Real world Painter

[timbre2]

I'm self-taught on Painter and I was wondering if anybody out there could share some ideas about how they are using painter in the realworld. I'd like to work on some larger files but on my Celeron machine the brushes just slow to a crawl on any thing other than postage-stamp size. I've looked at books like Painter 6 Wow and they seem to have examples of some good size prints, but when they mention file sizes in any examples they seem pretty dinky. Is anybody out there using Painter to produce anything in the 10 to 20 MB range? Any suggestions for how to work in larger sizes?

[timbre2]

I'm self-taught on Painter and I was wondering if anybody out there could share some ideas about how they are using painter in the realworld. I'd like to work on some larger files but on my Celeron machine the brushes just slow to a crawl on any thing other than postage-stamp size. I've looked at books like Painter 6 Wow and they seem to have examples of some good size prints, but when they mention file sizes in any examples they seem pretty dinky. Is anybody out there using Painter to produce anything in the 10 to 20 MB range? Any suggestions for how to work in larger sizes?

[ghi stecyk]

timb

How much RAM do you have installed in your machine? and how big of a file can you work on presently?
Celerons are not designed for extensive bitmap processing. A friend of mine did a personal comparison between his Celeron 500 with his G4 450. He ran the same complex mathematical routine through both. The G4 450 did it around 8 sec. while the Celeron 500 took around 80 sec ! It isn't designed to run fast so slow rendering is something you'll just have to deal with.
Another thing is that some brushes do tend to get bogged down even for me on my G4 and when working on 30+ MB files there is often a performance decrease.

stecyk66

[timbre2]

I've got 192 MB RAM so I figured that would be enough, but your stats are pretty impressive. I guess I need to think about a faster CPU if I want to deal with big files. The Celeron seems to be adaquate for Photoshop, but I guess Painter 6 is pretty CPU intensive. Thanks.

[ghi stecyk]

timb

You might also consider a videocard upgrade. I just use the standard ATI Rage 128 16MB card that comes with Mac. I push it to the limit and run it at 1600x1200. The new Voodoo 4 looks appealing to me so I'll probably make a purchase in the next while. A faster card can produce better refresh of the monitor environment without having to use the CPU as backup. The result is a more responsive system. Celerons are Pentium IIs designed to work at a slower bus speed and have half the L2 cache of a Pentium III!

stecyk66