Faster Computer for 16-bit Processing

[Boatman]

Good info. I will definitely knock off the up ressing. That is something I just started doing and I didn't think it helped much. You have all confirmed my suspicion that it was a waste of time and drive space. I'm still on the fence about upgrading the computer. I bought the hot mobo and CPU anyway and now the choice is to make $200 by flipping it or spend $200 to finish building a new system. It's the software loading that makes me crazy - takes days.

Well I'm off to dinner out. A friend is buying my wife and me dinner as a thank you for some nice shots I printed of them on their boat. Does that make me a professional now?

[Colin Southern]

Does that make me a professional now?

Yes

Don't forget to send the fish/chicken bones to the IRS though, as they're entitled to a portion of your earnings now!

[Boatman]

I took a recent photo and did some more testing with it. I thought I'd post a link to the file on my Skydrive, but at 500MB, it won't let me upload it. Even cut back to 8-bit, the six layer .psd is over 300MB. Anyway, I ran surface blurs in Jiro's technique at a range of settings and checked the times and the appearance. This was all done in 16-bit mode and with a 4752 x 3168 pixel image. The image is a woodsy / grassy image so it is fairly high frequency.

Here are the times:
40/40 3:50, 30/40 2:08, 20/40 1:00, 10/40 0:15

I would estimate that the 20/40 setting is sufficient for most work, though the opacity has to be set up around 75% whereas with the 40/40 setting I normally set opacity at about 20 to 35. I also added a layer using the USM at 20/50/0. This is very close to the results obtained using Jiro's technique with the blur settings at 10/40 and 100% opacity.

I think the real lesson I am learning is that, even though I don't like to, I really should flatten my images before saving them. They're huge when in multiple layers!