I upgraded my desktop computer with Adobe Photoshop CS3. It comes with Bridge, an application for sorting and captioning photos. Opening a folder with a few hundred RAW-format photos takes minutes of processing time gathering statistics and generating previews, maybe twice as long as in Bridge CS2. Selecting an image and moving it to a “rejects” subfolder takes about 5 seconds, about 5X longer than in Bridge CS2 (the same operation in the Windows XP File Explorer is instant). What kind of feeble desktop computer am I using? A year-old Dell XPS with a dual-core 2.8 GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM. It is too bad that Cray isn’t around to make supercomputers now that Adobe is going to require consumers to use them….
[It would seem that I owe Adobe’s programmers an apology. I copied the files from my Infrant NAS box (a cheap RAID 5 connected via 1 Gbit Ethernet onto my local hard drive). The performance improved by a factor of between 10 and 100. The Infrant has always been ridiculously slow when serving its Web admin pages, so I probably should have suspected this before writing the posting. I guess my workflow is going to have to be “keep everything on the local disk until processed, then copy to the disk array”.]
Your post is hilarious 🙂
But you gotta admit, why else would people want to buy a Mac Pro worth a staggering $2000++ if apps like Photoshop CS3 ran on a machine a little over half that price.
Cray is still in business, and given that the XT3/4 basically runs Linux, there’s hope for Adobe yet.
One thing I’ve wondered, how fast would those old (I guess ca. 15 years old) “SuperComputers” that were used for high-power computer needs like for the military and so forth be using regular consumer applications? You know, stuff like PhotoShop, video editing software, etc.? Would your average MacBook Pro be faster than the computers used to run weather-mapping computers?
Adobe didn’t have Lightroom to try and force an upgrade to when CS2 was released.
And to think I thought Bridge CS2 was a pig. Honestly, I can’t see a good reason to use Bridge in my workflow. Up until recently I was using iView (now Microsoft Expressions) for my DAM and tagging. I frequently dumped 20GB+ of 72 MB RAW images into iView, and it generated 320 x 240 thumbnails at a rate of about 2 per second*. Lightroom appears to be almost as fast as iView, but I haven’t quantitively measured it — I’m still new to the program.
Bridge, when given the same task would take so long that I would give up after 45 minutes or so.
*my set-up: MacPro 2.66 Quad, 5 GB RAM, writing to 2 TB HD.
Many have noticed this trend for some time. The balance between features and speed seems to always favor features, regardless of how useful these features really are for 99% of the users. Too bad we can’t be presented with the ability, through a features control panel, to select the minimum functionality we really need and regain some of the lost speed. It just seems that every year computers take longer to boot and run slower yet today’s consumer machines are in actuality fantastically powerful.
Thanks for slapping Adobe upside the head. Monolithic programs aren’t trendy, but they’re fast. If CS supported my D80, I’d return my CS3 upgrade for a refund.
Cheers,
Chris Butler
I jokingly tell my friends that Adobe probably fired the guy who wrote the thumbnail generation code in Bridge and before he left he replaced it with a bunch of sleep()s. Lightroom is broken the same way (and many other ways). I’m still sticking with Capture One to process RAW.
PsCS3 is far faster on my puny little 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo w/ 3Gb RAM iMac, than PsCs2 was on similarly configured G5 tower. How do you have your preferences for PsCs3 , Bridge 2 and ACR 4.1 set up?
I copied the files from my Infrant NAS box (a cheap RAID 5 connected via 1 Gbit Ethernet onto my local hard drive). The performance improved by a factor of between 10 and 100. The Infrant has always been ridiculously slow when serving its Web admin pages, so I probably should have suspected this before writing the posting.