I recently upgraded from Nikon digital gear to the Canon 1Ds mkII, and the images are stunning (easily the equal of good medium format film scans). They're also enormous, expanding from 20 MB .cr2 files to 100 MB 16-bit TIFFs and rapidly growing from there if I do any work with layers. When I try to load a file like this into Photoshop CS3 on my MacBook Pro (which has 2 GB of RAM), Photoshop grabs every byte of available RAM as soon as I do anything vaguely performance intensive (Smart Sharpen, Genuine Fractals, any sort of layer work) and starts paging to disk. The prcessor utilization also goes as high as 196% (essentially all Photoshop), and the machine will get as hot as 140-145 degrees F.
My two options are to add an extra gig of RAM to my MBP ($300), and buy yet another external drive - I have three now, and only one has any space left, or get a Mac Pro to process these images. If 3 GB will be enough that Photoshop doesn't need to page on files that can reach 400 MB (Genuine Fractals to 16x24 @300 dpi plus a couple of layers) or more if I've merged a few images to HDR, it is certainly a lot cheaper to just upgrade this machine. However, if 3 GB is still not enough, or if running at 140-145 degrees is cooking my MacBook Pro, I can't see any option besides a Mac Pro! No other Mac will take more than 3 GB of Ram...
Does anyone know if 3 Gb will be enough?
-dan
