After years of hesitation, recently I finally took the plunge and moved to medium format digital. I picked up a Phase P45+ 39-megapixel digital back.
Last weekend I was out shooting at Mt. St. Helens and after returning from the shoot, sat down for my first "heavy-duty" retouching sesson with Photoshop CS3 Extended, ACR 4.1. System details: Mac OS X 10.4.10, Dual 2.7Ghz G5 tower, 8GB RAM, 256MB GPU, Dell 30" LCD, ~175GB free 7200RPM HD.
I've been using Photoshop since version 3, and I probably had more crashes last night working on one image than I've had using every version from 3 through CS2 combined .
I have been using a non-destructive workflow (Adobe sometimes refers to this as parametric editing) for a few years now, but the jump from 8 to 39 megapixels just seems to be too much. I've been working on retouching a P45 raw image in CS3 Extended completely non-destructively (ACR smart objects, smart filters, adjustment layers, etc), and I am sad to say that even beyond the poor performance I'm seeing (I can forgive that, as it is a lot of data), Photoshop is really struggling.
Specifically, ACR froze for over 1/2 an hour during a spot removal session (required a force quit to recover), Bridge crashed while cataloging a folder, and Photoshop itself crashed, when adding a B&W layer, attempting to create a Quick Selection, and even when opening a second version of the file. Some of the tools (B&W layer, Quick Selection) also gave out of memory errors.
I'm very surprised at this, as Photoshop has been an icon of stability for me for many years.
When processing, my system still has a few gigabytes of available RAM as 32-bit Photoshop has limited to 3072MB--Photoshop's 100% allocation (3GB) limit.
I'm wondering if there are others out there using a non-destructive workflow on large images (medium format digital backs, film scans, stitched images, etc.) Have you had similar issues?
Thoughts? Suggestions? Workarounds?
Are there any 64-bit imaging applications available (not 64-bit pixel data, but 64-bit addressing) that operate non-destructively?
Any help, advice or experience you may have with similar workflows would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance for your help,
Brad