Your Photoshop Configuration

[hifi]

Hi all,

Hey I just finished installing Adobe Photoshop 7.0 last night after I bought into the hype. I am still attempting to find out what all the options do, but I really like some of the ones I have learned thus far...these Photo Layouts are really sweet. At any rate I noted that my supposably supper fast machine is taking forever when manipulating a photo. What I am doing is taking some 1200 dpi scanned images and importing them to photo shop in a .bmp format then placing them in a layout of say 2 5X7's or 8 walets and reducing the dpi to 600. (I then print them out on my HP Deskjet 5550 in high quality mode) they are looking really really sweet, I can't really tell the diference between the real photo and the printed one, but I am wondering what you Photoshop guru's have for a system setup and what you have found to be your best configuration. Give me some tips if you will. Do I need to use as high resolution as I am? How much memory do you have in your system? (and how much would you want if you could have it?) also, how large of a swap file/virtual memory do you recommend for photo editing? (I know what Adobe has for minimum requirements).


My useage will be strictly for family event photos, kids etc. My current system configuration is as follows:

AMD Athlon XP 2700+
Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra
512 MB Corsair PC3200XMS
2X80GB WD Special editions in Raid 0 config. (System drive)
1X40GB Seagate Barracuda IV (I have the system swap/virtual memory on this drive set at 900MB)
Windows 2000 Professional
Video is a GeForce 4 TI4200 (Gainward 64MB)

Thanks in advance!!

hifi

[NDC]

Click on Preference in the Getting Started section on the left....

http://www.vtc.com/photoshop-7.htm

[hifi]

Nice link....thanks NDC

[NDC]

YW as always, Hifi!

[Whir]

Well man, your system blows mine away completely, and I have no trouble with large images.

Also, thanks for the link NDC. Heh.

[OuTpaTienT]

Your using much too high of a dpi. 1200 dpi is overkill and it's what's making your machine so sluggish. The files you're creating are huge. Here, look how quickly the file sizes get out of hand as you increase the dpi:

8½" x 11" full sheet scan at 24-bit color

75dpi - 2MB
150dpi - 6MB
200dpi - 11MB
300dpi - 26MB
600dpi - 102MB
1200dpi - 409MB
2400dpi - 2GB

You don't need to scan any higher that what your printer can output. If you printer can output 600dpi then scan at 600dpi.

If your printer's highest output is one of those "odd" non-symetrical resolutions, like 700x350 or whatever, then you usually don't even need to scan above whatever the lower number is.

[Bopper]

I sometimes do Filmstrips from adobe premiere, and then transfer to Photoshop 6. I have 256mb of ram on a 600 Mghrtz system. mine gets really sluggish, because those are huge files for even short(maybe 15 second video clips). If you only have one Physical HDD on the system it could slow your Photoshop down because the scratch file for Photoshop, and the Swap file for windows don't really jive together so it causes it to Slow down. I have 2 HDD drives, and seperated the swap, and scrtch files. this made things a little better.

**EDIT**

Also setting the Swap file in Windows to 1 1/2 times the actual memory is the best setting.

[hifi]

Quote:

Originally posted by OuTpaTienT


You don't need to scan any higher that what your printer can output. If you printer can output 600dpi then scan at 600dpi.

If your printer's highest output is one of those "odd" non-symetrical resolutions, like 700x350 or whatever, then you usually don't even need to scan above whatever the lower number is.

Yeah, I figured that was a bit too much But my printer (HP 5550) has a max resolution of 2400 x 1200 dpi and me being new to Photo editing thought the bigger the better . I did size them down a bit (300dpi) and save them as .jpeg's so the pic's are now much easier to deal with and I really can not see much of a difference in quality in the printouts.

[OuTpaTienT]

300dpi is usually good enough for most normal printouts and up to 600dpi can be used for higher quality stuff. Rarely is over 600dpi going to ever be needed or noticable.

That's pretty awsome dpi output from your printer though. I'm curious just how close it can come to that claim of 2400 x 1200. Ink jets are notorious for technically claiming much higher resolutions than they are capable of. From all I've read about ink jet printers and the mechanical workings of the print head it would phyically impossible to achieve a true output of resolutions that high.

But I would strongly advise you don't use JPG to store your images. JPG destroy detail. They can really mangle a photo if you're not careful. I'd advise using a much better format, like PNG (24-bit), or TGA or TIF (with LZW compression). Those format will not alter your image in any way (unlike JPG).

[hifi]

Quote:

Originally posted by OuTpaTienT


That's pretty awsome dpi output from your printer though. I'm curious just how close it can come to that claim of 2400 x 1200. Ink jets are notorious for technically claiming much higher resolutions than they are capable of. From all I've read about ink jet printers and the mechanical workings of the print head it would phyically impossible to achieve a true output of resolutions that high.

Yeah, I am not sure really as I have nothing to compare it with (*if you compared it to my old deskjet 612C max 300dpi you can certainly tell the difference ) but if your curious, here is the link that sold me on it. Using the photo cardtrige along side of the color cartrige provides exceptional quality IMO. I can't tell the difference between it and the original (unless using a magnifying glass).

Quote:

Originally posted by OuTpaTienT


But I would strongly advise you don't use JPG to store your images. JPG destroy detail. They can really mangle a photo if you're not careful. I'd advise using a much better format, like PNG (24-bit), or TGA or TIF (with LZW compression). Those format will not alter your image in any way (unlike JPG).