Configuring Paint Shop Pro

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GerryD

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Gerald Davies
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A freind of mine has just purchased, Paint Shop Pro, version 10 I believe. It is running a little slow. Is it possible to confirgure Paint Shop Pro for performance? If so how is it done?


Thanks in advance :thumbs::thumbs:

Gerald
 
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There are so many parameters at play that could slow an application to run below par. Much more info is needed not least the spec of the pc and imprtantly the amount of ram installed and how much of that is available to the Application. How many processes are running in the background? Do you know how to check? I suspect that any optimisation will need done on the hardware and nothing much can be changed within the program to speed it up. So more info please.
 
Whilst Photoshop allows performance increase via scratch discs and RAM grab, PSP (at least up to version 9) has no such options.

So time to get rid of the excess processes running on your pal's PC.
 
Paint Shop Pro used to be owned by JASC, but were taken over a few years back by Corel who historically have a very bad name for taking over firms and then running down that software in favour of their own versions. To be fair they haven't done that with PSP, recognizing what a successful format it is with a loyal following.

Unfortunately, while they've kept what's good about PSP, they haven't been able to resist putting their own spin on it, which has meant making it fancier and fancier, and graphically more and more intensive. Whether you need all of that is very debatable - they now include different setups in the software for beginner and more advanced levels, and instead of the image browser opeing in a new window, it now opens in a restrictive window within the application, and IMHO they've ruined one of the best features about PSP, it's blisteringly fast image browser, even when browsing thousands of images.

I've tried PSPX(10) and I found it noticeably slower than the old version I've been using for years - PSP 7 -and that's on a pretty fast machine. While there are some good features in it, a lot of it I found just unnecessary padding you can do without, and reverted to my old version. I'd say a slow PC would be really challenged by these later versions

My advice would be to look for an older version of PSP still marketed under the JASC label - I think Version 9 was the last, but check on that first.

As for the version she has, I'm not sure what she can do to speed things up. It should be quicker if she opens PSP and then opens images from within the application, rather than clicking on an icon elsewhere and waiting for PSP to open, and then the image.

Another thing she could do is disable the PSP splashscreen which shows up every time you open PSP and is an annoying delay You can disable that in Preferences..

I'm not sure if VersionX has an option in Preferences to set the size of the scratch disk to be used by PSP - I seem to recall it has, but that's something she should check on which may help.
 
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Thanks for your replies. :thumbs: Machine is runing with about 512mb of ram and is a P4. Reconfiguring and reducing process has already been done. So no more to be gained from that.

I thing the hardware is a little slow for the task, but its not me using it. CT some usful tips there, i'll remove the splash screen and advise to open app and then open jpg/tif/etc...


Thanks once again!!!!
 
You definitely need more ram.:eek: Any photo processing program has to work with and store several copies of the image in Ram that's how the undo commands work and 512mb Ram just wont cut it especially if what CT says is correct and I have no reason to believe otherwise (I haven't used PS Pro since version 6).
Ram is cheap as chips at the moment but historically it has very volatile pricing so my suggestion would be to slap 2gb in there and watch in utter amazement at what that extra 1.5gb will do, not just to psp but the whole computing experience. With the relatively low cost of such a system changing upgrade it doesn't make sense not to. Oh and if your motherboard has dual channel ram capability then deffo get 2x1gb sticks.
 
Gazamonk said:
You definitely need more ram.:eek: Any photo processing program has to work with and store several copies of the image in Ram that's how the undo commands work and 512mb Ram just wont cut it especially if what CT says is correct and I have no reason to believe otherwise (I haven't used PS Pro since version 6).
Ram is cheap as chips at the moment but historically it has very volatile pricing so my suggestion would be to slap 2gb in there and watch in utter amazement at what that extra 1.5gb will do, not just to psp but the whole computing experience. With the relatively low cost of such a system changing upgrade it doesn't make sense not to. Oh and if your motherboard has dual channel ram capability then deffo get 2x1gb sticks.
Click to expand...

I know the Ram is low but she won't spent the extra money. Anyway with the extra RAM won't you want the software to run at its peak performance?

Lets not worry aboutt he ram for the time being and focus on configuring the software.
 
taxi said:
I know the Ram is low but she won't spent the extra money. Anyway with the extra RAM won't you want the software to run at its peak performance?

Lets not worry aboutt he ram for the time being and focus on configuring the software.
Click to expand...
You're missing the point. With 512Mbyte of RAM, the OS will spend all it's time paging data from physical RAM to disk and back again. Reading a disk is about 10000 times slower than reading data from RAM.

Your systems performance will be totally dominated by disk swapping. Increasing the RAM to something sensible would help. I suspect a brand new machine for £300 would be light years ahead in terms of performance though.
 
what andy said, id also concider a replacement machine rather than upgrading the RAM in the present one when your friend comes to it.

the problem with upgrading will be the older hardware which in terms of motherboard may have a limit to the amount of RAM installed which may not be cost effective for performance. also depending on what type it is as RAM gets older, it gets harder to source and makes it more expensive. again this may not be cost effective vs a new machine.
 
taxi said:
Anyway with the extra RAM won't you want the software to run at its peak performance?
Click to expand...
"Tuning" comes down to getting the program to use the underlying hardware more efficiently. You can only tune things if the program has options itself to allow you to tune. For example, photoshop has the following user configurable tweaks:
  • Ability to limit the RAM it uses to make it "fair" to other programs (i.e. will self - limit it's RAM usage so that other programs still remain responsive
  • Ability to use a different disk as scratch space. This is to avoid the same disk that is used for the pagefile (the file that holds the swapped "pages" from memory) as if you have limited RAM, the two processes (swapping and generating temporary images) are likely to compete. If you can spread the load over 2 disks, it should run a bit faster
  • Ability to use the graphics hardware to do 2D image manipulation (zooming/panning/rotating) and some 3D graphics work (not used this so don't know what it does).
  • Ability to use multiple cores by splitting the image up into chunks and working on each chunk in parallel (I've had all 8 of mine going full pelt on some
    filters)

Unless the software provides the switches to tweak these somewhere in the interface, you are then back to balancing CPU power, memory, I/O bandwidth and graphics performance - especially if we are talking 10+Mpixel images. The only way to do that is with hardware changes and that normally means cash....
 
I think Gazamonk really hit the nail on the head, that's a very low amount of RAM to try to undertake any sort of serious image editing with. If your friend's mobo is capable of upgrading the RAM it has to be a worthwhile improvement and RAM is really cheap these days.

He also touched on the undo feature which is a very good point. The way that works is that every time you make an alteration to an image in editing that alteration is copied into memory and you can undo each editing step by udoing those steps one at a time. However the more steps you have enabled the bigger that data being held in memory becomes , until the machine can no longer fuction. If you save each editing step as you go, this pool of data in memory is deleted each time you save as long as you're confident in saving the image at that point. and that would free up usable RAM.

It's nice to be able to step back and undo as many steps as possible when editing, and the amount of undo steps can be set in Preferences. You friend would probably free up usable RAM by setting the number of steps to the minimum, and saving the image often.

The only other thing I can think of is again go to Preferences where the size of the browser thumbnal images can be set - choose the smallest thumbnails.
 
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