Working resolution

[Dazz1]

Hi,

I have recently been toying with composite photo construction, which, for me, means working in Gimp with many layers. This means I can quickly consume memory. I have 12 GB installed and not easily improved since it is a laptop. My camera is an 80D, so 24 megapixels image size.

I was wondering, should I always work at maximum resolution. I know/think ideally I should, but practically speaking, for an image I might present in a club competition, or print out for hanging on the wall, would a smaller size be sufficient. For example, could I work at half res, and still have sufficient resolution?

[Tannin]

With 12GB, use any resolution you like. Think about working at a lower resolution only if you are sub-standard in the memory department (4GB or less). Even if you go gonzo and use 16-bit colour, your file is still very small compared to your available RAM. For example, the 16-bit TIFF of the 30MP 5D IV image I happen to be looking at is 140MB. Suppose that you are doing something fancy and have 8 layers. That still adds up to only around 1GB, or a mere 10% of your RAM. 10% is nothing to worry about.

Additionally, your photo working drive is an SSD*, so swapping RAM to disc is very fast (compared to mechanical drives).



* If by some chance your working drive is not an SSD, why are you on AP asking performance-related questions instead of driving down to your local computer shop and getting an SSD? It's 2018. An SSD is a no-brainer.

[agb]

[QUOTE=Tannin;1470301]With 12GB, use any resolution you like. Think about working at a lower resolution only if you are sub-standard in the memory department (4GB or less). Even if you go gonzo and use 16-bit colour, your file is still very small compared to your available RAM. For example, the 16-bit TIFF of the 30MP 5D IV image I happen to be looking at is 140MB. Suppose that you are doing something fancy and have 8 layers. That still adds up to only around 1GB, or a mere 10% of your RAM. 10% is nothing to worry about.

Additionally, your photo working drive is an SSD*, so swapping RAM to disc is very fast (compared to mechanical drives).



* If by some chance your working drive is not an SSD, why are you on AP asking performance-related questions instead of driving down to your local computer shop and getting an SSD? It's 2018. An SSD is a no-brainer.

[John King]

Tony's got that spot on.

I am using an old motherboard with 2.93 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 16 GB of DDR3 RAM. Ancient compared with the latest h/w. It does have a new graphics card with 2 GB DDR5 RAM, and a decent 240 GB SSD. It runs like the wind with PS6. Scratch disk is set to the SSD. There are 4 HDDs in the box. One of them is an 8 y.o. 500 GB drive that I use for imaging the boot SSD and similar housekeeping. It doesn't have to be fast ... The others are Seagate Enterprise drives. On the whole, this box is more than fast enough. Even my old XP w/s with 4GB RAM would handle full resolution A2 size files quite easily. The file size was 250+ MB and around 1 GB when open in PS6 as a 16 bit, ProPhotoRGB PSD or TIFF file.

I forgot to mention that I normally have about 40+ tabs open in FireFox, and the above still works fine. FF is taking up around 6-8 GB of my RAM ...

[Dazz1]

With 12GB, use any resolution you like. Think about working at a lower resolution only if you are sub-standard in the memory department (4GB or less). Even if you go gonzo and use 16-bit colour, your file is still very small compared to your available RAM. For example, the 16-bit TIFF of the 30MP 5D IV image I happen to be looking at is 140MB. Suppose that you are doing something fancy and have 8 layers. That still adds up to only around 1GB, or a mere 10% of your RAM. 10% is nothing to worry about.

Seems that the working format of Gimp is less efficient than that, I was just using 6GB for Gimp alone. With a couple of working images and maybe 6 to 8 layers each, and a bunch of undos, I can get up over 70% memory usage. Still that's probably as much as I'd ever open at once, but it's a lot.

Additionally, your photo working drive is an SSD*, so swapping RAM to disc is very fast (compared to mechanical drives).



* If by some chance your working drive is not an SSD, why are you on AP asking performance-related questions instead of driving down to your local computer shop and getting an SSD? It's 2018. An SSD is a no-brainer.

I agree.

However, it's an old laptop with an internal 1GB drive. A replacement SSD is about $400 or more and that seems a lot of money to put into it. Maybe I could buy a smaller working drive and put the old one in an external case (although I already have an external 3GB drive). It means I wouldn't be able to dual boot back to Windows, but I really only use linux so that's a minor thing.

But performance wise, it isn't really the drive that's slow. Some things, like dodging and burning with a big brush are laggy and awkward and I am fairly certain that's all happening in memory.

- - - Updated - - -

Tony's got that spot on.

I am using an old motherboard with 2.93 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 16 GB of DDR3 RAM. Ancient compared with the latest h/w. It does have a new graphics card with 2 GB DDR5 RAM, and a decent 240 GB SSD. It runs like the wind with PS6. Scratch disk is set to the SSD. There are 4 HDDs in the box. One of them is an 8 y.o. 500 GB drive that I use for imaging the boot SSD and similar housekeeping. It doesn't have to be fast ... The others are Seagate Enterprise drives. On the whole, this box is more than fast enough. Even my old XP w/s with 4GB RAM would handle full resolution A2 size files quite easily. The file size was 250+ MB and around 1 GB when open in PS6 as a 16 bit, ProPhotoRGB PSD or TIFF file.

I forgot to mention that I normally have about 40+ tabs open in FireFox, and the above still works fine. FF is taking up around 6-8 GB of my RAM ...

Browsers can do that, and with with Gimp taking up another 6GB, I would run out. Have to remember to close Chrome...

Also, I wish I could put multiple hard drives in, but it's a laptop. I would rather keep it portable as I do a lot of stuff on the road when I am away in the caravan.


Anyway, this a great discussion and you guys have me thinking in different directions, which is good. It's why I like coming to forums like this , so cheers!!

[John King]

Dazz, does your existing HDD have a cache? If so, how big?

When I upgraded my 2003 IBM laptop, I replaced the 40 GB cacheless Hitachi 5400 rpm HDD with a 5400 rpm HDD with an 8 MB cache. Just about doubled the speed of the laptop! I still use this on the road ...

[Dazz1]

Dazz, does your existing HDD have a cache? If so, how big?

When I upgraded my 2003 IBM laptop, I replaced the 40 GB cacheless Hitachi 5400 rpm HDD with a 5400 rpm HDD with an 8 MB cache. Just about doubled the speed of the laptop! I still use this on the road ...

Yes, it has 8MB cache. My question about resolution is more about the speed of the tools on the image, and as I am not actually maxing the memory out yet, I think it's just processing power versus the number of pixels. I can live with it as is, but if I don't need all those extra pixels, then it would go quicker.

[Tannin]

More to do with number of colours than number of pixels, Dazz. Well, both, of course, but 16-bit and 32-bit image files start to eat up your RAM.

PS: JK, Thinkpads and Seagate Enterprise drives. Great minds think alike! I'm running an ancient Thinkpad T530 as my main system. It's an i7 but by no means a recent one, but I gave it 16GB. Being a proper Thinkpad, it has multiple storage options: I have a 2TB primary drive (Seagate hybrid, of course), an identical 2TB drive in the DVD slot, but my boot drive (and PS swap drive) is a 500MB SSD in the Miini-SATA slot. Looks like a little bit of RAM but the system treats it as a hard drive. I'm thinking about replacing it with a 1TB one or bigger: at the time I bought it even 500MB was pretty expensive. Point is, a bit of RAM and a nice SSD makes even a barely-this-decade laptop scoot along very nicely.


PPS: In the back shed I still have two or three Seagate Cheetahs (first 15,000 RPM drives ever made) and an amazing IBM 15k double-height drive, which was huge in the day (9GB! Wow! Amazing!), very, very fast (second only to the Cheetahs, and that not by much), mega-expensive, and made a noise such that, if it was a jet airliner, you wouldn't be allowed to fly it over residential suburbs after 9PM.

[ameerat42]

I was intrigued by the above to see what it all meant in figgers...

Now I've got 15MPx files, not 24, and I did the tests as follows: GIMP/Photoshop alone; with the same, single
15MPx image; with 3 extra duplicated layers of that image on top of it. I used Task Manager to check the change
in memory usage. Results are:

GIMP/Pshop alone: 67MB/ 128MB
With single 15MPX image: 216MB/191MB
With 15MPx image + 3 duplicated layers: 639MB/224MB

At first it seemed GIMP was just a lean machine compared with Pshop, but upon loading the images
and then the duplicate layers, that got turned on its head I checked the figures again.

Nevertheless, either one does not soak up excessive memory My system has 8GB RAM.

- - - Updated - - -

On reading Tannin's latest post: I was using 8-bit jpegs for the test above.

[John King]

Tony, I've got a 5.25" double height IBM HDD in my shed (+ the all-important controller card ... ). It's a whole 20 MB! And a DEC laptop with a 20 MB HDD. Pretty advanced items in their day ...

[Tannin]

You might enjoy this page, John. http://redhill.net.au/d/i.php

I misremembered the IBM ZX, it was the second 10k drive, not the second 15k one. Details here: http://redhill.net.au/d/139.php

[John King]

You might enjoy this page, John. http://redhill.net.au/d/i.php

I misremembered the IBM ZX, it was the second 10k drive, not the second 15k one. Details here: http://redhill.net.au/d/139.php

Good stuff, Tony. However, my drive predates all of these!

Try here:

http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/5170...0_hdd_type.htm

Scroll down to the "Type" table. Mine is a Type 13. Dates from around 1982-1984.

@Tannin Here's a photo. The HDD next to it is a "modern" Maxtor 80 GB drive ...