Hi, there's smomething I've been wondering myself for some months. Last year when I had my old computer, I noticed very soon that the performance is very very slow by using a brush with over 55 px diameter. That was with 1800 Mhz and 512 RAM. Now, I have my new computer with 3200 Mhz and 1024, I hoped that it could be much faster now but no, I can use Smudge up to a diameter of 70 px, but not more, from starting 75, it's turning into a diashow. Unbearable! But as my friends know of me, a high resolution is vital to the quality of Digital Art! It's very difficult to create photorealistic artworks if you're limited to a certain resolution. I've never done a picture over 3 Megapix, but if you compare if with digital photographs, this really isn't much. As I'm now thinking of buying a new computer, I wish to ask which hardware component is mostly responsible for the performance of Smudge. As I also use my computer for PC Games, and not only for artistical projects, I'm limited to the "usual" PC Hardware, meaning that probably it would be impossible to buy 3 Gb RAM e.g.

I believe it's that the video display has to "catch up" to what you're doing, but I could be completely wrong on that... I just know that when I do a very large brush with smudge, it takes a long time but if I sit back and watch it, it will slowly go through (process) all the strokes I made, sequentially, until it's done. I, too, thought it was memory or processor bound, but your story makes me think it's actually the video. bonni

Display with a reaction time up to 15 milliseconds needs so many seconds to show the effects of smudge? When in 3D-Games it even reacts to High Dynamic Rendering or Pixel Shaders? Hard to believe. I think it's still Hardware-bound, but actually, I don't know to what extent.

Well deep blue would be nice choice if you want to use smudge tool, try to use liquify instead :) Btw his favorite food is RAM ;) Tihomir

Tantarus is right - Photoshop's favorite food is RAM - you can NEVER have too much! Yeah, when you are doing something like the smudge brush with a LARGE brush size you're gonna see some slowdown because of the calculations required to perform the task. I realize that should go without saying, but keep in mind that specific tool is not like just drawing with the airbrush - it's figuring out the reactions to the colors and densities you'rer applying it to in a way that won't be "pixellated" and chunky - realistic! You really can't compare that to 3D games as they have entire rendering engines built-in specifically to handle shading - and realize MANY things in there are pre-baked in that they already have the rendering of how light is affecting the surface. Look into the specs of your 3.2Ghz machine and see if you can use 1GB RAM sticks (and make sure you have the type of RAM written down - 333, 2700, 3200, etc.). If you can use 1GB sticks go to www.tigerdirect.com and order yourself some more RAM and put it in! But just know, the more complicated the brush or filter, the longer its gonna take to finish its job no matter HOW much RAM is installed. Good luck- -Lew ;-)

As RAM is not cheap in our good old Europe, I'd like to ask how efficient it could be to use e.g. 2 Gb in my computer. Is it just an increase up to ... e.g. 100 px diameter, or even more? Because I have to finance it on my own and money is just what everyone of us needed:)

It'll generally be a speed increase - but not necessarily "this diameter brush will now move at an acceptable rate" kind of thing. Things will definitely move faster, and you can handle some larger file sizes better, but there will still be things you'll need to wait for a couple of seconds - like your large Smudge brushes, Gaussian Blurs, Radial Blurs, etc. Again, algorithms too complicated to be an instant redraw on the screen.

Another thing to watch out is the resolution of the picture, the biger is resolution the biger is file size and that automaticly affect the respond time of the smudge tool or any other operation. On big pictures any home computer will be in knock down when using smudge tool. 3D games are developed on work stations which have inside about 128 procesors, RAM in terabajts and so on :) thundering1 is right stick in another 1GB of RAM, the video card is not important, I have Geforce2 32MB and can work with files of about 400MB or 500MB without trouble :) Tihomir

It's clear that it'll always depend on resolution ... I mean you don't need larger smudge brush on a picture with small resolution. I once tried out 2500x3000 somehow and to work accurate with this resolution I'll need a brush up to 150 diameter, but this goes with a speed that is not acceptable any more. It's no earthquake to work with smaller resolutions, in no way, but it'll make things much prettier to be able to create high resolution images as resolution is vital to the quality of printing. I'm actually taking part in a competition where the image should be printed out in A1-A0-size and actually, that goes not so well with 2000x2500 pixels!

Just cruising the forums and thought I'd pitch in my 2 cents! I use Photoshop 7, and when I upgraded my puter from a slow Pentium Celeron with 384mb memory to an Athlon 2.08g with 512mb memory, I noticed an amazing difference with my overall puter speed! However, I noticed that working long hours in PS would drastically eat my ram and alot of smudging would eat even more than just painting! Also, jumping up to a 128meg dedicated nVidia from an integrated 64meg sped up the smudge's processing time, but I still have the problem now and again! As thundering1 mentioned, its a very complex process! Solutions would be to have a fast video card, don't rely on an integrated, more ram is MUCH merrier, and I would suggest an Athlon processor as they run less gigs yet at the same time process much faster than their Pentium twins! Hope this helps, and if not, just ignore me! :) "I cannot escape from myself, I am never alone!" Cheers, Jesse!

One other thing that will control what's happening in photoshop is your Hard drive, and how much space photoshop has in it's cache partition. You gotta remember, EVERYTHING you do goes to history, and undo. purging often, helps to keep a reasonable speed in what you're doing. Having a dedicated partition works very well.... for example, I assigned E for one of the caches, and try not to store anything there. Hope this helps, Lou.