photoshop/file size question

big_moe

im doin a banner at the moment on photoshop cs2 on a macbook and the file is currently around 100mb.

i have about 6gb free on my Hard drive but when i start to add stuff to the banner, i get a pop up saying disk nearly full, and when i check it out, sure enough i have <500mb left. so i save the file, close the document (NOT photoshop) and my hard drive space goes back up to 6gb.

why is this happening?? surely the temp storage required for a 100mb file cant be 6gb??

any ideas??

cheers
moe

forbairt

big_moe wrote:

im doin a banner at the moment on photoshop cs2 on a macbook and the file is currently around 100mb.

i have about 6gb free on my Hard drive but when i start to add stuff to the banner, i get a pop up saying disk nearly full, and when i check it out, sure enough i have <500mb left. so i save the file, close the document (NOT photoshop) and my hard drive space goes back up to 6gb.

why is this happening?? surely the temp storage required for a 100mb file cant be 6gb??

any ideas??

cheers
moe

More than likely photoshop is taking up a nice chunk of your diskspace for its swap files ... ? 6 gbs does seem excessive though ...

big_moe

yeah i know photoshop would take up a good chink of space but 6gb for a 100mb file?? seems waaaaaay too high! its just a pain in the ass. having to save, close and re-open the file every couple of minutes. and i even have a 400gb external hard drive but this space is required on the system hard drive so i cant even use my spare 400gb!

sdssarah

you could try merging a few of the layers, this will dramatically decrese the size of the file, and will help out with making editing less of a pain in the ass!

either that or connect an external hard drive and save it to that, then it will have plenty of GBs to play around with.

forbairt

sdssarah wrote:

you could try merging a few of the layers, this will dramatically decrese the size of the file, and will help out with making editing less of a pain in the ass!

either that or connect an external hard drive and save it to that, then it will have plenty of GBs to play around with.

Saving it to the external drive ... shouldn't make much difference apart from the 100mbs of space freed up by copying the file to that ...but you could for a test try pointing your photoshop cache file at the external drive. (not sure about performance issues with doing this maybe someone else would know)

Merging layers shouldn't really be done either as you're losing a lot of information from your original file...

edit: by photoshop cache .. I of course mean scratch disks ..

heggie

photoshop recommends using a different disk for the scratch disk, it'll just depend on the speed of the external for performance.

Deliverance

Is the banner for a site or is it for print. Web should be 72dpi and print should be between 250 and 300dpi.
Also check out the history settings for every 'undo' that is stored some memory is taken up and if your working at a very high resolution then maybe each save takes up a lot of memory?
Free up redundant information from your hard drive anyway and give your scratch disk some space regardless.

Edit > preferences: to access options for memory and scratch disks.

big_moe

its for print at 300dpi. i got it finished. i just took all me tunes (±40gb) off the hard drive and then put them back on when i was finished!!!

sooner i get a bigger internal hard drive the better!

cheers
moe

Deliverance

Well done, success! Nice to hear it worked out. The mac always seems to have this problem with needing a large amount of 'scratch' but maybe video editing is a huge resource which needs this?
If so complements to the mac, any attempts at final production I try with the old faithfull PC is disastrous, lots of excuses with ununderstandable error messages.
I think I'm going to buy a mac to sit alongside my PC. Just to make it jealous. Cheers for your post 'big moe' lesson learned there.

Plus the fact that I have I spent months trying to get my PC software to burn playable dvds' of my work and spent 2 days creating a dvd with menu and nice options on a mac and it works beautifully on all players.

big_moe

yeah they're great! i have final cut express hd for video editing and it flies along with that! even with HD stuff its brilliant.

moe