articles/Photoshop/adobecreativeuitecs4-page2
by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2009
Bit Depth
A significant difference between the Mac and PC versions of Photoshop is the underlying architecture of the program. The PC version is 64-bit, the Mac version is 32-bit. This is because Apple dropped their Carbon-64 development late in the cycle, leaving Adobe in the lurch (and with the prospect of updating a million lines of computer code). The Mac users will have to wait for the next version before they get 64-bit operation. Lightroom is different as it runs in 64-bit on both Mac and PC platforms.
the benefits of 64-bit operation are discussed in the call-out box.
Speed Trials
Given the claimed benefits of 64-bit operation we were anxious to test it on real jobs.
A specific task we undertook was the building of a large set of contact sheets from a wedding. This is a real task rather than some trumped-up, machine-torturing task with no real relevance to working photography. The task was to make contact sheets, 12-up on 10x8 sheets at 180 dpi from 278 images in JPEG format totalling 1.67GB of source files. This makes 23 contact sheets of this real wedding (kindly provided by SWPP member, Martin Taylor). We immediately hit a snag - CS4 does not make contact sheets in the same way as either CS2 or CS3. However, the test is relevant as we were able to run both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Photoshop CS4 against each other. The results are tabled. Note that Bridge handles contact sheet making now, Photoshop does not even have to be open.
What does it all mean? Well CS4 is the obvious winner with massive reductions on all platforms. The difference between 32-bit and 64-bit operation is minimal in this test. The difference between Mac and PC is minimal in CS4 on the high-end platforms, but the Mac is 30% quicker than Vista with CS3.
Vista is almost twice as quick as XP using CS2 but Vista using CS2 is twice as quick as Vista using CS3! If your brain is now about to explode just take this nugget - CS4, when it comes to contact sheet building, is massively quicker than everything that has gone before.
The next trial was building a PDF for the magazine where we knew that the memory 'page file limit' was going to be exceeded. When we make the PDF for the magazine and we try to make more than 40 pages at a time, the program crashes in both CS2 and CS3 (from InDesign). Nothing has changed, it still crashes with CS4/Vista using 16GB of RAM and 8 processors. The only detectable difference was that the program took slightly longer before it fell over.
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SWPP - Society of Wedding and Portrait Photographers
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