400-800 Action in LS 342

[pigasus]

I love this action. But I rarely use it as it takes over 4 minutes to execute on my PC. It's the resizing that's where the problem lies. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions how I might speed things up (short of upgrading the PC).

MY images are 3MP from the D30.
My PC is a Pentium III 700 with 512 MB Ram.
I am using PS7 with the following settings:
- of the 463 MB of available Ram I have allocated 90% to PS (or 417 MB)
- Cache settings =8 (not using for histograms)
- First scratch disk is a 3G dedicated (and defragged) partition of a separate HD (not the system HD)

I can always run it in batch. But I'd like to experiment with changing the amount of sharpening (I'd like just a bit more). And with each test of a change promising to take 4-5 minutes, I've been putting off trying.

Also, while we're on the subject. Has anyone else had the following problem (which I had in PS6 and now in PS7)?

The first image I run the LS action against after opening PS always fails in action mask 342 on the command to select previous document. It returns a message that the document is not available. If I clear the history or reload the image and start over, everything runs OK. And all future images run OK. Until I close PS. Upon reopening it, I have the problem again. Curious! I've tried slowing down the execution of the action, but still have the problem.

Thanks for any advice,
Sally

[Greg M]

My computer will run it in 1 minute and 2 seconds. It will run the convert high sharpening HQ in 20 seconds. I've got an 1800 with 1.5 gig of ram. My previous computer would run it in about 2.5 minutes. That one had 768 meg of ram. Both machines run win2k.

If you have 1 picture open at a time it will take almost 1.3 gig of ram to allow PS to use just the ram and not access the hard drive. It's a lack of ram that slows it down. Keep in mind that unless you have win2k or XP you are limited to 512 meg of ram.

[Rudi]

Yeah, it seems to take a while...

While I haven't timed it on my machine, it seems to take forever, and I run an Athlon XP1600+ with 768MB RAM. I guess some good things just take time... :)

[Pekka]

You can speed up resizing a lot by limiting history states to 1. Photoshop can't use RAM effectively (program code from Mac memory model). I've heard version 7 is faster than 6, though.

[Pekka]

Greg M wrote:
If you have 1 picture open at a time it will take almost 1.3 gig of ram to allow PS to use just the ram and not access the hard drive.

Adobe's style to code is amazing. Common sense would dictate that if you start with 16MB image (in RAM), on snapshot (16MB) and resize it to 300% (48MB) and back to 101 (16MB) and back to 100 (16MB) it would eat about 112 megs total if you keep each copy in as history.

[pigasus]

Pekka wrote:
You can speed up resizing a lot by limiting history states to 1. Photoshop can't use RAM effectively (program code from Mac memory model). I've heard version 7 is faster than 6, though.


Yes, I'm already limiting history states to 1. And I can't see much difference between PS 6 and 7 on running this action. I even tried running it in 8-bit. Ran like the wind but resulted in awful blodges of artifacts in the background. :(

I guess I'm going to have to add more RAM. Let's see ... how about 1.5G of RAM so that I can run Pekka's action.

On the other hand, I've reassessed the degree of sharpening and think it might just do. So I'll just batch it overnight. I'm going to have a look at using this action on my low ISO images as well.

But if you have time, Pekka, (:D) a choice of sharpening options for the 400-800 action would be nice.

Thanks,
Sally

[pigasus]

I've found something that helps slightly. I reduced cache levels in Photoshop to 1. But it's still

S L O W !

I'd hate to try running it with a D60 file.

Sally

[Pekka]

pigasus wrote:
But if you have time, Pekka, (:D) a choice of sharpening options for the 400-800 action would be nice.

Sally,

Time? What's that? :eyes

Seriously, I consider LS HQ sharpenings to be tools only for the best shots (I get ones I like very rarely :)). When I get photos off Microdrive, I run Yarc which makes smaller JPG's, I choose only those I _really_ like and convert those to linear and feed them to HQ LS 342. I never do a whole batch with HQ just for preview. The non-HQ versions are good for quick peek of the quality, though.

There is not much you can do to speed it up, but to remove resizing totally and that will in my opinion take the quality away. I hate to wait, too, but what can you do....

If you upgrade your PC, I think you get more speed when you buy big 7200RPM hard disk and fast AMD processor (they are better in floating point calculations).

You will always run out of RAM in Photoshop because it is designed to use as much RAM as it can to speed up the internal functions. When it resizes a 16-bit TIFF it eats 200MB RAM which is ridicilous. Another problem is when you start and use your computer, in few minutes RAM will have problems in form of fragmentation. The RAM get's chopped "to fragments" internally and it is not so efficient any more. There are RAM boosters etc for defragmenting RAM and they can help you some but that also takes CPU power and time.

I'd really like to hear from Adobe where that 200MB or RAM is used when resizing 16MB photo 300%.

Then there is the System Cache (that was called Vcache in Win98 ) which takes 30% of RAM in order to make programs load faster and icons and windows open faster.

PS. 400-800 sharpener as it is now has a cool way of making photos very dimensional and "artistic" (it comes from smooth boosting of some areas with sharpness and some areas with blur), and I actually like it the most in LS.

[pigasus]

Pekka wrote:

I'd really like to hear from Adobe where that 200MB or RAM is used when resizing 16MB photo 300%.

Well, it seems to me that it might make sense. PS is holding the original image snapshot (18MB on my PC) plus the 300% image (9x18=162MB) equals 180MB.

PS. 400-800 sharpener as it is now has a cool way of making photos very dimensional and "artistic" (it comes from smooth boosting of some areas with sharpness and some areas with blur), and I actually like it the most in LS.

I agree totally. I think it's also the most photographic. I've been doing some experimenting with it (very slowly :)) and have found that in many cases when I go on to reduce an image for the web I don't need to apply any additional USM. My taste in sharpening has definitely changed over the past couple of months. These days I'm leaning far more to the natural look. It will probably need more sharpening for printing though, but I'd expect that.

I have also extracted the smoothing and sharpening part of this action to use with nonlinear TIFFs. I haven't tried it on any JPEGs yet but will when I get back from holiday (with photos taken on my Fuji 6800Z).

Great action, Pekka! Thanks.

Sally

[Pekka]

pigasus wrote:
Pekka wrote:

I'd really like to hear from Adobe where that 200MB or RAM is used when resizing 16MB photo 300%.

Well, it seems to me that it might make sense. PS is holding the original image snapshot (18MB on my PC) plus the 300% image (9x18=162MB) equals 180MB.



I really have to find out where all my gray cells have gone. Actually I wonder if there were any in the first place...

[Roger_Cavanagh]

PS7 is definitely faster on my PC - Win XP+768mb RAM.

Another option instead of changing history states all the time would be to add "purge all"statements to the action at the appropriate point.

Regards,

[pigasus]

Roger_Cavanagh wrote:
PS7 is definitely faster on my PC - Win XP+768mb RAM.

Another option instead of changing history states all the time would be to add "purge all"statements to the action at the appropriate point.



I haven't noticed any speed increases for this action with PS7 but that's probably because I have less RAM than you. Once I've exceeded my RAM allocation, it doesn't seem to matter whether I'm in PS6 or 7.

Sally

[drewmk2]

If you have 1 picture open at a time it will take almost 1.3 gig of ram to allow PS to use just the ram and not access the hard drive. It's a lack of ram that slows it down. Keep in mind that unless you have win2k or XP you are limited to 512 meg of ram.

I wouldn't necessarily blame it on the lack of RAM foring the computer to access the drive. All programs have to access the virtual memory on your hard drive called the "Pagefile or swap". More physical memory doesnt necssarily mean that less memory data will be moved to the harddrive. If all memory was stored in phyical RAM your computer would be extremely slow. The advantage to more phyical ram is the ability to process more at a faster rate, not necessarily take the dependence off the drive. The scratch disk is still very necessary.

Seeing that you have allocated 90% of the phyical memory to photoshop might be causing you some loss of speed. Check to make sure you're not using over 10% without photoshop running.