Zenia has been a “facebook friend” of mine for quite some time, but until recently we had never met in person. A few weeks ago Zenia told me about a musical album that she was working on. It was going to be titled “Alive and Shine” and would be her debut album. She asked me if I would be interested in doing the photography for the album cover and art. Was I interested? Of course!

I want to take a moment to mention that Zenia is one of the most positive and inspiring people that I know. Not only that, but she also writes, produces, plays and sings all of her own music at home. Having done the same thing myself in another life (waaaay back in the 80s & 90s), I have a soft spot for artists like Zenia. I was incredibly excited to work on this project with her.

Okay, so here we go! Due to the very tight schedule of only a couple weeks, we decided upon a concept which would be fairly simple to shoot and design in a short period of time.

Zenia mentioned that the album art needed to convey warmth, light, energy, and life. Since it was winter here in the northwest, I immediately knew that my compositing skills were going to come in handy on this job. Borrowing a technique which I learned from Glyn Dewis I created the following, very crude concept sketch using Photoshop Touch for iPad. The idea was to have Zenia with her hair blowing and the sunlight shining from behind her. Here’s my finger sketch from the iPad. Isn’t it beautiful! (sarcasm)

After I assured Zenia that the final product would be a tad better quality than the concept sketch, she was on board with the idea.

On the day of the shoot I enlisted the help of yet another “facebook friend” named Brandon (whom I had never met before either) to act as our wind machine. I also brought in Shiree Collier to do the hair and makeup. Shiree and I have been working together recently and I have the utmost confidence in her work. Plus she’s from New Zealand, so that’s a huge plus. They both did a fantastic job!

Once the hair and makeup was complete we moved to the studio. Here is what my lighting setup looked like.

Since I was planning to have sunlight shining over Zenia’s shoulder in the final shot, I placed a CTO gel on a light and placed it just behind and to the side of where she was standing. This would give a warm glow in Zenia’s hair and the side of her face. I made a decision to blow the background out to pure white for two reasons. 1) For the composite, I knew the background image would be very bright. 2) It gave me the most versatility for future promotional shots.

After the shoot was over, Zenia and her parents went through the gallery of proofs and decided upon their favorite images. I also gave my “artistic opinion” regarding which images I liked the best. In the group of proof images below, I liked the two images on the left, while Zenia and her parents liked the images on the right. It was no shock to Amber (my wife) that I liked the images on the left since I’m always a fan of long, flying hair in pictures. Yes, I’m the bane of every hairdresser I ever work with. I blame the fact that I’m bald for this obsession with flying hair.

The first thing I did was process the images which Zenia and her parents had selected. Here they are.

I also created a concept cover image with a square crop, to give Zenia an idea of what a final image might look like.

Once those images were complete I let Zenia know that I was going to work up two additional images for my own personal portfolio. I told her that she could use the images for her promotional material or anything else she wanted. Can you guess which images I used? Oh yes, here comes the hair!

Much to my pleasure, Zenia really liked the additional two images as well.

The next step was working on the graphic design for the album. This isn’t something which I normally get to do, but since I have some aspirations in the graphic design space, I enjoyed the challenge. As luck would have it, the CD jewel case design that Zenia decided upon required not two, but four images. After discussion with Zenia, we decided to use all four images in the design. Here is how we decided to lay it out.

COVER IMAGE

BACK IMAGE (with spine text)

INSIDE LEFT IMAGE

INSIDE RIGHT IMAGE (Behind CD)

PRINTED ON CD SURFACE

Here is a pre-production concept image from the CD printers website. This is what the album will look like when the CD jewel case is open.

So that’s it! I hope you enjoyed seeing the whole process from start to finish as much as I enjoyed working on it.

Thanks for reading!
Christian

And here’s a small excerpt from Adobe Lightroom. What exactly was going on during this sequence of shots?

I have also started working with an amazing hair and makeup artist here in Redmond named Shiree Collier. Shiree did Elizabeth’s makeup for this shoot. Check out more of Shiree’s work here.

Below are some of the pictures from the session.

And here are a few of the outtake images. Not exactly “professional” head shot images, but still fun nonetheless.

However, things started looking up when one of the locals mentioned that we should visit a spot along the beach called Hug Point. Hug Point is one of the only locations along the west coast where you can still find evidence of the original west coast highway. It turns out that travelling up and down the west coast before the existence of Highway 101 (built in the 1920′s) was done by beach! That’s right, the beaches were the highways. In fact, that is exactly how “Hug Point” got it’s name. Late 19th century stagecoaches that used the beach as a highway had to ‘hug’ this particular point even at low tide to get around it, hence the name.

Despite the crappy weather, I did bring my camera to hug point. You never know what you might find, right? While there I took the below photo of Amber standing in a spot that had been carved out of the limestone cliff. Little did I know that another photographer had taken a similar picture over 100 years ago. I happened across it when I got home and started researching the spot. Check out the comparison below.

If you look close enough, you will notice the wagon wheel grooves in the rock on either side of where Amber is standing. Isn’t that crazy?

When looking at the old photo, the first thing that struck me was the fact that this photographer was far more bad-ass than myself. Hauling what was probably a large, wooden daguerreotype camera in the back of a wagon while traveling on this terrain would not be for the faint of heart. I considered the fact that I actually debated whether I should take my small digital Nikon camera down to the beach that day because it was raining, cold and I didn’t want to lug it around. Clearly I’m a wimp and this guy was a bad-ass photo ninja.

I also got to thinking about how my grandmother, “Granny Max” as we call her, was born only a couple years after this photo was taken. If her parents wanted to travel up and down the coast, this is how they would have done it. In fact, she has told me stories about riding with her parents in their horse-drawn wagon when she was a young girl. It’s astounding to me that things have changed so much in such a relatively short period of time in terms of how we live our lives and the luxuries we all enjoy today.

The scenery at hug point is absolutely incredible. The above seasonal waterfall is just a few hundred yards away from the location in the previous photo.

If you ever visit Hug Point, I highly recommend getting a tide schedule. The location is only accessible during very low tide. The locals told stories of tourists visiting the point at the wrong time and becoming stranded on the rocks when the tide came back in. For example, the spot where Amber is standing above is typically underwater.

Another fun, historic object which can be found at Hug Point is the above topographic benchmark which was placed there in 1932. See if you can find it while there. Hint: You might have to do a bit of climbing to locate it.

Lastly, I’d like to leave you with the following, incredibly historic and awesome picture of…

…my dog Peepers totally photobombing in his own special way. I didn’t realize this had been captured until I got home from the trip on Sunday night. Thanks a lot Peepers!

Cheers,
Christian

I an incredibly fortunate that Amber is supportive of my photo habit and never gave me any grief for bringing along a large bag of photo gear while we were on our honeymoon.  The following are a few of my favorite shots from the trip.

Here is a shot I took of Amber standing in one of the gazebos at the gorgeous Sandals Royal Caribbean in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

This particular Sandals resort has a small, private island which is accessible by a ferry, pictured here to the right.

Here’s another shot from the same doc. With the ferry gone you can now see the private island. The island houses a fantastic Thai restaurant, a swim up bar and Jacuzzi, three “cabanas” which are available for reservation, and a clothing optional beach on the other side. Not for the faint of heart.

I had to get my HDR on with this shot of a boat on the beach one evening. The Sandals staff took to calling me “Paparazzi” whenever they would see me due to the fact that I was often seen carrying around my tripod. They thought this was quite funny.

While on our trip I brought along my brand new Nikkor 85mm 1.4 lens and shot with it whenever I could. I can already say that this is my new favorite lens. Here’s a shot I took of Amber with the 85 while we were on the ferry coming back from the private island.

Late one night Amber and I got creative with off-camera flash (SB-900) and one of the gazebos. Here are a two of the resulting images.

The nightlife at Sandals was entertaining to say the least. The beach party on this particular evening had a “daredevil” who burned himself with fire in some very uncomfortable looking spots.

Although the scenery in Jamaica was gorgeous, our very favorite part of the island was the people. We spent hours talking with the Sandals staff, vendors and some of the locals. One of the vendors named Frankie was kind enough to let me take his portrait.

One day when Amber and I were shopping in a town called Negril, it began to rain. Jamaican rain is very much like Florida rain. Basically, when it rains it REALLY RAINS. Most of the tourists headed to the bus to seek shelter. But like a true Washington State native, Amber wasn’t afraid of no stinkin’ rain. She jumped out in the middle of it and started to dance. In a shocking turn of events, I had a camera with me at the time to capture the moment.

Here are a few more fun shots from the resort.

Our time in Jamaica was nothing short of Magical. We are already planning a reunion trip back to the same Sandals resort with some friends that we met while there.

Thanks for reading!
Christian

Happy Summer everyone! It’s been a while since I updated my blog, so I thought I would break the long silence with a short post. As some of you know, I have recently become engaged to be married this coming October. In preparation for my honeymoon I am applying for a new passport, which in turn necessitates a new passport photo. So that’s what I was doing this weekend in the studio. After taking the passport photo I shot the above photo just for fun.

Shortly thereafter I imported the photo into Photoshop and did a bit of post processing on it. Below in an interactive before/after image which allows you to see the original, untouched photo vs. the edited version.

I’ve been wanting to post some before/after images for quite some time. But in the interest of my clients, I haven’t had any images that I felt comfortable using for such a cause…until now. I personally have no issues with you seeing my 40 year old puffy eyes and gnarly skin blemishes. So here you go!

 
 
Photoshop Processing Techniques in a Nutshell
1. Imported RAW file into ACR, increased fill and reduced contrast. Then opened it as a Smart Object in Photoshop and duplicated it using ‘New Smart Object via Copy’
2. Converted top version/layer of RAW file to B&W and changed layer to ‘overlay’. This has the effect of reducing saturation and giving the image a more edgy look.
3. Modified white balance in bottom RAW layer to cool things off a bit.
4. Added a bit more pop using a gaussian blur layer in overlay mode. Then added a high pass layer in overlay mode to bring back some sharpness.
5. Removed blemishes using Spot Healing Brush Tool and Healing Brush Tool.
6. Reduced puffyness of eyes using Healing Brush Tool and Clone Stamp Tool with mode set to Lighten.
7. Reduced some wrinkles using Healing Brush Tool.
8. Selectively brightened up skin around eyes using a levels layer set to Screen with a layer mask.
9. Did quite a bit of dodging and burning on skin, eyebrows, goatee and eyes using two curves layers to even out skin and add more dimension to the photo.
10. Sharpened eyes using Sharpen Tool set to 30%.
11. Selectively brightened the whites of the eyes using a levels layer set to screen with a layer mask.
12. Reduced overall saturation using Hue/Saturation Layer. Also reduced some of the Red, Orange and Yellow saturation using the same layer.
13. Softened skin just a tad using a layer with high pass, Gaussian blur, then inverted it and set mode to linear light.
14. Used Liquify filter to pull in the jaw line (camera right) because it was looking a bit funky. Also made a slight modification to even out the tip of the nose.
14. Used Nik Color Efex Pro 4 Plug-In – White Neutralizer to correct the color cast a bit.
15. Used Nik Color Efex Pro 4 Plug-In – Cross Balance with Tungsten to Daylight(1) to cool things off a bit more.
16. Used Nik Color Efex Pro 4 Plug-In – Pro Contrast to add just a bit more overall contrast.
17. Used Nik Color Efex Pro 4 Plug-In – Vignette: Lens to add a slight dark vignette.

That’s it! Total processing time was around 1 hour.

Cheers,
Christian

Preface: My Name is Christian Carroll and I’m a PC User

This post will detail how I recently designed and built a computer specifically with Photoshop performance in mind.  The computer I ultimately put together (pictured above) was….wait for it… a PC!  <GASP>  What?  I don’t use a Mac???  Yes, it’s true.  I’m a photographer who uses a PC.

In the photography world, admitting that you’re a PC user is tantamount to admission that you have a serious problem and are in need of a 12 step support group.  Let me be the first to admit that Macintosh is a fantastic, wonderful, beautiful (how many more glowing adjectives can I use?), super-awesome product.  I have used them in the past, and I hope to use them again in the future.  However, there are two main contributing factors which have made me a PC user.

FACTOR1: I worked for Microsoft Corp. for 12 years.  And for some strange reason we didn’t use Macintosh computers at Microsoft.  I’ll have to speak with Steve Ballmer about this the next time I see him.  Anyhow, I know PC hardware and software backwards and forwards.  And there’s something to be said for being your own tech support when you’re on a tight schedule and things suddenly, inevitably go wrong.  If anything goes wrong with my machine, I’m confident that I can diagnose and fix it with relative speed and ease.  If I owned a Mac, this would not be the case at all.  Some might argue, “but if you owned a Mac, nothing would go wrong with it!”.  Well friends, during my 12 years with Microsoft I was something called a “Software Development & Test Engineer”.  It sounds so technical and nerdy doesn’t it?  Basically, it was my job to break stuff.  In fact, I’m really good at breaking stuff!  And if there’s one thing I’ve learned during my years of breaking stuff, it’s “if anything can possibly go wrong, it probably will”.  And I’d like to add, “it will probably go wrong at the exact moment when it is the most inconvenient for you”.  This timeless principle applies to everything.  Even including…yes…Macs.

FACTOR2: Macintosh computers are NOT CHEAP.  If I can take a moment to be brutally honest, I’ve had a very difficult few years.  I’m financially recovering from a difficult divorce.  I have three wonderful kids who need to be taken care of.  I’ve been laid off three times over the past two years.  I’ve burned through the majority of my retirement savings in order to continue making child support and alimony payments.  The list goes on.  Okay, the violins can stop playing now.  <hehe>  The bottom line?  I, like so many others right now, am not made of money.  Brighter times are ahead, but for now budget is a major concern for me.  So if I can build a computer which does essentially the same job for 1/3 the price, you bet I’m going to! PCs have the distinct advantage of being significantly cheaper than Macs.  So for now, I’m a proud PC user.  If you are also a PC user & photographer/designer who is thinking about building a new computer, I hope this blog post is helpful to you.  If you are a Mac user, I totally hate you.  Okay, not really.  ;)

“My Old PC – A Journey to Photoshop Hell” – A Short Story by Christian Carroll

As I tell the following short story, keep the “time = money” equation in the forefront of you mind.

Several years ago the majority of my post-processing in Photoshop was fairly straight forward and involved a bit of dodging/burning, sharpening and some cloning at the most.  There were butterflies and rainbows everywhere I looked, and life was good.  I had no idea of the impending darkness to come.

Eventually I did something really dumb.  I decided to invest some serious time in learning more about Photoshop.  The more I learned, the more my design aspirations grew.  I was quickly addicted.   Fast forward to mid-2011.  I began getting into compositing and was using significantly more involved post-processing techniques.  Suddenly I was in hell.  There were no more butterflies or rainbows anywhere.  My 5 year old, 32-bit PC with 4GB RAM was at it’s absolute limit.  Photoshop was moving at the speed of a snail stuck in a frozen ocean of molasses.

At this point I employed all of my geek powers to squeeze as much performance out of my PC as I could.   I tweaked every performance related preference in Photoshop that I could find.  I shut down every service or application that was competing for RAM.  I even changed the default theme in Windows to a super basic one, to minimize demand on the graphics card.  But nothing seemed to work.

The lack of butterflies continued whenever I worked on a new project in Photoshop.  Using the quick select tool was nearly impossible, as nothing I did was happening in real time.  I would make a selection, and a minute or two later I’d see the selection (marching ants) actually appear.  Using the liquify tool crashed Photoshop completely or gave “out of RAM” errors 75% of the time.  And running plug-ins like Nik and Topaz?  Forget it…they typically crashed right after I clicked “OK”.  Post-processing a project which should have taken one hour instead took five or six hours due to sluggish performance and the constant restarting of Photoshop after crashes.  Plus, I was having to save my projects after every edit (saves could take 3-5 minutes each), for fear that Photoshop would crash during my next edit and I’d lose all my work.

If there was ever a compelling business need to upgrade to a new PC, I was looking it dead in the eye.  The time savings alone (not to mention the savings on mental therapy) easily justified the upgrade.  Thus began my quest to design and build a PC specifically with Photoshop performance in mind.

New PC Budget: < $2000

As I mentioned, budget is a big concern for me.  I was hoping to design a system for under $2000 (Windows 7 included).  The system would need to kick sufficient Photoshop butt so that it not only ran CS5 like a champ, but  would also have a prayer of performing well with CS6 and CS7.  As it turned out, the machine I designed came in at just a hair over $1500 when all was said and done (not counting shipping fees).  I ordered everything from Amazon.  Yes, $1500 is a lot of money.  But take a trip out to Apple’s website and get a quote on a Power Mac with similar specs and you’ll see what I was talking about in the Preface to this post.  :)

The above image was one of the last ones I created on the old PC.  I probably spent around 24 hours editing this project and uttered a cuss word about once every 5 minutes in the process. So if my math is correct, my new PC is saving me around 288 cuss words per project in addition to a significant amount of time & money.

Putting it All Together

Okay boys & girls, enough with the philosophizing and story telling.  Here comes the meat.  What I’m going to do here is provide a list of the gear that I chose and give an explanation of why I chose it.  In the next section I’ll also explain a bit about how to configure Photoshop to best take advantage of the hardware listed here.  I’m going to assume that you have sufficient geek powers to assemble the hardware, install the OS, drivers, do the motherboard BIOS update (which you should always do), etc.  Okay, here we go!

Intel Core i7-2600K Processor

The processor is going to be the brain of our Franken-shop Monster.   It will directly determine how fast Photoshop is able to perform many of it’s functions.  Fast clock speed, multi-core functionality (especially helpful with many Photoshop Filter operations) and 64-bit support are crucial elements when selecting an optimal processor for use with Photoshop.   I chose the Intel Core i7 – 2600K because it met all of these requirements.

The stock clock speed of this processor is 3.4Ghz.  I intend to over-clock it to something over 4Ghz, for an extra speed boost (more about the overclocking soon).  This processor also supports Dual-channel DDR3 memory.  This is good because I wanted to select some speedy, over-clock capable DDR3 RAM to further boost performance.

Note regarding 64-bit:  Be sure that you have the 64-bit version of Photoshop and NOT the 32-bit version.  Only the 64-bit version will be able to take full advantage of the hardware (in particular the amount of  RAM) listed here.

MSi P67A-GD65 Motherboard

I chose this particular motherboard for a few reasons.  Those being…

• It’s support for the Intel Core i7 (obviously).
• It’s support for DDR3 memory
• It has 4 internal SATA3 controllers (all my hard drives are going to be SATA3)
• It has 4 USB 3.0 ports (2 on back panel, 2 internal).  I will be attaching a couple external USB3.0 hard drives for extra storage.  I already own these.
• It supports RAID0/1 on all the SATA ports.  I don’t immediately plan on taking advantage of this, but I want the flexibility to possibly do so in the future.
• It has a “push-button” feature called OC Genie II which automatically chooses and enables the best (according to MSi), most stable settings for overclocking your system.  Pretty cool!

Corsair Enthusiast Series TX750 Power Supply

Every computer needs a power supply.  I found a super cool website for easily calculating how much power is needed for your custom built computer.  It’s called eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Pro.  By plugging my hardware config into the calculator I determined that I needed a minimum PSU wattage of 529W.  Since I want to leave a bit of room for expansion, I went ahead and ordered a 750W power supply from Corsair.

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU Air Cooler

Since I am overclocking my processor, it’s going to get hotter than the stock CPU cooler is designed to handle.  Therefore I decided to swap out the stock cooler with this bad boy to ensure that my CPU doesn’t overheat.  If you don’t decide to overclock your CPU then you can probably stick with the stock cooler.

Corsair Vengeance 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 Memory

In recent months my Photoshop projects have become large files consisting of 30-60 layers each.  That fact combined with some of the Photoshop tools I’ve been using has turned the program into a RAM eating monster.  With my old 32-bit machine, Photoshop could only access 3GB of RAM.  As I found out the hard way, that wasn’t nearly enough.  I’ve been using the Liquify, Content Aware Scaling and Refine Edge tools quite a bit recently.  These tools have a voracious appetite for RAM.  Going forward I’m also thinking about taking advantage of the new 3D features in Photoshop.  For these reasons among others, I knew that I needed at least 16GB of RAM in my new machine.  And of course the more RAM I have available, the less often Photoshop will have to do “page swapping” to a hard drive (which slows down performance).  We will discuss the subject of page swapping and Scratch Disks a bit more below.

I selected 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM for the following reasons…

• It’s built for overclocking
• It’s designed for maximum compatibility with the Core i3, i5 and i7 processors
• It’s super fast and so damn pretty that it should be against the law

EVGA GeForce GTX570 HD 1280MB GDDR5 Graphics Card

I elected this graphics card for the following reasons…

• It supports OpenGL.  This means that Photoshop CS5 can use the card’s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).   This will help significantly speed up performance in an ever expanding number of key areas.  According to Adobe using a graphics card which supports OpenGL, “Activates a set of special GPU-accelerated features such as canvas rotation, panning/zooming, Brush dynamic size, Brush hardness control, Rule of Thirds crop grid overlay, and 3D overlays (including ground plane, light guides, and bounding boxes for mesh and materials)” to name a few.  Adobe is always adding to the list of GPU-accelerated features with each new release of Photoshop, so getting a card which supports OpenGL is a huge plus.
• It has more than 512MB of VRAM.  Adobe recommends having more than 512MB for any 3D work.  Since I’ll be doing this soon, I wanted to be prepared.
• It totally rocks for playing 3D games!  Oh wait…that has nothing to do with Photoshop.   Forget I mentioned it.  ;)

Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache (X3)

I bought three of these hard drives.  If I were lighting cigars with $100 bills I would have chosen SSD drives instead.  If I were lighting cigars with $1000 bills I would put the SSDs in a RAID 0 array.  But SATAIII speed is still nothing to sneeze at.  Here is how I set them up for maximum efficiency.

Drive1 – OS/Boot Drive:  Windows 7 OS is installed here.

Drive2 – Application Drive: Photoshop (and other applications) are installed here.

Drive3 – Data Drive: All of my working files will live here.  RAW files, PSDs, TIFFs, JPGs, etc.

Corsair Force GT 60 GB SATA III Solid State Drive

This drive combines the blinding speed of an SSD (which have no moving parts) with the SATAIII interface.  Needless to say, this drive is FAST.  555 MB/s read and 495 MB/s write.  And I decided to put that speed where it would do the most good.  The sole function of this drive is to operate as Photoshop’s Scratch Disk.

In cases where Photoshop eats up more than the available RAM, it uses a portion of the hard drive as virtual memory.  This process is sometimes called “page swapping” or “paging out to a hard drive”.  In Photoshop’s preferences we can tell it which hard drives to use as “Scratch Disks” for this exact purpose.  Typically the process of paging slows things down considerably, especially if the hard drive(s) being used are slow, under a heavy load, or both.  That’s why I chose a drive that is crazy-fast and exclusively dedicated to paging.  The one I bought is only 60GB, but that’s fine.  We don’t need a ton of space for this purpose.  And it’s a good thing too, because large SSD drives are expensive!

Thermaltake V4 Black Edition Computer Case

This was an easy one to choose.

• It’s cheap
• It has enough clearance for the CPU cooler to fit inside
• It makes it super easy to install hard drives
• It’s black and evil looking

Cooler Master 120mm Case Fan (x3)

The Thermaltake case already came with one 120mm fan.  So I decided to buy three more to ensure good airflow.  I placed two intake fans near the bottom of the case and two exhaust fans near the top of the case.  I even color-coded them according to their function (Green LEDs for Intake and blue LEDs for Exhaust) because my geekdom knows no bounds.

Blu-ray Disc Rewriter Internal SATA 12x

I bought a Blu-ray disc burner because it will burn CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray data disks.  It was pretty affordable too.  I’m not burning many Blu-ray data disks these days, but in a year or two I expect Blu-ray will replace DVD as the standard.  And of course my decision wasn’t influenced in the least by the fact that I can now watch Blu-ray movies on my PC.  Nope, not one little bit.  ;)

Optimizing Photoshop

It’s time to bring everything together and optimize the software to take full advantage of the specific hardware we have selected above.   First I should mention that Adobe has an excellent general guide for tuning Photoshop for peak performance.  That guide is located here.  In the interest of not re-inventing the wheel, I won’t go into many of the things covered there.  That page has some very useful information, so definitely give it a read if you haven’t already.

64-BIT VERSION OF WINDOWS & PHOTOSHOP – THIS IS IMPORTANT

This is worth mentioning again, so here it goes.  You must have the 64-bit version of both Windows & Photoshop in order to take advantage of the hardware listed in this post.  If you have the 32-bit version of Photoshop (even if it’s running on 64-bit Windows), it’s only going to be able to access 3.2GB (best case scenario) of that beautiful, blue 16GB of RAM.  If you’re not certain which version of Photoshop you have installed, pay attention to the splash screen that appears when you first launch the program.  There you should see a line of text similar to, “Version 12.0.4 x64“.  You can also access the splash screen by going to ‘Help->About Photoshop’ from the menu bar.  If you do not see “x64″, but instead see “x32″ then you know you’re not running the 64-bit version of Photoshop.

HARD DRIVES – WHERE TO INSTALL WHAT

As mentioned in the hardware section above, I configured my three Western Digital hard drives using the below method to avoid read/write bottlenecks and optimize speed.

Drive1 – OS/Boot Drive:  Install Windows 7 64-bit on this drive.

Drive2 – Application Drive: Install Photoshop on this drive.  The default Photoshop install will attempt to use the OS drive.  You will need to manually point it to this drive instead during installation.  Also install other applications (Lightroom, etc.) here as well.

Drive3 – Data Drive: Store all of your photo projects, files and resources on this drive.  Open files and projects from here.  And then save them here when you’re finished.

MEMORY (RAM)

Speaking of beautiful, blue RAM; here is how we can make sure that Photoshop and Windows play well together with that 16GB.

Launch Photoshop and go to Edit -> Preferences -> Performance…’   You should now be looking at the Performance page of the Preferences dialog box.  Now take a look at the Memory Usage section near the top left of the dialog box.  It should look something like the graphic below.

The first thing to do here is resist the temptation to drag that usage slider all the way to 90 or 100%.  Remember, your operating system (Windows) needs some of that 16GB in order to perform basic functions.  You can inadvertently hurt the performance of your machine by amping this setting up too high.

So what should we set this at?  Here’s my non-rocket science approach to this question.  First, determine how much “available” RAM your system has with Photoshop closed, subtract a 2GB buffer from that number and give the balance to Photoshop.

Here’s how I did that on my system:

1. Close Photoshop and any other applications which are typically not running when you are doing your post processing.
2. Launch any applications which typically are running while you are using Photoshop.  Example: If you occasionally have Lightroom running while you’re editing in PS, launch it now.
3. Give the “three finger salute” (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and select the ‘Start Task Manager’ button.
4. Select the Performance tab in Task Manger
5. Look under ‘Physical Memory (MB)’ and take note of the amount of “Available” memory.  Ex. My amount of available memory is 12540 (or approx 12GB).
6. Subtract a 2GB buffer from that number, just to play it safe.  So for me that’s 12GB – 2GB = 10GB.

And that’s it!  10GB (or 10240 MB) is the amount of memory that I feel I can safely allow Photoshop to use without negatively impacting system performance.  At least this is the method that I used.  Another popular method is to simply leave this setting at the default value.  <hehe>  Perhaps I should have mentioned that first.  ;)

SCRATCH DISKS

Now it’s time to tell Photoshop which drives (and in what order) to use as scratch disks.  Remember, these are the drives it will use for “paging” when it runs out of available RAM.

1. Once again, Launch Photoshop and go to Edit -> Preferences -> Performance…’.
2. This time look in the section titled “Scratch Disks”.  It will look something like the graphic below.
3. Locate the dedicated SSD drive in the list (for me that’s the D: drive) check it’s ‘Active’ box and ensure that it is selected/highlighted in the list.
4. Now move that drive to the very top of the list using the little ‘up’ arrow on the right.  This tells Photoshop to always use this drive first.
5. Now select and maneuver any additional drives to positions of your choosing in the list.  I elected to use two of my 1TB drives as 2nd and 3rd scratch disk options.  In case we somehow manage to use up that 60GB of space on the SSD.
6. Do not use your OS/Win7 drive as a scratch disk.  Notice how I have left that one (C:) unchecked in the list below.  Adobe recommends that you don’t use the OS drive as a scratch disk, and I think that’s very sound logic.
7. Remember to close and re-launch Photoshop once you’re done.

GPU SETTINGS

Let’s make sure Photoshop is taking full advantage of our graphics card.

1. Once again, open your Photoshop Performance preferences dialog box.
2. This time look at the section titled, “GPU Settings”.
3. Ensure that your graphics card is listed under “Detected Video Card”.  You can see my GTX 570 listed in the picture below.
4. The important thing here is to ensure that the “Enable OpenGL Drawing” check-box is checked.

Benchmark Performance

As I stated at the beginning of this post, I’m a tester.  That being the case, there’s no way I was going to build this machine without also doing some type of benchmark test to see how it performs when compared with my previous one.  So I downloaded the free Photoshop Benchmark V3 test from Hardwareheaven.com.  Keeping conditions as similar as possible, I ran this benchmark test on both my old and new machine.  Here is how they performed (smaller number is better):

Old PC – 2.13Ghz, 4GB RAM, Windows Vista 32-bit

Benchmark Score: 396.0

New PC – 4.2Ghz (over-clocked), 16GB RAM, Windows 7 64-bit

Benchmark Score: 147.3

Keep in mind that PS Benchmark V3 only uses Photoshop filters for each test.   That puts a bit of stress on the CPU and RAM, but doesn’t take advantage of the OpenGL features in our graphics card.  I wasn’t able to locate a Photoshop benchmark which included OpenGL related tests.  If anyone knows of such a thing, let me know.  This test also doesn’t deal with 50 layer, 250MB Photoshop files.  <hehe>  I seriously doubt if it ever caused anything to be paged out to the SSD.

In the end, the best benchmark “test” is run by the user (you and me) every time we do a new project.  And let me tell you, the butterflies and rainbows are back again.  Big time!

Thanks for reading!

Christian

P.S.  If you have Photoshop optimization tips and tricks which have worked well for you, I’d love to hear about them.  Please leave a comment!

I love photography.  Whether I’m on a photo job or just hanging out with friends and family on the weekend, I typically have a camera with me everywhere I go.  Those of us bitten by the “photo bug” are accustomed to hearing things like, “C’mon, do you really HAVE to bring your camera this time?” from our children and even our spouses when getting ready to head out to any given event.  And while I agree that there should be a healthy balance to all things (yes, even requiring me to leave the camera at home from time to time), I do openly admit that photography is both an art and an obsession of which I am a willing victim.  And my photo obsession continued this past weekend when I brought my camera gear over to a friend’s house on the 4th of July.

Our good friend Tish lives on a beautiful lake here in Washington State.  When we got out of the car we were greeted by two incredibly energetic German Shorthaired Pointers (Wyatt and Roy) who had an obsession of their own.  Their obsession?  Pine cones, birds, mud, water, and anything that moved!  These two dogs were so animated and had so much energy that I couldn’t help but photograph them in action.

So I grabbed by 70-200 lens, walked down to the dock at the lakefront and started shooting as the dogs.  I captured them chasing passing birds, pine cones (thrown by Amber), and even having long staring contests with fish in the lake.  The only way I was able to get them to hold still for a few seconds was by holding a pine cone next to my lens as I snapped a few shots. Here are a few of the images from that day.

Another dog named Fontana also made an appearance during the course of the day.  Fontana was a beautiful golden retriever with long, light yellow fur.  Her fur was the perfect super-sponge for soaking up buckets of cold lake water and subsequently shaking it all off directly behind a certain surprised photographer.

Here is the dock that I was shooting from.  I snapped this with my 14-24 lens.

And of course the fireworks on the lake that night were spectacular!

COMEDY CLIPS

Where there are dogs, there is comedy.  Here are a few of the outtakes, starting with a picture of my Labrador (Peepers) attempting to jump from the dock to get a ball.  Nice try Peepers.

And here I caught a rare photo of CUJO.

And lastly, I’d like to announce that I am the first photographer to capture a non-blurry picture of an actual Chupacabra!

Happy 4th of July everyone!

Christian

A couple weekends ago I had the privilege of joining a fantastic local band in the studio as they recorded their latest album.  Their name is BOWI and if you love kickin’ Celtic music they are very much worth checking out.

Despite how it may look on TV, recording an album in the studio is a difficult, meticulous and stressful undertaking.  I know this because I basically grew up in a recording studio in San Diego.  During the 70s, 80s & 90s my father owned Studio West, one of the premier studios for “jingles” in the nation at the time.  Anyway, despite the stress involved with recording their new album the members of BOWI allowed this crazy photographer to stomp around and blast them in the face with strobes to document the process.  I’m so glad that they did!  To follow are a few photos I captured during that day.

When I first arrived in the studio Tony Schuler was busy recording some electric bass tracks.

The talented recording engineer pictured below is Steven Bell, the owner of Top of the Hill Music Studio.  He was an absolute pleasure to talk with and he was very patient with me as I set up my lights in various parts of the studio during the session.

Below: Rich Teachout recording some whistle tracks.

I should mention that I had to shoot almost everything from the control room because the shutter on my camera was too loud for the microphones.  That presented quite the challenge at times because I had to shoot through two panes of glass into another room most of the time. But it gave me an opportunity to get some fun shots that I otherwise might not have captured, like the image below.

I was lucky enough to catch Tony warming up in the main studio during a 5 minute break.  So I grabbed a few shots without having to stay in the control room. The main studio is ENORMOUS and beautiful. I tossed in a little mood lighting for Tony here.

The talented Leah Cupps, goddess of the bodhran.

Below you can clearly see what fuels any decent Celtic album.

During a short break I grabbed Rich’s banjo and took a few close-up shots.

Slán,

Christian