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Very large files in Photoshop CS3

0098386

0098386

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Original poster
Jan 18, 2005
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Having some troubles with Photoshop CS3 (XP and OSX). In a nutshell- I've been working on an independent game for the last 2 years now, a Metroid-like adventure game. I've got a 1:1 ratio world map in Photoshop so I can line up areas and such, only it's growing quite large now, at the moment it's at 30,000x15,000 pixels but I need to expand it to 45,000x30,000. Only it's starting to shout at me.

I've maxed out the Ram on my machine (3gb, C2D iMac) but my scratch disks are now full. I've given Photoshop 100% of ram usage, but are there any other ways of getting it to run a little better? Like throwing the number of colours down or something?

Cheers all :)
 
Yuck.

The best advice I can give is to help you get blood from a stone. This is what I can think of off the top of my head, and you're probably doing it already.

Quit all other programs. Exit all other logins. Make sure your desktop background is set to a static image, and not changing every so often (it's probably not).

Those won't help much, but they will help a little.
 
Ah, thought there wouldn't be an easy way out of this :eek: I had an offer from my uni to either get into the CS4 beta or have a discount on it too (didn't turn up for that meeting), really wish I went now. I hear its better with big files than CS3.

Might give it CS3 a try on my MB. It's got less but faster ram and more HDD space than my iMac.
 
If the file is in the CMYK colour space (its most likely not) but if it is convert it to RGB. That way PS has one less colour channel to process, it can make quite a big difference on such a large file. If you don't need colour at all you could go a step further and make the image grayscale. My guess sis though you do need colour.
 
You need a fast drive such as SATA raid for your cache disk, so read write of your file and photoshop cache will be faster.

Since your iMac has 3gb of ram, I am assuming it's the older one which only has firewire 400 thus external drives won't speed anything up in that case.

You should look into a refurb MacPro or MBP (with sata card) so you can connect to a raid.
 
Consultant said:
You need a fast drive such as SATA raid for your cache disk, so read write of your file and photoshop cache will be faster.

Since your iMac has 3gb of ram, I am assuming it's the older one which only has firewire 400 thus external drives won't speed anything up in that case.

You should look into a refurb MacPro or MBP (with sata card) so you can connect to a raid.
Click to expand...

My white 24" iMac is also limited to 3GB but I have FW800. I have the 2.16 GHz iMac.
Yes as the file size grows performance goes downhill fast. I have no trouble with dSLR sized files but I have some scans from medium format film. These are only 300MB files and it's a little slow.

I'd look for a FW800 RAID-0 "stripped" disk system. Get the one g-tech sells to video editors and use that to hold the mage and scratch files. It might be twice as fast is what you are using. but really, "only" twice as fast is no much. You should be looking at a Mac Pro and 16GB of RAM and fast internal SATA drives ... Either that out cut of the big image into smaller images.
 
You have no business trying to do this with 3GB of RAM. Load up this puppy or go back to animating GIFs.
 
Large Document Format

You might already have done this, but did you convert the file to a .psb (large document format)? I don't have a lot of experience with that myself, but I've heard it can help. You might need to convert it back to a .psd once you're done editing and ready to import into the other programs you're using.
 
Thanks for the helpful comments.

In the end I just copied the file to the MB; same CPU speed, better GPU but 1gb less ram than my iMac but it works perfectly. Takes about 60 seconds to load up but once it's done it flies. Even managed to resize it to the full document size of 70,000px by 35,000px with Photoshop using up 95% ram and a good 20gb of the HDD.
Photoshop asked to convert it to a PSB too.

Really not looking into getting new computers for this either. After I'm done with this project I won't need this much again.
 
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