pound per dolor they are very limiting.

What is fine for you and how big are the images that you are producing?

I know quite a few artist that will design an image in high rez scale at say 5 x 5 and then send it to a printer who will then scan the image and at a higher rez for printing.
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Art is the perception of the creator. Meaning is the perception of the viewer. acceptance is the perception of society.
::philcUK
10/31/05 5:23 PM GMT
ive never had a cross platform compatibility problem in any adobe product or in OS itself since ive been on OSX.

The Adobe RAM issue was cross platform and as far as i'm aware the cap fix applies to any version of CS2 regardless of it being windows or mac
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"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps"
&prismmagic
10/31/05 5:24 PM GMT
Phil when you render a difficult image of large scale how fast does it render and what is the CPU and Resource use at that moment. I am curious, next time you render a large image say poster size , please open up your systems tray and check the CPU and Ram usage. I would like to know?
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Art is the perception of the creator. Meaning is the perception of the viewer. acceptance is the perception of society.
*caedes
10/31/05 6:33 PM GMT
Are you sure that you aren't referring to the RAM limitations due to 32bit memory addressing? In order to address more than ~4GB of RAM you have to use 64 bit processors (like your Opteron), a 64 bit OS, and a 64 bit verison of Photoshop (doesn't exist currently). According to this document from Adobe Photoshop will use available RAM over the 4GB limit as a cache for the scratch disk, however I think that your biggest improvement would be to allocate a large RAM disk on the machine and point your Photoshop scratch disk to that in-memory volume. This is probably the best you can do until they get a 64bit version fo PS out.
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-caedes
&prismmagic
10/31/05 6:42 PM GMT
Yes there are limtation to the 32 bit window but there are also limitations to the boards out their also so I'm goning with a ti-on baoard. The 32 bit Corel suite handles it fine along with other programs even in the old 32 bit server boards. Not PhotoShop has and will have problem until they Fix the Ram limitations. I am running Corel 11 on a 64 right now and it screams to to the Xp 64 exceptance of the larger amount of ram. I will be setting up the 4 gig scratch drive next tonight to test it.
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Art is the perception of the creator. Meaning is the perception of the viewer. acceptance is the perception of society.
*caedes
10/31/05 7:08 PM GMT
You shouldn't have to worry about any hardware limitations of RAM capacity if you are getting Opterons though.
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-caedes
::philcUK
10/31/05 7:08 PM GMT
it's a rare problem indeed as very few individuals would ever need more than 4GB of RAM in an image editing program. The most memory intensive elements tend to be plug ins so in that respect the problem is reduced in the case of third party plug ins that are installed in addition to the the standard PS set as they access RAM independently to that already assigned to Photoshop itself.
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"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps"
&prismmagic
10/31/05 8:17 PM GMT
Correct that why I am going the opteron way on a server board. If you ramamber over a year ago it was your input on the issue that started me to reseach this.
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Art is the perception of the creator. Meaning is the perception of the viewer. acceptance is the perception of society.
*caedes
10/31/05 9:47 PM GMT
Oh ok, I didn't actually remember that. =\
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-caedes
::philcUK
11/01/05 11:55 AM GMT
OK Mr.C - did a test as you requested. Created a file based on my Spartan Woods image at 24 x 18 inches at 600dpi = 10,800 x 7200 pixels (more than enough for commercial fine art presses). At high bit depth and with 8 duplicated layers it came in at a whopping 3.48GB. I assigned 3GB of RAM to Photoshop and prioritised the memory to be application dependant at the expense of background functions.

The first test I did was using one of Photoshop’s more labour intensive plugins, Smart Sharpen. There is a lot of work on that image for this plug to calculate so here goes...

I applied the filter without waiting for a preview render (so no pre-processing is done) at 100% strength on a 2 pixel sharpen. It took 1.5 mins to process the image globally. Not great but to be expected. According to the system monitors it used 1.8GB of Ram and 85% of the CPU allowance.

Next test. I used a third party plugin, Aurelon's point to point colour correction tool CoCo. Again did a global alt on the maximum range available in the plugin with a complete colour change. As I expected this worked much faster. Again, processed the filter without waiting for a preview and it took 10.5 seconds but only used 55% of the CPU and 1.85GB of RAM.

After these two tests I purged Photoshop’s temporary memory before continuing.

Next test was a global alt using curves. I was unable to measure the performance of this as it applied the alt virtually instantaneously when I hit ok.

I then did a global Variations alt changing the saturation and colour balance. This took just under 3 seconds to apply and used 1.4 GB of ram and again around 60% of the CPU.

I then tried using some tools. Used an airbrush on one of the layers and there was no lag at all on any brush under 500 pixel size.

The final step of rendering it all down to a final flat image took 8 seconds and only 600MB of RAM

Don’t know if these figures will be any good to your trials or not but hope it’s a help in some way. All these tests were carried out on a Dual 2GHZ G5 Mac with 4GB of RAM (3 assigned to Photoshop.)
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"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps"
.EmilyH
11/03/05 2:56 AM GMT
"It's a rare problem indeed as very few individuals would ever need more than 4GB of RAM in an image editing program."

Didn't Bill Gates say something along the lines of not needing more than a few MB of memory?

Careful what you say, it may come back to haunt you. ;)
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::philcUK
11/03/05 3:44 AM GMT
yeah because we are all going to rush out and get 40MP cameras and then and try and edit a full cards worth of images simultaneously. not.
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"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps"
&prismmagic
11/03/05 4:00 AM GMT
No try creating an image at 34x42 at 1200 dpi.
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Art is the perception of the creator. Meaning is the perception of the viewer. acceptance is the perception of society.
.co2metal
11/03/05 7:29 AM GMT
I recall hearing something like "256kb of memory is all the home user should ever need."
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&prismmagic
11/03/05 7:31 AM GMT
Hehehe, yeh right. Have you yet made an image in inches say 11x14 at 600 dpi.
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Art is the perception of the creator. Meaning is the perception of the viewer. acceptance is the perception of society.
.co2metal
11/03/05 8:49 AM GMT
well of course.. that quote was from the 80's i'm pretty sure and may be what EmilyH is talking about.

i just wish i had had the tools and hardware to create my best water desktop images at such high quality.. 1600x1200 at 72dpi comes out decent on a 24"x18" print, but i can only imagine how much better they would look if made at top notch quality :\
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&prismmagic
11/03/05 9:15 AM GMT
Thats why I am putting together an * gig dual core computer. 8 giig will be set up as a ram drive for my graphics work.
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Art is the perception of the creator. Meaning is the perception of the viewer. acceptance is the perception of society.
::philcUK
11/03/05 9:57 AM GMT
again the question though - why 1200 dpi?

Commercial image and plate setters do operate at dpi values in there thousands but this is just for the linework (LW) elements of a piece. The continuous tone (CT) elements have screens applied to them in various strengths from low values such as 50-60lpi in rough screen and flexo work, through 150-175lpi for regular high quality print and up to, at most, 220-250lpi for fine art. So using a 1200dpi image here would be totally superfluous – even 600 dpi would be overkill. Most image retouching houses work at a resolution of 120 per cm (304.8/inch) for regular litho print and 140 per cm (355.6/inch) for fine art images.

Even if you transpose all this to non-screened digital presses the relevance of ultra high res images is still quite negligible. Because digital print isn’t screened it is more about the perception of the human eye. The quality of the eye is measured as the ability to distinguish points. The sharpness of the eye is normalized as 1/60 of a degree; this is called a visus of 1. The standard of 300 dpi is sharp enough for this visus; with normal eyes a 300 dpi print should look sharp.

Normal eyes have a resolution of 1/60 of a degree. Visus = 1

Below average eyes have a resolution (visus) lower than 1. A visus of 0.6 is considered to be the limit for driving a car. In fact that is very low.

Above average eyes have a resolution (visus) higher than 1, a visus of 1.3 is considered very good.

To be something like a fighter pilot you need to have exceptional vision, close to the perceived maximum of a visus of 1.5

Generally speaking people do not view a printed image at anything less than 12” in normal conditions. At this range people with a high visus of 1.3 (around 20% of the population) can ascertain the quality difference at 300dpi. People with below average vision of say 0.7 visus – again around 20% - would not be able to tell the difference between a 200 dpi image and a 300 dpi image at this range. It’s worth remembering here that 90% of the planets population have eyesight in the range of 0.7 to 1.3 so that’s whom you are generally catering to. People with exceptional eyesight can perceive quality differences between 3 and 400%. Above this however it begins to become a mute point.

As you are talking about poster production here it is even more important not to overkill your work as posters are generally viewed at more than 12” distance. If you wanted to cover every single base – 600dpi on an image at s/s scaling would be more than enough to cover any eventuality whether it be digital or screened.

If you want to see what I mean more tangibly and you have access to decent semi pro inkjet, create an A4 image at 2400dpi then, using exactly the same print quality settings print three copies out changing the printers resolution only – one at 600dpi, one at 1200 and one at 2400. Give them to someone other than yourself to look at laid out randomly side-by-side at a distance greater than normal viewing conditions (12 inches or more) and see if they can tell you which is which….

It also worth remembering that even if you build a Weapon of Mass Creation to create your images on, chances are your repro houses wont have anything like that and, if they are using software like Artpro, Barco, Dalim etc to repro your work that all run in RAM – they wont thank you for dropping a behemoth sized image on them planned into a job.

Sorry if that all sounded a bit preachy, its not meant to be, but at the end of the day we are in this is as a business and time is money so spending more time on work than is necessary is a waste of time and money. Remember – you aren’t being gash – you’re being commercially viable.

:-)
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"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps"
::groo2k
11/03/05 1:57 PM GMT
Just to expand on Phils thought a little bit. The print industry minimum standard for print graphics at their true (print) size is 300 dpi. Most printers will not go above 600 dpi while printing an image at its true size. The human eye can not distinguish the dpi of any image over 600 dpi when it is printed. So, unless scaling of the image is needed, then there is no need to have an image set above 600 dpi. Plenty of processing time can be saved by not working with images set at 600 dpi or higher. Hope this helps.
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&prismmagic
11/03/05 5:32 PM GMT
Thank you robert for the input I have conciderd the the input at the specs that phile has given me. I am still in the research mode at this point. I will be making the final choice by monday. Thank you all again pertyiculery phil who put out the effort he did. what I am concidering is ticking with the 6 gig system that is being tested At this point. If I do we will set it up with three gigs of operational ram and 3 gigs as a ra drive.That will eliminate any need for pagging to the hard drive vertual memory.
0∈ [?]
Art is the perception of the creator. Meaning is the perception of the viewer. acceptance is the perception of society.

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