Optimizing Vista and PS CS3 HDR

[Gare]

I purchased yet another computer yesterday. No big deal. It's a HP Slimline with 2 gigs Ram and Windows Vista Premium. The reason I bought it is this. I wanted dedicated machine for PhotoshopCS3e, Artezin and Lightroom. Nothing else on it, not even networked into my system and especially no internet or virus protection or firewalls to suck up resources. It has a slot/port for a USB external hard drive. I'll use this for transfering data in and out. It will not be part of my work environment.
Now that you know the purpose of this machine, can anyone advise me on what services I can turn off in Windows? Again, this will be totally 'stand alone'. and I want as much dedicated RAM as I can get. Thanks in advance

[Gare]

Hi Ron,

I've got Vista Business 32-bit installed, so I'm not sure how much help I can offer. Actually, I live in XP and take vacations in Vista...I haven't had time to migrate all my apps to Vista and there isn't an easy "Registry Migrator" utility or anything.

Without any networking services, you can basically kill all Internet Explorer and Outlook services; I'm not sure you can uninstall them, but you can set them not to start up. You can also kill any/all virus monitors (unless you bring a virus to the new machine via your USB), and you can disable any/all updaters such as InstallShield.

I'm a little curious about how you're going to run CS3, which requires an online connection for Authorization. Are you going to network, install CS3 and then un-network? You might get complaints from other apps that want to "phone home" without a connection, but I see where you're coming from—the ultimate firewall. Just don't put a CD or DVD in your drive you got from a friend, right?

Here's a neat trick that'll up your RAM: Vista will look at your USBs for thumb drives and if you have the right type (and there is no easy way to tell what Vista considers "right"), you can assign the thumb drive as "dirty" system RAM. Recently I bought a spool of CDs at Staples and a 2GB thumb came free with the spool (remember when you used to get prizes in cereal?), and sure enough, the thumb was fast enough, so my initial purchase of a 2GB End Noise PC is now sort of a 4GB PC...Vista uses the external RAM for housekeeping and scratch space, but the performance improvement is significant.

Overall, the 64x edition of vista is a performance enhancer. Time trialing on my PC, CS3 loads in 12 seconds under XP and 3 under Vista. But fast app loading isn't where it counts, at least not for me. Cinema 4D v10 has a 64x version and my renders fly under Vista. If you use Windows and you do rendering from 3D apps, just get Vista 64x if you've got a Core Duo.

My Best,

Gare

[Gare]

Barbara and I talked a little about freeing up Vista RAM this afternoon, and...

The hit from networking is nominal. The real RAM bandits are your browser, your email reader, and any crapware you inadvertantly pick up on the net (spyware, Google toolbar, and so on).

You might free up some RAM by disabling UI goodies such as the glass look, the rotating folder windows, drop shadows and so on. Turn then off manually and you can also kill off apps from Taks Manager. UI special effects are memory hogs; skins and stuff, and this is true of OS X also. Startup programs should be avoided (we used to call them TSRs); you probably don't need Pantone Coloris starting up, desktop utils like calendards and clocks, weather alerts (which you wouldn't get offline), screen savers that kick in, system sounds take up some RAM (get rid of all audio if you're just doing stills and video)...in general, examine the processes that are active in Control Panel and kill stuff that's loaded behind your back--make certain you know the name of the executable...you probably don't want to kill explorer.exe .

Finally (?) the jury is out on installed fonts. The beta forum on PS CS3 had a comment that some programmer had all of the Adobe Type Catalog installed under Vista and reported no performance hit. I don't get the same results: when you top off 1,000 installed fonts, I feel a performance penalty.

My Best,

Gare

[ronmatt]

OK, here's what I did Gare. I plugged in the cable and activated the internet. Installed CS3 Premium, Artizen and Lightroom. That's all that's going on it. The Vista Premium on the new machine is the bundled OEM version. I'll be testing it there before I consider putting the disk version on the other PC's ( it took all day to weed out all the crap that was on the machine. But I took it down to bare bones. It's fast as light and processes HDR from Raw ( up to 5 exposures) almost as quickly as opening a jpeg on the other machines including the Mac. I don't feel the need to disable anything else at this point. ( Not to crazy about Vista right now, too many cuteseys )
Then I pulled the plug on the internet connection. I got a USB data exchange connector so that anything into the 'sterile' machine comes in by way of the other PC. Pre-scanned for viruses. I may keep a low level virus scanner like AGV running just to be on the safe side. Shouldn't hurt. It's faster now than I can think, so.......

Thanks for your replies..
RM  P.S. I'll be posting some HDR images soon

[Gare]

Hi Ron--

I need an outdoor scene and it's turned dusk and cloudy, but with RAW16-bit, I was able to get at least a test-for-concept shot tonight. CS3 Extended opened the file when I dragged it on top of the executable icon in less than 10 seconds, and that was in XP, so I can imagine how fast you're loading RAWs in Vista! Actually, I had this little freeware app called AbleRAWer running durung the beta cycle, and the shipping CS3 blows its doors off time-wise, even with all the plug-ins I have installed.

For general information, you can download a RAW (pre)viewer for XP for free on Microsoft's site and it's natively supported in Vista. RAWs are essentially undeveloped data, like film in the analog camera, and I've found that CS3 is unparalleled at handling the developing—the RAW processing UI has a lot more features than CS3. And check out the new adjustments under the Image menu.

I haven't found a compelling reason to pop for Lightroom. Bridge is still a joke, and I adopted iMatch and XnView years ago for cataloging and basic functions like batch renaming, lossless JPEG rotation (which PC CS3 still cannot do), and other stuff.

What you might note is that CS3 doesn't enumerate your installed fonts like CS2 and Illustrator do on startup...you take the hit after you choose the Type tool and click in a document. Adobe did everything they could to load and run fast, I can assure you!

Have you, and has everyone, read the docs on working with HDR images? You need to bracket your exposures unless your camera does this for you. If anyone would like a tute, I'd be happy to write one and post it.

BTW, you get a nice finished HDR image and you'll find it very useful as an environement map in the high-end modeling/rendering programs (Maya, C4D, 3DS, and even Carrara). It really brings out the depth in a scene.

My Best,

Gare

[ronmatt]

my camera auto brackets as much as 2 stops over and 2 stops under. By the way, don't forget the tripod.......Gare you should really give Artizen a look, a very interesting app. for HDR. The below posted site is well worth a read as well.


http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutori ... -range.htm

[Gare]

Hiya, Ron--

I downloaded the trial of Artizen HDR; hey, for $60 disposable income it looks like a neat RAW enhancer. I don't care for the "phone home" nag crap in the trial version, but it still intrigues me.

Folks, both CS3 and CS3 Extended have the imporved RAW processor. Here's a screen cap of the features (sharpening, tone curves and such are the cryptic icons), and what I did with a bluish cast photo plus a little barrel roll distortion using Filter>Distort>Lens Correction to make the toad a little plumper.

It looks like video camcorders and digital still cameras are stratifying in price and feaqtures. You have your "buy one at the drug store checkout counter" cameras that are little more than .0002 megapixel webcams and then your serious photographer's tools. I was able to get a Canon (rangefinder, not an SLR) 8MP on eBay for about $500 that does RAW. The noise level is very good and there's very little chromatic abberation—the LAB green to magenta edge fringing you might occasionally see, very evident in JPEGs.

CS3 has your bases covered vis a vis the non-standard camera manufacturers have adopted for RAW. Canons shoot to CDW file format and CS3 loads them without a whimper, as it does Nikon and other digital camera RAW files. You have the optin on PS to save a copy of your RAW file in DNG file format, Adobe's invention, which is basically a standardised format for unprocessed images. I've found it plumps up the saved file size by about 10% which means you go from 4MB to 4.1MB or so for an 8MP image but this is cool. You have the option to save the original camera info to a sidecar file, which means you can apply your camera settings to any image to gain color consistency. You can do this using Image>Adjustments>Match Color with any image, but the results lose artistic subtlety.

My Best,

Gare