god those images take ages to process on my laptop... working with those is like impossible :|

guess i need a workstation with 8gig ram, quadcore and WAY faster hdds or even ssds ...

4+ gig helps with PS. The rest doesn't matter a whole lot for most PS stuff. HDD speed doesn't matter at all.

petopeto said:
4+ gig helps with PS. The rest doesn't matter a whole lot for most PS stuff. HDD speed doesn't matter at all.

hdd speed matters, of course...
especially when ram is not enough (swapping ugh)
but also saving huge those huge bastards + loading take quite some time with an old 4200 rpm laptop hdd ... (psd above 200meg)

If you're swapping, you need more memory, not a faster drive (or it'll slow down everything, including loading). Drive speed isn't a real issue.

petopeto said:
If you're swapping, you need more memory, not a faster drive (or it'll slow down everything, including loading). Drive speed isn't a real issue.

since i cant easily upgrade the memory of my laptop, drive speed would greatly increase anything! (my drive is slower than normal usb2.0 ones lol)

Photoshop CS4 would make editing images like these easier...since its 64 bit and all..

Maybe if you're editing 10 of them at once...

admin2 said:
Photoshop CS4 would make editing images like these easier...since its 64 bit and all..

too bad i dont have a gpu that supports cs4 :/

CS4 is not necessary for the average user, just like CS3.

I've always stuck with CS2, and that's all that I have ever needed, other than Corel 10 and Painter X.

Lots of things aren't necessary, that doesn't mean they don't help...

The palette redesign in CS3 helps a lot; it was terrible having documents fall underneith palettes, and it's a lot more space-efficient. The only thing I remember using that I think was added in CS2 was the clone stamp palette.

Havn't tried CS4 yet. The "pixel grid" sounds useful, though it sounds suspiciously like something that's been in every other paint program for the last twenty years and mysteriously missing from PS. Document tabs--something else showing up just a little late. "Content-Aware Scaling"--took long enough. Canvas rotation sounds cool, too.

I'll have to agree that the pallet design for CS3 was an improvement over the dual one in CS2. But there was a bit of added feature in CS3 that I have yet to even touch >.<

To follow up after trying CS4:

The UI is laggy to the point where I'm not going to use it regardless of anything else. Zooming in and out is completely unresponsive and changing windows has a visible redraw time.

The tabs are a waste of screen space and I don't want them. Switching fullscreen modes gets rid of them, but there's no option to turn them off entirely that I can find.

OpenGL is broken: it doesn't "support" dual monitors, and does anyone who seriously uses Photoshop *not* have two monitors? May as well say "systems with more than a gig of memory not supported"; it's so unreasonable it's fraudulent advertising.

Canvas rotation sounds neat, but it requires OpenGL support.

The first thing the 64-bit version did was set its cache to 4 GIGS--I have lots of memory so no one application can eat it all, and Adobe seems to think the purpose of 64-bit support is to circumvent that and eat all of my memory again. (I have 8 gigs; PS does not get four of them.) I turned this back down to 2, but unless you're actually editing extremely large images--and I'm talking about 20kx20k images, well beyond what you normally deal with when scanning anything printed--I'd suggest sticking with the 32-bit one. There's just no need for 64-bit and it's probably a bit slower.

Without the speed problems, none of the regressions from CS3 can't be worked around, but the slow redraw and zooming is a complete deal killer.

If anyone actually draws (tablet) in PS, you might find the new fullscreen mode interesting: it turns off everything except the canvas. It looks very clean and some people will probably like it for drawing.

Humm... Fullscreen mode. Sounds neat.

But if the user interface is laggy and the cache is set to 4gig, my little ol computer cant run such a program then >.<

Zooming is... unresponsive? O_o

I'm running on an on-board GeForce 8200 (which is possibly the shittiest 8-series GeForce since it's an IGP) with an Athlon X2 5000+ (2.6GHz) and 4GB of RAM and Photoshop CS4 runs fast here. Unless you really have a shit video card, then there shouldn't be any problem with acceleration in Photoshop CS4.

And yes, this is running the 64-bit executable.

Yeah, I'm having 0 problems with CS4. It's not lagging on zoom or brushes. And this is with 64 bit executable too.

I have a 9600 GT (definitely not a shit video card) and CS4 is laggy in XP64. (Alt-mousewheel zooming doesn't redraw until I stop moving the wheel, instead of redrawing cleanly, and there's a visible hitch when changing images.)

Also, I had to track down a registry hack to enable GPU support because apparently Adobe thinks XP64 doesn't support OpenGL (seriously, Adobe, it does), but that just makes it worse: brush drawing lags way behind the cursor. Without GPU support enabled, pretty much every CS4 feature gets turned off.

Another thing I can't figure out: with GPU support on, when I try to drag the canvas around (H), it zooms all the way out and drags a box around, instead of just dragging the canvas normally. It's terrible. This doesn't always happen, though.