Opening Adobe files

MC
Posted By
Maria_Carreira
Nov 6, 2003
Views
315
Replies
2
Status
Closed
I am a new user of Adobe and my problem is that when I open up an Adobe file (for example a plan) Adobe increases the file from a few hundred kilobytes to a few MBs thus using up most of my memory.

I don’t want to decrease the dpi to less than 300 and am unsure as to whether i should change the size of the plan from A3 size to smaller just to decrease the memory size. However, I would like to keep the size A3. Could you let me know why the memory is substantially increased when I open up the file the first time I’m sent it?

Many thanks.
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Helen_Polson
Nov 6, 2003
Hi Maria,
I take it by "Adobe" that you mean Photoshop? (Adobe is the company which produces Photoshop, Illustator, InDesign etc).

Some more information might help us help you- what are your system specs (ram, memory, cpu etc) and what problems exactly are you experiencing? You say it’s using up most of your memory- is Photoshop crashing/slowing down/freezing or are you getting an error message?

Also, I find that thing like plans are better vreated in a vector program such as Adobe Illstrator rather than Photoshop as this gives much smaller file sizes and graphics can thn be scaled to any size without loss of quality.

Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Helen
L
LenHewitt
Nov 6, 2003
Maria,

I open up an Adobe file <<

That’s pretty meaningless – I see Helen has already given you the "Adobe is a company" lecture, so I won’t repeat that, BUT….

You can open and Save to many different file formats in Photoshop. From what you say, it sounds as though you have a .JPG file.

Now on disk that will be considerably smaller than when opened in an application. When it is opened it is de-compressed, and the size in memory of ANY raster format file is given by the number of horizontal pixels x the number of vertical pixels, times the number of channels (1 for greyscale, 3 for RGB, 4 for CMYK) times the bit-depth of the file.

An A3 image at 300 ppi will be 66.4 meg in CMYK, 49.8 meg in RGB, 16.6 megs in Greyscale, and 2.8 megs as a bitmap.
However, the scratch file that Photoshop generates can be many times larger than the image in memory, so for colour files of that size you really do need an abslute minimum of 256 megs of RAM and at LEAST 1/2 gig of free disk space. Ideally you would have in excess of 512 megs RAM .

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