Adjustment brush in ACR slow

Question

I'm finding the adjustment brush to be slow to take affect. There is a delay between making the brush stroke and seeing the adjustment occur. It starts out with a short delay, but increases with each stroke to the point where it takes 6-10 seconds after the brush stroke for the adjustment to show.
The delay occurs if Camera Raw is hosted by Bridge or by Photoshop. The delay is longer when Camera Raw is in full screen mode, but it is still quite slow when not in full screen mode. Photoshop Memory Usage was set at 65% then dropped to 50% with no change in the delay. Virus protection software was disabled.
My system is a Dell Dimension 8300 Pentium 4, 2.80GHz with 2GB of RAM running Windows XP with Service Pack 3. The video card is a NVIDA GeForce FX 5200 with 128 MB memory. Old gear for sure, but I'm wondering if there is anything I can do to improve the performance of the adjustment brush short of buying a new computer. Would upgrading the video card improve performance?

Answer 1

Hello
As far as I can see, both the video and audio editing world are already using non destructive editing and the files can be huge for video, so Photoshop will evolve in that direction also.
The operations in ACR are just mask overlays, which are not really that complex, even though the xmp are large, but in the most complex one I have been using, it is only 157kb.It is a vector layer, whose mathematical description is held in the xmp.
A comparable 8 bit mask as a channel in Photoshop would be 12mb in a 36mb uncompressed image.
It is also the reason why CS4 has so many types of adjustment layers and filter layers. That is exactly what a mask in ACR is acting as,in other words a local adjustment layer.
Many years ago there was a very good application called Picture Publisher, that recorded all pixel and layer operations as an editable text file, on a low res copy of the main image. The final compilation was rendered using the same text file on the full size image. The main problem with that the application was not accurate enough.It had a rounding error, so in certain circumstances 1000 pixels turned into 999 pixels. This as you could imagine would make some truly amazing final images, but not quite what was intended.
I am sure that ACR will evolve and have quite extensive masking operations. There is a requirement to be able run a slide show in Bridge, with all images corrected this way and without having to use Photoshop proper, one image at a time.
Adobe might also finally conclude that Lightroom will be redundant
I can wait!
Mike Engles