Greetings from Dartmoor

[john shiell]

Having taken advantage of your website for so long I thought it high time to introduce myself. I live on a farm on Dartmoor and have been interested in large format photograhy for ages. I have a wooden 5x4 Wista and a couple of lenses. Plus a De Vere 504 which I have installed in my converted milking parlour. Your webiste is very ineresting and informative and look forward to making some contribution. I have to add, I'm addicted to tea!!!
Best wishes,
John

[Lynne Evans]

Hi John! Good to have another South Westerner as there seem to be a lot of Northerners on this site .

I live a couple of hours up the road from you near Yeovil and also have a Wista. Never been know to pass a tea shop either! Could be travelling down your way in the next few weeks.

Lynne

[SteveH]

We seem to have quite a little congregation (is that a good term for large format photographers? Answers on a postcard...) building up in the souh west. How about another local day out. Not that there is much to photograph....


Steve

[john shiell]

Hi Lynnne, thank you for your reply. Would look forward to meeting up with you on your trip to Devon. Maybe compare notes on the Wista?? At present am trying to make enlarged negatives on photoshop and eventually produce platinum prints of 10x8 size. But I'm still trying to get to grips with scanners, etc. My computer seems to freeze and go off into a puff of smoke as soon as I have any large files. Even though there seems to be bags of memory and hard drive to compensate.
Best wishes,
John

[Joanna Carter]

John, I among others in this group, "do" computing for a living; what is the spec of your computer; memory, disk, operating system, etc., and what version of Photoshop are you trying to use ?

[john shiell]

Hello Joanna, thanks for getting back. The computer is about 4 years old with 512mb of ram and 120gb hard disk running on windows XP professional. Photoshop is fairly up to scratch with version CS2. I find that when I scan with photoshop from the epson 3200 it just freezes and stares back at me. These are generally B/W 5x4 negs. Maybe it's the resolution I'm not getting right. Les Mcleam has a DVD out explaing all the points of scanning B/W and making enlarged digital negs from them. I'm still trying to source it to see if it will offer any insight.
Best wishes,
John

[Joanna Carter]

The computer is about 4 years old with

512mb of ram

Here is your problem.

When Adobe state that PS requires 512MB of memory, it means that it requires that much in addition to that which is already being used by XP and all the other little programs that are already loaded before you get to start PS.

You are talking about trying to scan an image which, at 1200dpi will produce a file of around 4 x 1200 x 5 x 1200 x 16 bits; IOW around 60MB of data. then you have to take into account the 120 MB of memory that XP takes just to run itself without any other programs loaded (not even virus checkers), not to mention the virtual memory it uses. Plus you have to consider what Photoshop takes which, on my Mac is around 62MB of memory plus another 530MB of virtual memory just to start up....

<not to be taken seriously>
And you wonder why scanning a 4 x5 neg brings your system to a halt ?
</not to be taken seriously>

Scanning actually takes even more memory than just holding the file in Photoshop to account for the fact that the 'puter has to build the image from raw data by running some reasonably sophisticated algorithms. And Photoshop keeps more than one copy of the image in memory for different layers, history, etc.

How are you connecting the scanner to the computer ? If you are using USB, is it USB 2.0 or only 1.0 ? this can make a phenomenal difference to the data transfer from the scanner; Firewire is even faster than USB 2.0 and, if your scanner supports it can help further.

BTW, what processor do you have ? A four year old machine could well not have the fastest of processors for coping with hungry programs like PS.

Assuming there is nothing actually wrong with your installation of XP, Photoshop or the Epson scanner driver, I can only really recommend that you get at least 2GB of memory to give Photoshop the breathing room it so desperately needs; and possibly another hard disk for PS to use for all the scratch-disk space it requires if that much memory is not enough

[DJ]

Rule of thumb...

However much memory you have, if you're using Photoshop, it's not enough.

I've seen Photoshop eat all available ram in a system with 4gb, plus a 2gb system swapfile, plus 12gb ( yes twelve ) of Photoshop's own temp space, on one ( admittedly large ) image.

If your scanner has a standalone scanning program, use this in preference to the Photoshop TWAIN / WIA plugin, so you don't have Photoshop running at the time you're scanning, this will save a bunch of memory.

[john shiell]

Thank you Joanne and DJ. Point taken!! Yes I had discovered that when I scan through epson's own programme the results are a whole lot better and quicker. Must take a trip to get an upgrade.
John