CS4 freaking sucks ("unique" problems I'm having)

[Cerulean]

NUMBER ONE
Photoshop CS4 on my machine takes like 45 to 60 minutes to open a 48MB PSD (of a web template; Photoshop uses about 1.5GB of memory for this file), and now to my discovery it seems to be taking approximately that long to open a simple 4MB PSD I just freshly made and saved (it happens to be the PSD for the animation below; Photoshop uses about 150MB to 250MB for this file).

I have my scratch disks enabled on all my drives and partitions in this order (according to Photoshop Creative Feces 4) :

D:\ - 195.98GB
C:\ - 5.91GB (same HDD as D:\; 500GB SATA-II Seagate Barracuda 7200.11)
E:\ - 41.76GB (different 200GB IDE HDD)

Available RAM: 1677 MB
Ideal Range: 922-1207 MB
Let Photoshop Use: 1459 MB (87%)

History States: 25
Cache Levels: 8

Enable OpenGL Drawing: Yes
Vertical Sync: Off
Force Bilinear Interpolation: Off
Advanced Drawing: Yes
Use for Image Display: Yes
Compositing: Gamma Corrected
Color Matching: Yes



NUMBER TWO
I make an animation...

Really simple. I set the delay to 0.01 (and have tried 0.00) on all the frames except for the very last frame, which is 5 seconds. In the "Save for Web & Devices" preview and configuration window, it plays just fine and normal. Problem? Well, as you can see -- the exported animation above obviously isn't using those frame delays (except for the last frame). The frame delay used there appears to be between 0.1 and 0.25, which is NOT what I want. I want 0.00 or 0.01 -- it's supposed to swoop and come in fast, and hold it for 5 seconds on the last frame.



THIS IS HOW I FEEL ATM

 

[Black Morty Rackham]

While Photoshop 11 (I refuse to call it "CS4") certainly has issues, opening and saving files does not really seem to be one of them. I just saved and loaded a 1 GB Photoshop document, and it took about as long as you'd expect it to off a 30 mb/s laptop hard drive. All my relevant settings are at the default, I believe.

As for animations, well, just use something else. Photoshop has animation features, yes, but that's one of the most useless features ever.

 

[Jamesgott]

As for animations, well, just use something else. Photoshop has animation features, yes, but that's one of the most useless features ever.

agreed. the animation is horrible. its not an animation program.

 

[Big D.]

Photoshop now also does what ImageReady did. It is not for real animations, just banners or show/hide layer animations.

You can't adjust the delay to whatever you want. Use Flash for simple 2D animation. There you have timelines and keyframes, not just frames like Photoshop has, so you can tweak animations very well.

For the loading, make sure you have just one file open at a time. Also, don't use disks that are full as your scratch disk. You could need a few GB of space for PS, so don't use a drive with only a few GB free. Use just the drive with 200GB free, uncheck the others.

If you open two PSD files at the same time, especially if they have lots of layers, it'll be slow as hell on any computer (I have a 3ghz quad-core and it's always 10-100 times slower to load a second PSD file). If you open one file at a time it can take seconds. You can open lots of BMPs, JPEGs, etc. easily, but not files with multiple layers...and your animation files can count each frame as one entire image. Honestly, just use Flash for animation.

 

[Grentz]

Fireworks works nicely for simple animated GIFs. I know its not cheap, but it is a nice program. Great for web devs as it is awesome for resizing/adjusting/creating many of the images used on web sites.

 

[madFive]

Yep - if you haven't used Flash yet, you really owe it to yourself to try it out. The above animation would take all of a few seconds to create, and you can easily set whatever frame-rate and motion-blur you want, and change it on the fly if it doesn't perform the way you want online.