Working with 300dpi pictures... !

[SNAAKE]

Ok what exactly do I need more to work with 300dpi pictures ? Everytime I try to work on a 300 dpi marquee or a fairly large CPO my computer locks up for some reason.I need more cpu power or ram ? THanks in advance !

-

[DrewKaree]

Yes to both ideas.

IIRC, photo applications (Photoshop in particular, I believe) are one of the few types of applications that make good use of a dual proc machine.

Same issue with mine, but at least I'm able to work on 'em.

What do you currently have for proc, ram, and OS?

[Lord Hiryu]

I don't know the specs of your computer.
But you will need, more Ram.....(512 mb minimum), a hard drive with free space...for the virtual memory, a fast grafic card....Ati9200,GeForce 4 or upper cards, and a fast PC.
I'm illustrator, and with my PIV with 512Mb ram, and the CPU at 2,4 i can work with anything.
All the day I stay with Freehand10, Photoshop CS, Illustrator and ACDsee.....(plus IE.).....open and working at the same time.

Cheers.

P.D.: Sorry for my english....

[zorg]

ram is a must have.

ram in order to load huge images files
cpu in order to apply some filters, tools without having to wait a couple of hours ;-)

[El Bucle]

I'm having a similar problem.  It's not that my computer locks up, it's that not all of a certain layer will load on the screen.  On my marquee, for example, the background loads fine, but when I add the word "ARCADE" on top of it, it only displays "ARCA" and half of the "D".

Using 72 or 150 dpi works fine.

Specs:
1.67ghz Athlon
1 gig DDR
80 gig hard drive
GeForce 4 Ti 4400

SNAAAKE, as for your situation, I'd have to agree with zorg and Lord Hiryu.  I know there's a way you can assign the paging files (or whatever they're called) to a certain hard drive. . . maybe that's your problem.  Also, download Security Task Manager at http://www.tucows.com/preview/337757.html to see if you've got viruses or extra applications eating up your CPU/ram space.  Don't forget the power of defragmenting, either.

[Witchboard]

I run Photoshop CS on my Duron 800 with 512 MB of ram.

[JoyMonkey]

It helps a lot if you have your PhotoShop swap file on a seperate hard drive or partition than your OS.

EDIT : Snap!

[Oddfeld]

Also make liberal use of the cropping, flattening layers, edit>purge>all, etc.

When you place something half off your document bounds, or you scale or free transform something so it's 5 times the size of your document area, the extra stuff is still there, you can drag it back into view with the move tool etc.

Selecting all, which will make a marquee as big as your document bounds, and then cropping the image, won't have any visible effect on your composition but it may reduce the size of the thing in memory dramatically as it will chuck away all those invisible memory-eating pixels outside the edges of your document.

They'll *still* be thrashing your memory usage by virtue of being kept around in the history so you can have a squillion levels of undo. Flushing the history, purging the clipboard, etc, regularly is a must when working on a big file to stop it becoming unwieldy.

Also, make liberal use of stuff like vector and type layers and layer effects. If you want a bit of solid type on your marquee with a bevelled edge and a dropshadow, say, it is a lot less memory intensive to define that as a type layer (so vector graphics defined mathematically by a few points rather than by thousands of pixels) and have layer effects set up to render a bevel and a dropshadow on the fly than if you rasterized your type, set up a separate layer with a blurred copy of it as a dropshadow, etc, since every one of those raster layers is adding a bunch more pixels to your document.

Also, consider that 300dpi may well be overkill. For litho printing, a common rule of thumb is to use a dpi of 1 and a half to two times the linescreen in lpi that it'll be printed at and things like coffee table books are printed at 150lpi, which is where the 300dpi thing comes from. Magazines are often 133lpi. Now, you probably won't get stuff printed using traditional screening, but rather output on a big inkjet which effectively dithers everything, and is a completely different concept. Display graphics on Lambda printers and such are often done at a lot lower res and they still look good. Plus you have to remember that the filesize you're working with will increase with the square of the dpi since you're working in 2 dimensions - double the resolution, you quadruple the number of pixels. Even a small reduction in resolution (working at 250 dpi say) may have a big impact on the number of pixels you're pushing around.

[Generic Eric]

It helps a lot if you have your PhotoShop swap file on a seperate hard drive or partition than your OS.

EDIT : Snap!

Wow  What I mean to say is that I didn't think of that.  Good pointer.

@ Snaaake, you may look into getting a new video card.   I have a vid card w/ 256M of ram.  That helps bunches.

[DrewKaree]

Also make liberal use of the cropping, flattening layers, edit>purge>all, etc.

When you place something half off your document bounds, or you scale or free transform something so it's 5 times the size of your document area, the extra stuff is still there, you can drag it back into view with the move tool etc.

Selecting all, which will make a marquee as big as your document bounds, and then cropping the image, won't have any visible effect on your composition but it may reduce the size of the thing in memory dramatically as it will chuck away all those invisible memory-eating pixels outside the edges of your document.

They'll *still* be thrashing your memory usage by virtue of being kept around in the history so you can have a squillion levels of undo. Flushing the history, purging the clipboard, etc, regularly is a must when working on a big file to stop it becoming unwieldy.

Also, make liberal use of stuff like vector and type layers and layer effects. If you want a bit of solid type on your marquee with a bevelled edge and a dropshadow, say, it is a lot less memory intensive to define that as a type layer (so vector graphics defined mathematically by a few points rather than by thousands of pixels) and have layer effects set up to render a bevel and a dropshadow on the fly than if you rasterized your type, set up a separate layer with a blurred copy of it as a dropshadow, etc, since every one of those raster layers is adding a bunch more pixels to your document.

Also, consider that 300dpi may well be overkill. For litho printing, a common rule of thumb is to use a dpi of 1 and a half to two times the linescreen in lpi that it'll be printed at and things like coffee table books are printed at 150lpi, which is where the 300dpi thing comes from. Magazines are often 133lpi. Now, you probably won't get stuff printed using traditional screening, but rather output on a big inkjet which effectively dithers everything, and is a completely different concept. Display graphics on Lambda printers and such are often done at a lot lower res and they still look good. Plus you have to remember that the filesize you're working with will increase with the square of the dpi since you're working in 2 dimensions - double the resolution, you quadruple the number of pixels. Even a small reduction in resolution (working at 250 dpi say) may have a big impact on the number of pixels you're pushing around.

You lost me at "Also"

[mahuti]

in this case, "liberal" was not a political statement.. that might have thrown you off.

Photoshop is a ram hog. It also likes to have lots of scratch disk, so have plenty of room available on a the scratch disk drive.

[DrewKaree]

Hey, I've got Photoshop pointing to a completely bare 12 Gb partitiion on my drive.

Not enough?   

I was considering building an older (but dual proc) machine, but the only thing holding me up is that there's only 2 slots for memory, and 512 to 1 Gb sticks for that thing are still a touch pricey for my tastes.

Do any of you graphic whiz kids utilize a dual proc setup, and how much nicer is it than a single?

[Ravage]

what with all these massive side art files I've been workig on, I took my machine from 1g ram this week to 2g ram!!! was expensive, but man - everything ssweet now!

Rav

[Oddfeld]

You lost me at "Also"

Bah, OK:

Make stuff simpler. Chuck away stuff you've finished with. Work at as lower resolution. Get more RAM.

Oh, and I use a dual proc setup at work (Mac not PC) - it's not appreciably faster doing the bulk of stuff but you really notice it on stuff where you stare at a progress bar while it works out what the hell it's doing (running filters etc) - it's a lot zippier. It's about the only program I use that makes much use of a second processor.

[mahuti]

My specs are dual 2ghz (mac) so... equals about a dual 3.2 pc... 2 gb ram. The PC I have is running similar specs. 300 DPI doesn't really get the computers going, but they're pro machines, and that's what they're for. I've been doing the same thing for years on much, much slower machines, however. More ram has always been a great help. Fast processor's are required to speed up processing on big files, but lots of ram is really key too. Basically ram will be the difference between being able to do a file slowly, or not at all.

And just to add, either on a PC or Mac, the duallies are only good for PHotoshop & After Effects and other apps built just to take advantage of them.

[Radar]

My work machine that I do all my graphics work on is a Celeron 500 with 256 ram and in integrated shared-memory video card.  I did a booth that was 118"x90"@300dpi with dozens of layers.  It was 400+ megs and took 30 minutes to even open. 

They are upgrading me to a dual P3 800 with 512 ram and think that should be plenty for me.  Ugghh. 

[SNAAKE]

I am on a 850mhz athon(lol),1gb ram and 32mb ati rage fury pro(ahhhahah).My 1.6ghz just arrived so I will be upgrading tonight.What kind of video card do you guys recomend for around $100-150 ? Thanks in advance

[neuromancer]

I used to work with some gargantuan files in Photoshop on a 500 mhz P3 with 384 Mb of RAM. If you're machine is crashing then something is wrong. It should be s--l--o--w, but not dead.

Try installing a new instance of windows, which will add a "dual boot" menu, and then just install PS there. Nothing else. If it still doesn't work you're out of luck.

You don't need 300dpi unless you're printing it on a photographic printer. No inkjet is going to make use of that kind of detail.

Bob

[NiteWalker]

Use a video card with a lot of ram. Give your pc a minute to catch up with the processing of 300dpi pics. I use the same resolution for my overlays and stuff too. You just need a bit of patience when working with em.

[HaRuMaN]

I work with 300 DPI pictures, too.  When I do something that takes a good amount of time, like applying a filter or something, I just walk away for a minute, find something else to do.  It makes it much less maddening, lol. 

[zvar]

Personally, when it gets to the point of taking minutes to do anything as it's too large a graphic, I'll split it into 4 diffrent graphics and work on each bit.
Reducing to 150dpi and merging all together when I want a sample of the overall look.

Steven

[scottp]

Coming from the printing side of things, I see very little difference between 300dpi and 266dpi and find 266 easier to deal with.  Large side art is also fine at 200dpi.

In my personal experience, memory is very important, even going from 1gb to 1.5gb made a big difference.

As far as video, I would check out the ATI Radeon lower end

Scott
www.mamemarquees.com