Going from PS to PSP, some newbie help !

[Amamba]

Hi,

I am an amateur photographer. For a while I had access to Photoshop CS2 that belonged to my friend who temporarily quit the hobby. Now he's back into it and I gave him everything back. Looking for PS replacement, I tried LR (didn't quite like it, at the price), PSE (too limited / slow), and GIMP (good but purely for edits). Finally someone suggested I try PSP, which I liked enough to just order it from Amazon.

I expect to come here often to ask questions, so I'd like to say Hi !

The first couple of questions - first, the brushes in PSP tend to get very laggy (I am on W7 x 64 system, dual core Pentium 2.7MHz, so I don't think CPU is the problem here). It doesn't happen all the time - I would notice this when I tried the program. Is there any known fix (settings / prefs, etc.) ?

Second, is there a "fade" command like both PS and Gimp have ? I.e. if I run a "Smart fix" command, I could then select "fade" and sort of dial the results back. It can be achieved by running a command on a separate layer and then changing the opacity, but "Fade" allows doing it without duplicating the layer first.

[LeviFiction]

1) Like any system if you increase the steps between draws you can speed up the brushes a little. But PSP's brush system does get slow at really high sizes.

2) No it doesn't.

[Amamba]

1) Like any system if you increase the steps between draws you can speed up the brushes a little. But PSP's brush system does get slow at really high sizes.

2) No it doesn't.

Well, #2 is ok. #1 is a killer though.. I tried Photoshop, Gimp, Photoshop Elements, and PSP, and it has the slowest brushes.

Thanks for reply !

[brucet]

Brush size is very important. If you have a combination of large file, large brush size and small steps then x4 will slow down. I have a 64 bit i3 machine running win 7 win 4gig. My files are often 400 meg+. I always use brushes with 1 step. But by simply down sizing the brush the speed picks up a lot. Try a few combinations and you'll find a big difference in speed. Sometimes bigger aint better!!

Regards

[df]

Try turning off the scratch disk and see if you see any improvements. Probably not but it's worth a shot.

Also since you're on a 64 bit computer (and I assume more than 4gb of RAM) then you may take a look at the link in this post http://forum.corel.com/EN/viewtopic.php ... 89#p234089 I've used this and it's done the trick for me. Makes much better use of the RAM even though it's still a 64 bit program.

[Radim]

For drawing with brushes there are better and most of all quicker apps.
* http://www.artweaver.de/
* http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Ho ... 56215163/1
* http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Ar ... 78349964/1

[flagpole]

to do your fade command thing I'd just duplicate the layer, apply the smart fix or whatever to the top layer, then just adjust the transparency on the top layer,

[Amamba]

Thanks to all who replied.

Yes I figured the duplicate layer trick, just would be nice if there was a "Fade" command so that there's no need to do extra steps.

Radim - sorry if I wasn't clear, I am not talking about drawing with brushes, but rather using brushes on masks. Interestingly, it's very inconsistent, i.e. at one point they are very laggy, and at another (after PSP restart or system reboot) they are OK. I guess it has something to do with memory management of PSP under Windows.