One for the Books!

LH
Posted By
Lawrence_Hudetz
Nov 7, 2008
Views
332
Replies
8
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Closed
Today, I opened a file to print and sharpened it with Smart Sharpen. Now, I have always been unhappy with the speed, it was Veery slow. Sometimes with my stitched files, it could take many minutes. Well, today, I’m down to seconds! I mean the largest file I found took about 16 seconds, where the same file earlier took 200 to 300 seconds! I have absolutely no idea why!

Some time back, it seemed to me that the Smart Sharpen suddenly was taking longer than it used to, and I chalked it up to the increased file size. I would wait and wait even for the preview to finish. If I dragged the preview box around, it would leave a transparent background which would slowly fill in.

It seems like it’s not writing to scratch. Opening PS, I see about 75 MB in scratch. Opening a file in PS, it jumps to 570 MB, but now, it does not increase in size after sharpening. That’s not the behavior I’ve seen before. After Smart Sharp on similar sized files, I would see scratch size go up to2 or three Gigs, sometimes as large as 6G. Now, no change at all!
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LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Nov 7, 2008
So while many people are complaining about speed loss especially in CS4, I got an increase in CS3.
S
Silkrooster
Nov 7, 2008
Interesting. I was going to suggest that maybe your drive has be defragmented, but that wouldn’t effect the scratch file like that.
The only thing or two things that I can think of, is either your preference files have been repaired or you received an auto update.
To my knowledge the only recent update is for InDesign.
It certainly is interesting though.
LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Nov 7, 2008
The drive is a dedicated drive, so it is wiped clean at each PS exit. I could understand a drive problem if i was seeing that the drive actually was used during Smart sharpen, but it wasn’t.

I’m not complaining, mind you, but I want to know why, so as to be able to go back to this condition should it revert to the slower one.
LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Nov 7, 2008
I ran it again this morning, watching the Performance tab in Task Mananger as well as the temp file size in Scratch. I used the NR filter first, which adds a duplicate layer over the Background , then sharpened twice with smart sharpen. The sharpen time went from 16 sec to 24 sec, and the temp file climbed from 570MB to 1.3GB.
LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Nov 9, 2008
BTW, my system consists of a single core AMD 2G,Asus M2V board, 2G Ram, XP SP3.
LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Nov 10, 2008
Ok, I found the answer, at least I suspect it’s the answer.

I run Smart Sharp usually with some degree of Highlight fade. It is usually sitting between 50% and 80%, with some forays up to 100%. Last week, I sharpened a file that had no significant highlights, so I took the opportunity to move the slider to zero. That’s what t did it.

Last night, I had to fade it again and there it was! Turns out that at any setting other than zero, the timing increases by an order of magnitude. At 100%, the timing for 90% of the time it takes to complete, then finishes.

100% is faster than at 50%, by about 10%.

Because I keep the slider at some Highlight fade as a matter of course, I didn’t see that it was causing the delay. What I see is that the Progress bar stops at about 1/3 of it’s length. At zero, it does not stop.

Just opening the Smart Sharp with the slider non-zero adds a huge amount to the Scratch disk. With the slider at zero, Scratch does not increase.
DM
dave_milbut
Nov 10, 2008
damn. i was rooting for you larry. 🙂
LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Nov 10, 2008
Thanks for the vote of confidence, dave!

Smart sharp seems to be generating an algorithm or some sort of tuning of the filter for the slider.

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