Skip to main content
N
NZ Light Space
Participant
September 22, 2020
Question

Performance Issues When Processing Large Panoramas

  • September 22, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 319 views

Hi Community,

 

I'm looking for some advice on some performance issues when running CC. My workflow consists mainly of large scale astrophotography panoramas. I'll generally stitch and render these from Kolor Autopano Giga, either as JPEG or TIFF, and then import into Photoshop ... as soon as I import them things start to get slow. Things get impossibly slow when I resize / warp / save etc ... those things basically grind my entire workflow to a halt. What's confusing me is that my computer isn't exactly a slouch, it's got fine specs really and can run most modern games on very high, if not the highest possible settings. Here is my current rig:

 

Asus Sabertooth Z170s
Core i7 6700K
NZXT Kraken X61 AIO
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB
Asus Strix GTX 1070
Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD (C: Drive)
Windows 10 Home

 

Photoshop is currently setup on the C: drive (where the OS is also located), I also have a RAID 1 Array set up with a 6TB capacity spread across 4 hard drives, this is used for photo storage and also I have set up the Scratch Disk here.

 

I have looked at the various methods of optimising performance for large panoramas and have tweaked these settings in my preferences but without much difference. At this point I'm wondering if purchasing another 32GB of RAM would help, and also wondering if buying a 1TB SSD and installing Photoshop on this may help (in that it won't get bogged down with any other programs on the drive).

 

If it's not too obvious, I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to most things comuter based, but would appreciate anyone who might have some advice / tips to help.

 
Regards, Chris
This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

JJMack
Community Expert
JJMackCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 22, 2020

In pixels what is the canvas size of you stitched panorama.  I believe Photoshop limit is 30,000 x 30,000 which is 900,000,000 less than 1GP in 8bit jpeg color a layer 5.4GB  in 16Bit Tiff color a layer 10.8GB.  That is a lot of bytes to process with plug-in, Filters etc Photoshop has many feature the can not take advantage of many cores.  With large layers I think your best upgrade would be a high end Processor.

 

Use the Task Manager to see if RAM will help is your 32GB being used?

JJMack
JJMack
Community Expert
JJMackCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 22, 2020

Some Filters are quit compute intensive. Even when multiple threads that can take time to do their processing.  My machine is old and slow. Compare to yours.  It is all I need. It has 2 slow 2 GHz Xeon six core Processors, 40GB of ECC Ram and a small 256 GB SSD.  All  data file are on  external USB 3 disk.  System, Application, Appdata, Paging and Scratch is on the SSD.  There around 120 GB of free space for scratch.

 

I just create a new document  30,000 x 30,000 8 Bit RGB color.   I added the max amount of noise to the white canvas.  Took little to no time.   Now I know surface blur is compute intensive so I started  Surface blurt with it max settings to time it and look at the Task Manager. All thtat was active on the machine was Chrome which I was not playing with, Adobe Photoshop 21.2.3 surface blur and the Task Manager.  Here is What I saw in the Task Manager.

 

100% CPU, half memory utilized Photoshop can user 90%,  6% SSD Photoshop was using some scratch space. It took my machine 12+minuets to perform the surface blur,   All 24 core were flat lined.

JJMack
JJMack
Community Expert
JJMackCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 22, 2020

Core speed is more important then many core. Here you see Photoshop Smart Sharpen Filter took nearly 3 minuets.   Again the bottleneck is  processor.  through my 6 cores are running 24 threads the CPU utilization is 21%.  However it one task of the 24 holding things up. Ram usage when up some.

JJMack
Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices