Image-editing for large images

[ilikefood]

Hi-

Recently, our company purchased a digital printing press. It's made for printing large billboard-type images, so the files we deal with are enormous. The computer we work on is a Dual PIII/750, 640MB RAM, and SCSI hard drives.

Occasionally, we have to do some very light editing to the images before we send them to the printer's software-- usually just combining two images or exporting to a different format.

More than once we've hit the 2GB file size limit in Photoshop. CorelDraw seems to work usually, but I've seen some operations take almost 3 hours. I was wondering if anyone knew of any image-editing programs that are specifically geared towards huge images like this. Or am I simply trying to do too much on this machine?

Thanks!

-brendan

 

[cantwellt]

On your Photoshop CD in the goodies folder there is a little ditty that will let you work on a small portion of an image and then put it back into the whole image after editing. It's a plugin called Quickedit.

I hope this helps!

 

[GeorgeMack]

I have heard good things about a plugin by Altamira called "Genuine Fractals" (uses fractal math, doesn't create funky patterns) that uses advanced math to store the image and UPSIZE to large output. Check it out at Power XChange or

http://www.publishingperfection.com.

or your usual plug-in sources. Also available in different packages, including Quark plugin.

I haven't used it, but the word I've heard is that it does a nice job. It may depend on what you need to throw at it and how much control you need over details etc. Check the web for reviews.