Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

I know that suppliers like Autocad do not feature Open Gl any more.

Maybe they know something. It is in Adobe's interest, imo, to provide as seamless an install and operating experience they can to their users.

Lawrence:

OpenGL is still quite good. Most of the 3D animation/modelling applications depend on it on many operating systems/hardware. A lot of the major post production composting software depends on it as well.

Its not in the grave yet. Direct 3D has certainly come into its own though, but a lot of production environments run a lot of different machines for different applications etc. OpenGL still has the upper hand in cross platform support.

Perhaps Adobe has a the architecture in place to add direct 3D support in the future, giving 3 display options for windows users. I dont know if thats in their interest though.

Well, Open GL is free, and free is a very good price!:D

Q Photo:

Are you running CS 4 maximized across both of your monitors or just on one monitor?

I'm running at 2560x1600, and CS4 performed a lot slower than CS3.

CS4 could handle huge PSDs with lots of layers. Thats not really the issue. Thats all CPU for the most part. Turning on/off layers had some delays where you could see each tile draw on screen. Adjustment layers, while fast and didnt effect performance, were very slow to update while adjusting them interactively, such as the color curve adjustment layer. It would actually perform a lot slower when adjusting than then adjusting the regular old color curve.

Healing and Stamping were lagged and often resulted in missing your inputs when defining the source area you want to clone.

I'm curious if you could create a new doc at 4000x5000 (240 dpi) and Adobe Pro Photo RGB color space. Zoom to 100% so it fills up your screen(s). Now on a new layer, take the paint brush and draw an endless circle very fast. Does the lag build up ?

Do you have figure drawing skills or are you mostly a photo manip guy? Figure artists will do a lot of quick guestures when drawing, and i found CS4 to have an anoying delay with short quick strokes. This delay turns into a bigger delay the longer your stroke is. Even with short quick strokes, it seemed that your stroke would display by the time you finished your stroke.

This slight delay builds up heavily the faster you move and the longer the stroke. Hence my request of you trying an endless circlular brush stroke.

Do you see performance differences if you do this endless circular stroke in 100% zoom vs 30% zoom?

Also try opening up one of your huge 500 meg PSDs. Assuming they are photos at large resolutions, try adding a color adjustment curve layer. Zoom to 100% and adjust the color curve. Do you get realtime feed back as you move your curve? Does the curve move fluidly or at 2fps?

I found it to move at 2fps and update only after i moved the curve point to a location. It did not update while moving teh curve (probably cause it was so slow)

CS3 has none of these issues.

Lawrence Hudetz:

A Mac version of CS4 would not be possible if adobe used Direct 3D.

Thanks everyone I am going for it. In 20 minutes I am going to microcenter to purchase an ATI Radeon 4850 512 MB card. This is on Adobes tested list. If any of you savvy guys have a better suggestion please advise before I depart. Thanks so much!

-mark (I have a LOT to learn)

Well, that's what THEY say!

> I would not have thought MS could be more reliable

a quip! rather, a joke! huzzah! :)

Talking with other programmers who work with major 3D presentations, I get the message that Open GL is the disaster. They much prefer DirectX. It puts MS in the business of validating cards, not the program suppliers. I would not have thought MS could be more reliable, but Autocad appears to prefer DirectX and eschews Open GL at the moment.

Resolution is no problem on the i7 system either. I was limited to 6G of ram by availability and PS took about 4G. I did have to use scratch on a 280M file for Smart sharpen. Took 14+ sec to sharpen, on either standard HD or SSD. I wouldn't spring for one of those.

But my home system, well the less said the better at this point.

Working the percentages has it's value, but the fact that Adobe was looking for a local system that is afflicted as well as supplying specialty builds means the problem is endemic and needs a solution. We don't know of major users buying multiple licenses experience.

The i7 was a lean machine. My home machine, while not bloated, is carrying a fair number of programs and app, plus the usual files for favorites, My docs etc.

Then, there is the difference between XP and Vista on how they start services. That makes a big difference to startups.

Therefore, I don't see how the "low resolution" theory holds up.
Q