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OK. I know that Photoshop CS (or 8) has new whiz-bangy features, but how responsive is it compared to Photoshop 7? I recently upgraded my G4 DP 450 from 512 MB of RAM to 1GB. That sped up PS 7 for me somewhat (though still not as much as I'd like when workin' with big files). However, I'm hearin' reports that PS CS/8 is slower. What's the story???

It's a little slower starting up, but faster in actual use.

Every report I've seen showed significant speed decreases in many functions. Some by 30%. I think Adobe is trying to get people to move to PCs. Macs get faster and Photoshop gets slower.

Action test with multiple filters

108.3MB image file/20 filter/actions
PS CS = 330 sec.
PS 7.0.1(G5) = 225 sec.

from

[www.xlr8yourmac.com]

I have the same problem with Adobe Illustrator - version 8 rocks, but version 10 takes wayyyyyyy longer to open or save a file (on a similar dp 450 1GB SD). And any of us who have used Photoshop or Illustrator regularly have been burned enough to save our work regularly, so longer save times means slower productivity. Disappointing if PS is slower than 7 as there are some nice bells and whistle features promised.

Adobe forums:
But on the 1.42 it is like molassas. its ridiculous. Using the healing brush in v7 there was no perceptable wait. now with CS, after each use the clock spins. My setup is a Dual 1.42 with 2 gigs ram (CS is the only thing open, with 80% to PSD). Panther OS. Dedicated Raid 0 scratch disc (ultra 160 scsi). Files are about 300MB with layers (16x20 @300dpi).

gonna go back to v7 if adobe doesn't fix this soon!

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Mike, I realize the work that goes into writing the software. I've used Photoshop since v2.5, and am professional retoucher for the last 5 years, and am familiar with getting photoshop to run at least at a respectable level. So for this to be literally half the speed of the old version just ruffles my feathers a little, especially when Adobe is mum on the issue

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I can confirm the PSD 7 is faster (alot) on both machines, although CS on the G5 is less noticeable. Even smaller files that should have no problem fitting in RAM seem to be slow. I haven't tried running a script yet, but I'm having lots o' problems using things like the healing brush (which I use alot of - and in CS, i'm NOT using the new "Use All Layers" part ).

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I noticed while copying a layer from a 1 gig image to another gig image just took me about 12 minutes or longer. I kept activity monitor open and saw that my cpu is only working at 55% MAX, 5 % on the system. 40% + is always idle. At times while photoshop was working on the image the cpu would be up to 80% idle. I have run disk utilities and repaired permissions. something seems off in P8 Panther dual G5 1.5 gigs ram with 75% dedicated to photoshop. scratch is 30 gigs separate partition but on the same drive as system and photoshop.
Spinning beach-ball is present at times.

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Maybe this whole speed issue is something simple and easy to fix but it's really unbelievable how slow PS CS runs. I don't have a G5, but my machine was state of the art 5 months ago and it's stricly a dedicated Photoshop machine with nearly the max ram and a RAID. My general thought is, that while none of the operations I've tried so far have slowed me down a lot compared to v7, very few seem to have sped up since version 7. And considering I jumped from v7 with a SP G4 and a handi-capable bus... to a Dual G5 with 2 GB RAM (65% to PS), 2 SATA drives (one for PS scratch) and a video board that's probably 3x faster than the one I had... something ain't right.

Hmmm...that's some dissapointing results, Teddy. It looks like Adobe's not takin' the effort to tweak their latest products for the Mac - although I thought that they were gonna since they released that G5 acceleration plug-in. Maybe it's the bitterness over the FCP vs. Premiere rivalry tricklin' down to Mac users.

Slow save times on large multi-layer files is one of the reasons why I went from 512 MB to 1 GB recently. I just got a speedup, so I don't wanna get slowed down again. Thanks for all of the info.

I actually like 5.5 better than 7 in many ways. They've cluttered up the interface. It's a toss up but since I'm on Panther now it's 7 or use classic which is unacceptable.

Adobe seems to suffer from the same problem that Apple sometimes has:

Fix it even it it works great and even if you screw it up.





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F. Zappa

Yikes, right you are. Haven't had any jobs with large 2gigs images since installing CS, so was unaware of the problem. Tried messing with some old 2 gig retouching projects in both CS and 7...CS is hugely slower...Terminal shows it hanging quite a bit. 7 flies in comparison. Thanks for the head's up. Sorry for the misinformation.

In the last couple of days I had decided on my own to ditch CS in favor of 7 because 7 seemed to be so much snappier. This confirms it.

Curious. I changed the memory request in CS to 50% from 100%. CS is much zipier now.

I am an Adobe Certified Training Provider. I think that the new features in Photoshop CS are well worth the minor slowdowns you may experience. BTW--dedicating anything more than 60% of available memory to PS is a major mistake, and will actually slow down the program, not speed it up! I know this doesn't sound right, but it is.

Catherine

Cathrine, I agree with you only in the respect that we need CS to open up RAW picture files. We also love the ability to edit the picts in 48bit mode, but for the average photo retoucher, if they got the job done in PS 7, I don't see any compeling reason to upgrade unless you absolutely need to. I think Adobe really screwed up on this version. I say that because I too have noticed how much slower it is and if I didn't need these features I would not have upgraded. My work has 7 (I know thats not many) copies of PS and only 3 were upgraded because only these people absolutely needed these new features. I will not upgrade the others until I see some sort of update to fix the speed issue. I saw the same thing, as mentioned before, with Illustrator. I still have people running ver 8 in classic because it is just as fast as ver 10 or 11 in OS X. I have no reason to upgrade unless it at minimum runs as fast.

I wouldn't have upgraded to 10.3, but I tested it and IT'S FASTER that 10.2. I can't put this on machines fast enough I love it. Even on older G4's it runs great. I'll break the budget if it helps my people get work done faster.

bit

Myself, I'm still stitting on the fence. The only advantage for me is the Canon 10D RAW conversion and the shadow recovery feature. If I could update for less than $100, I might be able to justify it....... Hopefully the upgrade price will go down in the next several months, like 7's did.

michael

Isn't RAW cobversion available separately as a plug-in for PS7? For $99? ...'course it's kinda 'noying to pay for something that's part of the CS version...

CS has some nifty features, and has improved the file browser tremendously, to the point where it now looks like a very, very useful tool. It lets you save different workspaces, so you can have one setup for batches of mostly portrait images, a different setup for mostly landscape, etc.

The color-match feature looks potentially very useful, as does the shadow & highlight tool.

I'm working with smaller files than some of you, not generally over 60-70 MB, though, so I'm not expecting to necessarily see any significant speed difference.



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He relieved me today on rescue and proudly whipped out a beautiful 14incher.

— Catzilla

It would be nice if Adobe would listen to the users. It really seems that they don't care...heh...kinda like Quark. What features do users want? Overall, i'd say the resonding answer is SPEED and lots of it. But what does Abobe do? they cram in some more "fancy shmancy, can't live without 'em, new" tools and features. Of course this slows PS or AI to a crawl...but thats ok right? I work in PS7 and AI10 only b/c they run natively in OSX. Are there some features i'd like to add? Sure? but at the cost of performance? no way.




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