Photoshop filters and loading interface.

ME
Posted By
mike.engles
Oct 1, 2003
Views
362
Replies
11
Status
Closed
Hello

I guess this is a question for an Adobe person. It is connected to a comparitive review by PC Mag of Apple G5s and pentium 1Vs.
I have been using a 240 Mb file as in the review and have confirmed the PC Mag observation, that Windows Photoshop takes quite some time for some filter dialogues to be usable. Most of the filters in the Distort Menu and a few others, take nearly 40 secs to load the UI. There is a lot of disk activity and then you get the UI.

I have checked both the Windows Swap file size as well as Photoshop’s. They remain at the same size as the 240 Mb file is opened 262Mb and 731 Mb. This disk activity does not change either of these sizes. I am using a machine with 1GB ram. The review machines were 2GB. The delay in loading seems to start for image sizes of 170 Mb and larger. Also once this kind of activity starts it is infectious. Filters that did not exhibit it begin to. Some refuse to run, because there ia not enough ram, others because of a program error.

It does seem from the review that this delay does not occur on Apple. Why is this? Is there an explantion? Can anyone else replicate it? Perhaps some of thses filters were never designed to run on large files.

Mike Engles
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JM
John_Mensinger
Oct 1, 2003
I’ve neither seen the review, nor am interested in replicating the condition, but I suspect that it has to do with filters that are live-preview-enabled, either by default, or because the Preview check-box was selected on the previous instance…

I simply noticed that you didn’t mention this, and it’s my personal experience that the preview process can cause the type of delays you describe.
ME
mike.engles
Oct 1, 2003
Hello

It might be what you say, but it does not seem to be consistent. The Blur Menu is live preview but has no problem, nor do Sharpen. What I am asking is what makes Apple Photoshop different?

Mike Engles
CC
Chris_Cox
Oct 1, 2003
Mike: Welcome to Windows. Some of the APIs are fast, and some are slow.

The same applies to all OSes, just in different places for each.

A few of the plugin filters (especially distorts) will really run out of RAM on moderate sized images — which forces Photoshop and the OS to do a lot of housekeeping on the allocated memory.
ME
mike.engles
Oct 1, 2003
Hello

What is the housekeeping? The Swap file increases from 400Mb to 730Mb, after the image is loaded, but the disc activity for 40 sec or so does not make any difference.

Mike Engles
CC
Chris_Cox
Oct 2, 2003
The housekeeping is in RAM — and would be rather difficult to explain.
ME
mike.engles
Oct 2, 2003
Hello

Are you saying that the Windows Swap and Photoshop Swap are just reserved space with nothing in them. The disc activity is a process of filling them.

I can see that with a 1GB ram machine and a 240MB image, there would not always be enough ram, but the PC Mag machines had 2 Gb ram. That image should not have choked the machine.

Also Filter Artistic/Cutout will not run at all, with a ‘not enough ram message’. It will not run with a 150 Mb image.

Mike Engles
J
JasonSmith
Oct 2, 2003
"It will not run with a 150 Mb image."

Yep, get that on my Mac too. G4 DP 1.25ghz/2GB RAM. OS 10.2.6.
ME
mike_engles
Oct 2, 2003
Hello Jason

Thanks for replying. Do you have interface load problems with certain filters?

I have a feeling that a lot of these filters are pretty old and have not had a lot of new work done on them.

Mike Engles
J
JasonSmith
Oct 2, 2003
when I go to use something like usharp mask or g-blur with big files(300mb+), sure there is a lag time for the preview.
ME
mike.engles
Oct 2, 2003
Hello

Some of the Distort Filters like twirl will take 50 sec to show a usable UI, but 20 secs to run the filter.

With G Blur 85 or a big Unsharp and a 240MB file, the live previews are almost instant. These filters are obviously heavily optimised, but others take a long time to load the interface let alone the preview.

It seems that it is a nonsense to use any but the most common and optimised filters for benchmarking for either platform.

Mike Engles
CC
Chris_Cox
Oct 3, 2003
No, Mike you’re misreading what I’m saying.

And yes, Cutout is one of our problem filters that REALLY needs to be rewritten from the ground up (sorry, it wasn’t for CS). As-is, it uses up a lot of RAM, and how much it uses depends on the complexity of the image used, in addition to the size of the image.

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