CS takes several minutes to enter filters

BF
Posted By
Brett_Foland
May 27, 2004
Views
599
Replies
17
Status
Closed
When I try to use a filter such as Grain or Watercolor it takes several minutes to get to the filters screen even if I have a small image (2 or 3 megs).

If I remember correctly, in Photoshop 7 you would get the one filter that you were trying to apply. In the CS version it seems that the program applies all of the filters and then enters the filters screen.

How can I speed up this process?
Can I change a setting somewhere so I will only get the filter that I am trying to use?

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CC
Chris_Cox
May 27, 2004
No, it doesn’t "apply all filters".

What OS?

How much RAM?

What is it doing while you’re waiting (hard disk activity, etc.)?
BF
Brett_Foland
May 28, 2004
Good questions

2.8 Ghz Dell with hyperthreading
2.6 GB RAM
85% RAM dedicated to Photoshop
2 HD’s one with OS Windows XP Pro Other with swap files
No other apps open

I’m stummped!
CC
Chris_Cox
May 28, 2004
I’m stumped, too.

I know the filter gallery is slower than the old filters — but it’s not normally THAT much slower.

And XP on that system should be fine.

Hmm – one thing to check: the OS swapfile settings (2x RAM, set min and max to same value, reboot)
CC
Chris_Cox
May 28, 2004
Oh, and try reducing the amount of memory given to Photoshop (try 65%).
BF
Brett_Foland
May 28, 2004
Thanks Chris–I’ll try these tonight.

Even defragged the HD but no help.

I am going to watch the performance monitor and see what’s happening with the hard drive, swap file and processor. This way perhaps I can narrow it down.
JA
Jo_Ann_Snover
Jun 15, 2004
I have a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 system with 2GB RAM, 85% of which Photoshop may have (I upped it trying to get better performance – I curious about the earlier post suggesting reducing it?).

Most things about CS are reasonably peppy (I’ve been using Photoshop since version 5 and on several machines; I’ve used both Photoshop 7 and CS on the current system). The file browser’s very slow, but the filter gallery is wretched. Simple things like spatter or sprayed strokes that used to be fast now take forever even to get to the dialog with the preview image.

Is there some way to turn off the gallery and go back to the one at a time filter? Can that be added to a maintenance release?

Today I had the filter gallery complain it was out of memory trying to run sprayed strokes on a layer of an 8 bit grayscale image (layer was 25MB, the image is 251MB). It is the only image open.

I have two monitors; I’m running Windows XP Professional; I have a lot of fonts and peripherals. The Windows virtual memory is set to be "system managed" and it shows it’s currently allocated a 2046MB page file (it says recommended is 3069MB) There is 120GB of free disk space, so it could make a bigger page file if it needed to.

I can’t think of anything "odd" about my system.

The filter gallery has rendered those filters close to useless because of the slow speed (and every little change you make, you wait and wait, so it’s not just the initial dialog box display).
MM
Mick_Murphy
Jun 15, 2004
I don’t think there is anything peculiar about your machine. The Filter Gallery is intrinsically slow and using it on 250 Mb file it is likely to be extremely slow. Incidentally, the general recommendation for page file size is 1.5-2 X RAM but I doubt this will have any effect on the Filter Gallery.
DM
dave_milbut
Jun 16, 2004
turn ps memory allocation down to 50% if it’s not there already.
BF
Brett_Foland
Jun 16, 2004
Jo Ann,

I finally uninstalled Photoshop CS, cleaned all indications of it out of the registry and then finally reinstalled. The problem went away. I loaded back my additional filters and plugin’s one at a time to see if a problem cropped up. So far so good.

I think I may have too many styles, patterns, etc in each of theor browse windows.

Hope this helps.
JA
Jo_Ann_Snover
Jun 16, 2004
Thanks for the various suggestions.

Could someone explain (or point to an explanation somewhere) why _reducing_ the amount of memory Photoshop is allowed access to could improve performance? It seems completely counter-intuitive – a memory intensive application performs better when I let it have less memory? I’m not trying to argue about whether it’s helpful, just to have a clue why? Would I have been better off getting a PC with less RAM (from a Photoshop perspective)?

I worked around my problem with the grayscale image by putting that layer in a separate file just to run the filter. Then I copied the filtered layer back to the original document. The filter gallery still came up very slowly and the time to process the filter as I changed settings was exceedingly slow. It didn’t complain about being out of memory though.

I think there is something wrong, however, when Photoshop is the only app running on a machine with the hardware I have, and I can’t run a spatter or sprayed strokes filter on a layer of a 250MB image. If I had 3GB or 4GB of memory could I have done what I wanted?
L
LenHewitt
Jun 16, 2004
Jo-Ann,

why _reducing_ the amount of memory Photoshop is allowed access to could
improve performance? <<

A simplified explanation:

Photoshop performs best when no PROGRAM CODE is swapped out of memory to disk. If you allocate too much memory to Photoshop DATA use (which is what your preference setting does), then you reduce the RAM available for PROGRAM CODE.

IMAGE DATA will ALWAYS be swapped to disk, regardless of image size or memory allocation – Photoshop’s PRIME memory is the scratch disk, the available RAM being used as a cache for that disk image. However SOME filter operations must be performed entirely in real RAM, which is where you are seeing problems. One work round is to run such filters on a single channel at a time.

If I had 3GB or 4GB of memory could I have done what I wanted?<<

Not until there is a 64-bit version of Photoshop running under a 64-bit operating system.
JA
Jo_Ann_Snover
Jun 16, 2004
Thanks, that makes sense out of what seemed illogical.

Given that setup, how can a user figure out what a good percentage would be (to use in the Photoshop dialog allocating memory for Photoshop)? In my system, the PS dialog says that there is 1777MB RAM available of which 1511MB may be used by Photoshop. I assume the first number isn’t 2GB because of OS usage. Is there some rule of thumb for the right difference between those two numbers?

I’d think that Adobe might make a utility to calculate a recommendation on a given system – like Windows "System Managed" for the swap file. That would allow Photoshop to make changes based on usage patterns, if necessary.

Memory management is important, and given the user’s in the least well informed position, but wants the absolute most out of the hardware they bought, why not have Photoshop figure it out. Those who think they know better than Adobe could always enter numbers manually and the rest of us who just want to do great things with images can just leave it alone? I’m a former software engineer – I’m not afraid of details or complexity – I just don’t want to invest any expertise in the mechanics of making Photoshop fast if I don’t have to.
JA
Jo_Ann_Snover
Jun 17, 2004
Len,

Thanks – I’ve bookmarked that. I took a look at physical memory using the large grayscale document and the filter that gave me an insufficient memory error yesterday. At the point the error dialog came up, I showed ~790 MB available physical memory.

My Photoshop scratch disk is on a separate disk from the program, and it has 49GB free space, however there was a PhotoshopTemp103…. file on it whose size was 2,107,400KB. These disks are running NTFS, so doesn’t that mean that the file should be capable of growing until it fills the disk. That file size at the time of the error makes it seem that Photoshop won’t grow the file beyond about 2GB?

At any rate, I think my filter problems do not have to do with my memory settings or too slow a CPU. I didn’t see CPU usage get above 60 percent while Photoshop struggled to get the filter gallery up or to run the filter. Physical memory is ample and is available. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this, but it appears Photoshop CS has some sort of problem making a big scatch file. The knowledgebase says that it should only be limited by available disk space, but that isn’t what I’m seeing. Help!
CC
Chris_Cox
Jun 17, 2004
If your system is working correctly, Photoshop can create scratch files up to 32 Exabytes or until your disks are full.

Yes, the Filter Gallery is slow – we know that.
JA
Jo_Ann_Snover
Jun 17, 2004
Chris,

Then please tell me why I’m getting a memory error running a filter in the conditions I describe.

What could be "not working correctly" about my system that would casue this behavior?
CC
Chris_Cox
Jun 17, 2004
Many of the filters in the Filter Gallery require a large amount of memory and can run out with large images.

Plus there are some issues with Windows memory fragmentation – especially when you get close to the 2 Gig per application limit.

Reducing the memory allocated to Photoshop makes more of the 2 Gig available when Windows fragments everything, or the plugin makes mistakes about memory accounting, or ….

I can’t identify a single reason – but reducing the Photoshop memory percentage should help.

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