Photoshop Elements 4

Hi All,

I've just upgraded from Photoshop Elements 2 to PE4 (liked the idea of editing 16bit files if required, and the paragraph text facility is particularly useful to me). Overall it seems fine, feature-wise, but it's much slower that 2 was. It seems to think about everything before it does it, even opening menus etc.

Has anyone else experienced this, and if so, have you speeded it up in any way?

I use an AMD XP2500+, with 1Gb DDR400 RAM, two 7200rpm large HDDs with 8Mb buffers, and everything was nice and quick with PE2. I'm guessing that 4 has more stuff running, and going on in the background - can you disable it?

Any help much appreciated.

Thanks,
Dan

in the preferences you can set the ram usage to about 80%.
Set up a scratch disk on your second drive.
close any other programs you don't need running.

Hi Daniel,

have you got an onboard graphics chip or a seperate card. You may find that if it's a chip it is only 64mb or less, whereas you'll get a great improvement in speed with a dedicated graphics card. An ATI Radeon 256mb card will cost about £30 and it takes longer to get the case off, than it does to fit it..

Cheers

Liam

Hi Don and Liam,

Don, I have already done all your suggestions, although RAM usage is set to 75%, the maximum advised by Adobe. I don't think this is the cause of the slowness, because it's slow to open, and open images, let alone processing them. I usually have around 750Mb of RAM available before opening Elements.

Liam, I have an AGP card, but it does only have 32Mb of RAM. However, I'm doing a direct comparison with the PE2 that I just uninstalled, and it just seems slower. Perhaps I should just splash out a few bob and see if that makes a difference.

BUT, just had a fiddle with my settings, and changed to 'no hardware acceleration' for the video, and everything's got quicker. SO, looks like a new video card might be in order.

I shall have a look around,
Thanks all,
Dan

Hi Daniel,

32mb? that will slow it down considerably. I haven't used either of those apps, but that's not enough to run a single layer in GIMP, which straight off the camera is 40 odd mb. That means that it's constantly using the HD for memory, and slowing down the processing speed. (I think that's right.. I never did bother learning too much about swap files)..

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2605

some advice from those who know, when I was after a card.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Liam

Hi Daniel,

I've been using it too for a while. First thing I realized was that I had to double the ram to the max (Sorry, cant remember the figures) on my laptop - is two years old still new? Probably not.

As others have commented above, close down everything you dont need running. I've been scanning 35mm negs at maximun res. for archiving purposes and three or four open at once seems to be about as much as the machine can handle.
here is something to try: I work mainly in film and TVand it is received knowledge that you never have the media on the same drive as the software. Due to the fact that 'In the fidller's house no one dances' I haven't tried this at home but it might work. I bought an 80gb external HD that fits in a shirt pocket from PC World for less than £70 so I should really give it a try.

Another issue is that modern software is constantly doing stuff in the background .Ctrl+alt+delete, then the 'processes' tab is very revealing.

Good luck

Ken

Hi Liam,

I think you're getting confused between system RAM and Video RAM. The system RAM is used for the processing of the image, i.e. opening the file, storing it in memory, etc. I have 1Gb of this memory, and can open and manipulate panoramic images of 13,000 x 2,700 pixels without too much bother.

Video RAM is used to store the actual screen image, which for a 1024x768 resolution, at 32bit colour, is about 3Mb. Allowing the card to have one 'screen' in memory while loading a new one, means that a card with 8Mb of RAM should be fine for 2D work. More memory and video processing power is needed for 3D work, such as video games where different textures, shading etc is done by the video card.

When I used PE2, I had absolutely no problem with the display, so the card I have at the moment was capable of handling the redrawing of the screen, it's only since I've upgraded to PE4 that I've noticed the slow down. Presumably this means PE4 places a different sort of load on the graphics processor. Start-up time for PE4 has halved since I disabled the video hardware acceleration - this is before I even open an image.

Ken, I already keep my images on one disk and my OS and Program files on another, but it's a good tip and one that surely must make a difference.

Generally I do have the minimum of applications open, but again, it's the difference between PE2 and PE4 that I found surprising.

I have thought about increasing RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb, but as I use a RAM monitor, which tells you how much you have available, I can tell that it's not really been a problem. If the available amount drops below 100Mb, I tend to save, close Photoshop, restart it and I'm back up to 800Mb+. In normal use I don't have to do this, only really if I'm working on the panoramas - the first one I did was 13 35mm slides, scanned at 5400ppi, all on seperate layers. That did get a bit slow!

Thanks all, new card on order, hopefully speed things up a bit more.
Dan