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1. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
rasworth Aug 21, 2009 8:19 AM (in response to riskypotato)Phil,
More info required before forum members have a chance to assist:
1. Are you using a second hard drive for the scratch disk, and how much space allocated?
2. Sidecar .xmp files or cache?
3. One or two adjustments per image or several?
Your system is not all that powerful by today's standards - ACR creates a list for its edits, does not actually change the image, and if one goes wild with the adjustment brush the list becomes very large requiring lots of processor power to render. You can see this by opening up an xmp file with a text editor after intensive edits in ACR.
Richard Southworth
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2. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
riskypotato Aug 21, 2009 8:43 AM (in response to rasworth)Thanks for your reply, Richard.
1. I have a partitioned drive - scratch disk on 250G HD, and usually
the image files on the 500 G other disk.
2. Image settings in camera raw database. At one time I used the
sidecars but didn't like so many files; they may not show up in Bridge
but they show up in your finder window, and I noticed that some would
get left behind sometimes, if you moved files using Bridge.
3. Well, I guess the problem gets progressively worse as the number of
adjustments pile up, but I'd like to think I should be able to "get
away" with at least 3 or 4 adjustments without such a noticeable
decline in performance. For instance... darken sky, lighten
foreground, pick a couple of areas to tweak, remove a spot or 2
etc.... This is more or less the norm for me.
Would you recommend adding RAM?
Thanks again,
Phil
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3. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
Jeff Schewe Aug 21, 2009 9:26 AM (in response to riskypotato)riskypotato wrote:
I have Mac OS 10.4.11, 2.3 GHz w/ 4GB DDR2 SDRAM.
G5 or MacIntel? Big difference in speed if you are on MacIntel and you upgrade to Leopard....if G5, it will seem slower and slower as time goes by because even a low end MacIntel will run rings around even a high end (or what was high end) G5 or G4...
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4. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
riskypotato Aug 21, 2009 9:40 AM (in response to Jeff Schewe)Hi Jeff, Yeah... G5... darnnnn....
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5. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
rasworth Aug 21, 2009 9:45 AM (in response to riskypotato)I have a relatively old XP system (single core) with 2gb of ram and I have not noticed the excessive slowing. I do recommend buying an inexpensive (much smaller) second hard drive, in my experience has made a big difference, particularly with older systems. Dual partitions on a single physical drive do not help performance.
Don't know if xmp files help, Jeff can probably comment, but I would certainly try. Also check your ram percentage setting in Photoshop, not sure about a Mac but I keep mine at 65%. And there is a separate cache for ACR, settable in the preferences.
Richard Southworth
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6. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
riskypotato Aug 21, 2009 10:43 AM (in response to rasworth)Thanks much for this info, Richard. Do you mean I should use an
external drive for a scratch disk? I have many of these that I use for
storage/duplicates. My RAM's at 69%.
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7. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
rasworth Aug 21, 2009 10:53 AM (in response to riskypotato)No, I meant an internally mounted second drive. An external firewire drive might be fast enough, not sure. At least in the Windows world it's relatively straightforward to install additional hard drives, perhaps someone can comment on the feasibility (and usefulness) of doing so for your system. And there may be other tricks you can try, such as carving off some of your ram into a virtual hard drive, although you would obviously be limited in the number of images you could process at one time - might do so just for the ACR cache to address your specific issue.
Richard Southworth
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8. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
riskypotato Aug 21, 2009 12:58 PM (in response to rasworth)Well, this is helpful from both of you. Guess I'll try to beef up my
system for the time being.
Thanks,
Phil
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9. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
Lost_Orbit Aug 21, 2009 3:57 PM (in response to riskypotato)This is not directly related, but I used to notice serious slow downs when using brush adjustments in Lightroom 2.4. I was on a PC with 2GB DDR1 RAM running Vista. I have several fast IDE hard disks in my system dividing OS/Data/Page file roles. I'm not sure what Lightroom uses for paging/swaping memory, but I don't think it's anything like Photoshop (you don't get to specify scratch file locations). I normally edit 15 Megapixel files and the brush local adjustments tool can get very slow and elastic in its response when I do a lot of fine brush additions. What I could notice is that Lightroom was taking up a lot of RAM at that point. I upgraded my DDR1 system to 3GB and the situation has improved but it was still easy to reach a point where it would slow down again as soon as the number of brush strokes mounted (Lightroom would be eating up approx 1.9GB RAM at that stage).
You mention that you have DDR2 on your system so I'm guessing you have the Power Mac that takes up to 16GB (8 slots x 2GB). I've no experience whatsoever with Mac OS, but if the OS+Program have no limitations in addressing RAM memory (Windows 32bit OS can see a maximum of 3.2GB RAM), then perhaps investing in additional RAM is not a bad idea. An extra 4GB DDR2 is affordable (unless you're restricted to using specific type of memory modules, I have no clue really), and is far faster than any hard disk swap/scratch file. Of course, that is assuming that the bottleneck is indeed the RAM memory.
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10. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
riskypotato Aug 22, 2009 7:01 AM (in response to Lost_Orbit)Thanks for this. I have 4 empty DIMM slots, though the sobering
realization for me from this thread is that my system is dated. Ah
well, it's served me well for 3 years; I'm hoping to get at least
another year out of it./Phil
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11. Re: another CS4 user with a slow adjustment brush
riskypotato Aug 22, 2009 8:44 AM (in response to Lost_Orbit)Also, just to let everyone know, the adjustment brushes run like a
dream on my new laptop, with an Intel Core Duo, 2.66 w/ 4G RAM.
/Phil


