DPR Forum

Welcome to the Friendly Aisles!
DPRF is a photography forum with people from all over the world freely sharing their knowledge and love of photography. Everybody is welcome, from beginners to the experienced professional. Whether it is Medium Format, fullframe, APS-C, MFT or smaller formats. Digital or film. DPRF is a forum for everybody and for every format.
Enjoy this modern, easy to use software. Look also at our Reviews & Gallery!

Which Computer configuration for digital Imaging

Hi Scott, for your first problem, you can buy a separate keyboard and mouse, very cheap these days. 1024x768 is the resolution of your LCD. You laptop can usually drive an external monitor at higher resolution but may not be at very high refresh frequency since video chips used in laptops are in general not of the best performer. All external USB/Firewire hard drives are just an internal IDE drive with a USB/Firewire shell; so yes they are the same. :)

-- /Gong
 
Scott,

I ran into the same problem you had by reaching the ram limitation on my older PC. That's why I got a new Sony Laptop. In Photoshop, memeory is more important than CPU speed.

As other members indicated, I added an external monitor and keyboard and wireless mouse from my old PC. Very nice setup for cheap. However, if I do it again, I will go for an powerBook. But they are over $2000. And I don't really need a laptop neither. The iMac is less than $1500 and very good performance, no need for an external monitor, etc. Even the $800 eMac will out perform you existing setup.

You need an addition pci card (video card) for using both the laptop monitor and another one where you can put tools on the laptop and work on the picture on the other. I think the higher end Mac has this feature built in. Keep in mind that you can only calibrate one screen.
 
>>Hi Scott, for your first problem, you can buy a separate keyboard and mouse, very cheap these days.

The other option is to elevate the monitor to eye level and leave the laptop and keyboard at table height, far better ergonomically anyway.
 
In the memory vs. CPU debate, both are important in different ways. If you have less memory than PS will use for the size/depth and type of task, then yes, enough additional memory to what PS needs will give a tremendous boost, because otherwise PS is forced to page memory from the swap file, which means you are now reading / writing to disk - OUCH!

However once you get past this threshold, there comes a point wehere more memory will not help you, because PS doesn't need it. At that point processor speed will give you the most improvement. In addition, PS does have the smarts to use multi-processors and hyperthreading intelligently.

So in other words, going from 380MB to 1GB, huge improvement. Going from 1GB to 2GB may or may not. Going from 2GB to 4GB probably won't make a difference.

Happy Thanksgiving to all Americans, and to everybody else. What the hey - every day is a good day for anybody to give thanks
happy.gif
.

DJ
 
Regarding how much memory is best for Photoshop, I found in my own investigation that it depends on the size of the image that you are handling, and how many different image processing functions that you perform on that image.

Photoshop keeps a history of each step that you perform on the image, and to do that it makes a new copy of the image in memory each time you do something. For ex&le, if you start with a 57MB 16bit file from a 2700 dpi scanner, then as soon as you do anything like rotate, levels, or curves, You'll see the "memory usage" jump by the size of the file each time. Adjust levels, and the memory usage jumps by 57 MB. Adjust curves, and the memory usage jumps by another 57MB. Eventually, when enough actions have been performed, the RAM is no longer enough to hold the next copy of the image and then Photoshop starts using the scratch disk for page swapping, which is when you'll suddenly notice that each new action now takes much longer.

When I scan a medium format frame I typically get a 200MB 16bit file. With 1GB of memory I can usually only perform levels and curves and image size before I run out of memory. Then the subsequent steps like unsharp mask and print preview become painfully slow because of page swapping to and from disk. I also tried 2GB of RAM, but it only delayed the inevitable by allowing me to perform a few more actions on the file before running out of memory. I would still nearly always run out of memory, even with 2GB RAM when processing medium format files.

In conclusion, the most important thing to enhance the performance of Photoshop is a high speed swap disk. I'm now using a partition on a RAID ZERO pair of hard disks on a PCI RAID card for my swap disk. That has made a huge difference to my Photoshop efficiency because now when I run out of RAM, which I almost always do, the next actions are still quite fast -- MUCH faster that just using the default system disk for swap space.

One more thing: Photoshop doesn't release it's memory when you close a file. You have to exit Photoshop completely before it releases the memory used by the last image.

Kind Regards,

Craig
 
Scott,

I can only speak for a Mac. My G3 333 laptop could do it and my G4 can do it. Here's what you do:

Open System Preferences then Click on Displays then Click on the tab "Arrangement" then to rearrange simply drag the monitors in the configuration you want. The first time I open Photoshop I manually drag the tools I want to relocate to the laptop screen. After that they stay in place as I work or close and open other files.

Guy
 
>

Hi there, I following the CRT versus TFT discussion for quite a long time now. The first TFT that actually beats a CRT is the EIZO CG18 / 21 series. This is my first hand experiance, I´m working as a ColorConsultant and had to find a TFT for image editing in a professional lab... there may

be other TFT-displays with the same quality on the market, but I dont

know them ;-) Regards Sebastian Schroeder xkontor IT solutions
 
Are the black level and deep shadow detail in this display truly better than a really good direct view? This is one of the inherent drawbacks of the technology. I know they have improved, but are they really there?

I really wish they would, and had higher than 1600x1200 resolution. I'd love to get rid of my two bulky NEC 22" CRTs!

DJ
 
Craig,

I found that very useful and I'm sure others did too. I knew that Photoshop used up lots of memory but I didn't know why, or that you had actually to close the program to get it to let go of the memory.
I wonder though if you could perhaps explain a bit more about the RAID hard disks and swap disk as I don't know that that means. I have heard reference to RAID and swap disks and so on before but I don't understand.

Thanks for an interesting post.
John
 
For all you people having difficulty with Photoshop and memory here are a few tips. One, check your scratch disk settings and make sure that you are using different disk for start and running program, if your drive is partitioned this setting can be critical= ie the first two settings should be for different places on your drive. For best performance, scratch disks should be on a different drive than any large files you are editing. * Scratch disks should be on a different drive than the one used for virtual memory. * Scratch disks should be on a local drive. That is, they should not be accessed over a network. * Scratch disks should be conventional (non-removable) media. * Raid disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes. * Drives with scratch disks should be defragmented regularly.

2) If you routinely clear the history of the image it will reduce the file size. 3) Remember to check your cache settings too- you can safely use half the RAM on your computer and still run Photoshop by itself. 4 Close everything else when doing serious photo editing .5)Edit as much as you can in RGB PSD, the most efficient place for Photoshop to work. 6) When saving monster size images, uncheck image preview in preferences, it will decrease the size of the file significantly. 8) Stop storing all your images on the hard drive if they consume a significant amount of space and go to CD's and back ups to reduce the amount of disk spaced used by image storage. If you re- save and close and re open the file, it should be sufficient to maximize efficiency- you do not have to completely close and open the program to "release the ram". If you are using a mac G4 with 256 RAM, that should be more than enough for large file sizes- 5-8 MB images to 10-20MB images.
 
Back
Top