Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Really tired of saving TIFs...

I'm writing this between full TIF saves. I save all my edits with all layers intact, the largest file I saw today was over 1GB large.

The problem isn't the size but the time it takes PS CS5 to crunch through the save. It's sometimes over a minute long. Sure I'm saving to an external but I'm telling you, it takes 85% as long when I save to the internal SSD.

No joke. This is bullshit.

If you look at my photostream, you see that I don't edit singles anymore. I batch edit. This means multiples (usually of 4's) of images simultaneously opened in PS. Not a big deal if they're measly little 12MP files from the D3, but when they're 31MP files from the H3DII... /sigh I'm SOL.

Yes, I know about the "uncheck build previews on save" trick. But how the hell will I know which file is which without previews? They're all just typical camera-raw file names A-something-something (H3DII files) or DSC-something-something (D3 files). Impossible to figure out what's what without previews.

I thought I needed more RAM. I really did. Instead I need PS to save faster. But I'm not really sure that's entirely a hardware issue. As I mentioned, saving uncompressed TIFs on my local SSD isn't much faster.

/sigh

5 comments:

  1. I have a 4.2 ghz overclocked watercooled i7 hackintosh with 12gb of ram and an SSD (gets 14,500 on geekbench) and it takes a long time for me to save tiffs with layers as well so its definitely not a hardware issue, its photoshop.

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  2. There was actually a post about this (somewhere) a while back. The save mechanism for Photoshop dates back to when Photoshop was first release back in 1990 or 1991. In some of the most recent CS releases they've added multiple GPU and CPU support, but the subroutine for file saving is still this old, antiquated, single-threaded code that shoves all your data through one processor and down to the file system.

    It really, really, really sucks and I hope someone on the Adobe team is listening out there - very cool that I can have live zooming and soft scroll panning, but what we really want is the ability to save a large file in under 10 minutes.

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  3. What don't you save in PSDs ?

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  4. PSD? :) http://lucimablog.blogspot.com/2010/07/tif-versus-psd.html

    Cheers!

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