Thanks DesignPro-you seem to give out a lot of good info and keep it simple.

Question on SSD's for you-since they are a bit more expensive is there a reccomended minimum Gb/Mb for use as a scratch disk?

Otherwise I have a spare 500GB USB drive I need to transfer over to my 1T 'safety storage' [[used as a plug and save then re-box for safety against failures of one of my two externals in continuous use.]]

So I'll have a spare 500Gb external plus two or three 50+Gb internal HD's from older boxes I might put into use as slaves if that would be better.

Aambertyme...if it's like PS7 it's under Edit then Properties and memory managment [[IIRC]].

My only issue with the Mac is none of my software nor my online stuff is going to work with it-I tried.

I can barely afford to pay attention much less replace my software with Mac proprietary stuff and some of it does not work on Mac...take my Half Life games for instance. :D

That's what I was seeing on my searches as well-not to use an external HD.

Thing is-to partition, AFAIK, one has to do it when installing the OS so that ;eaves both of my option out and my choices in PS to set the scatch disk are exactly two-both taken by part of Windows and I see no way to expand whatever setting is in PS when installed. Just a drop down with two choices and even my two externals are not showing in those choices.

Well, it's just slow....not sure anything will resolve it except, perhaps a total reinstal of XP, friend is supposed to send me a new-ish Acer and a set of XP disks.

The Acer will be my main work station and I'll either reformat the other and do a partition with Linux for web usage [[surfing, Netflix and so on so I do not destroy my main work box or just dump it-salvage some parts and reformat THIS box the same way as it seems faster overall.

Nothing more fun than waiting ten minutes ofr PS to laod then ten minutes for an image with layers to load [[current work]] then waiting ten minutes for simple things like the eraser tool to do three segments and so on... :rolleyes:.



Working on an image last night and it took three hours just to get it opened, flattend another layer pasted in and some erasing work done then some changes to the layer to suit my artwork.

Even my '01 ME unti with ;ess than half the RAM was faster so it's got to be the OS which I've almost bare-boned but there are some things in it I cannot find except they show up as 'Running' [[programs installed by former user]] but they seem invisible otherwise.

Thanks Steve-let me go see if there were some answers I can understand. :D

I'm in the middle of having to basically replace everything from my comuter to my photo gear. I picked up an old Dell Dimension and installed PS7 on it and it keeps telling me that my scratch disk is on the same drive as some Winows memory function and it should be elsewhere-prefferably on another disk.

I've never seen this before on previous installations and never had a slave disk or second disk to put a 'PS scratch disk' onto.

Any suggestions?

Also the tools seem to be functioning strangely-I cannot use the box selection tool to select a area to crop, it starts to make the box, makes a small box then skips and sets another small box and so on...I've been having to do a copy then resize the canvas to fit then drag and flatten the image to what I would normally copy out and paste into a new canvas.

My erase tool seems to do the same, I have to constantly 'click' as I go along to erase a large area of the image rather than just click and sweep.

I've never had issues like this with installs o several computers-even Wine in Linux tho some tools are not useable because of a Ubuntu issue with Windows that the online resolve instructs do not match the Ubuntu setup but that;s a different story.

ouch. I'd consider-well, ok, I'd just do some shots with a different lens and go from there.

I must have lousy luck with camera shops because, even tho I've had some favorites for prices and gear, I've never had one that could troubleshoot or repair anything-they'd just send it out to Cannon or Nikon after doing what I'd already bone [[blow out the mirror and such with a bulb.]]

Back around '92 I lived in Florida, went to kollege and rode a motorcycle. Had a laydown that sent me skidding on my chest thru a major intersection...tore the plastic mask right off the helmet, broke my wrist and road rash from the top of my boots to my ears.

Had a photovest on with my Canon AE-1 with a 50mm lens mounted in one front pocket and my tele in another along with misc items.

I was trashed, the bike was trashed and the only thing that got busted on the camera or lenses was a daylight filter-had to peel it off with pliers but the lens threads were fine.

Camera lasted 8 more years before a room mate stole it the night he dissapeared.

I'd never print straight from the camera or file.

Every image I run is processed, cropped and given a black border so, when they are printed I lose nothing of the image and can have the matte adjusted for the border loss or extra paper gain-white edges where the image did not fill the paper even with the border.

Much easier than hoping not to lose part of the image because the dimensions or the printer or whatever was having a bed day.

Been shooting for 30 years with a variety of gear and lenses of different sizes and the only time I've ever used a 'Stabilized' zoom is when I'm braced against a rock or tree or something else.

Never even *heard* of such a thing until the last year or so as I did not need new gear until then.

You youngsters and your fancy-nancyboy gear. ~Pshaw!~

Why, when *I* started photographing I had to use a wheel barrow just for the 50mm lens and body-they were so heavy back then. Had to walk ten miles uphill BOTH ways in 12' deep snow to find a place to shoot and burn up in a 115 degree heat at the same TIME!

:lol: Just kidding on the last one-but seriously, shooting with non-stabilized lenses is no big deal.

Not photography related but yeah...Local pawn/gun, went in to look around and the owner and wife immediatly pulled out a particular handgun I'd researched and raved about how well it shoots and so on showing me a paper target shot 'By that very gun." ok. Few months later we stopped in to actually look at shotguns and the *exact* same thing happened almost like they rehearse this including the target. I already *know* the handgun blows. Don't want it and when I described the particular style of scattergun we were looking for he pulls out a birding gun with a 30" bbl...like say what?

Bozsik-that makes sens and for images of items photographed. Never been my thing so never came to mind.

2laner-I know about the batts, replacements for my older Nikon are ridiculous, it's one reason I always try to buy a battery grip for a new camera ASAP-allows me to run the manufacturer batts but also gives me the choice of AA's of which I carry Eneloops for other gear so they are interchangeable...just in case.

My one concern about using others software rather than a personal filing system is what happens if the software goes away?

Like I mentioned-I use a secondary stand-alone HD.

So let's say I'm using Picassa and everything is formatted so Picassa can find it but my main PC goes Tango Underdog.

So I go and get a new PC and come to find out either Picassa won't run on it or no longer exists. Software does go away after some time or get so outdated it won't run anymore.

How will that affect those of you that use a system setup by someone else using what they consider arbitrary means?

Old Redeye...

Well, in most cases even if you have ten brother Bob's they are going to have different middle names or your family is inbred hillbillies from Tennessee and need to teach me to Moonshine.

So First folder:

Family'

sub-folders:

'Bob A.'

'Bob G.'

'Bob J.'

and so on.

I don't personally know how many images I have but I have 2 Tbytes worth of 'em and it generally takes ne less than two minutes after booting PS to get from "Open File" to have an image opened on my desktop to work with unless I am hunting and pecking for something in-general to work with but no particular cene or person in-mind to start with.

Step-by-step to my madness.

When I go to dump a SD ard from the camera I put a new folder on my desktop and give it a name/date corresponding to where it was shot or whom it was shot of..

'SanAntonio 8/10' [[San Antonio, Tx August 2010]]
'Beverly 6/11' [[Model Beverly June 2011]]

and so forth. Inside-depending on how many images/places I shot I might set up sub folders.

'SAnAntonio 8/10 _> 'Riverwalk 13/8/10, 'Lake 15/8/10', 'FolksHouse 16/8/10' and so on.

Inside each folder you have the original dump 'DCS0001', 'DSC0002', 'DSC0003' and so forth.

Images that I like at first look immediately get converted to a TIFF and renamed 'Becca0001'

THen, if In edit it goes 'Becca0001a' 'Becca0001b' and so on.

I then move the whole thing into a spare HD with seperate categories

'Nature' folder for instance which has the States I've visited so I drop the one named 'SanAntonio into the 'Texas' folder.

'People' is a little easier-just drop the one named 'Bevrly' into it and any shoots after are just dropped into a dated folder into the named one.

Once it's set up it becomes pretty easy to retrieve whatever series of images I am wanting to work with.

I do have a seprate folder titled '300TIFFS'...those are the final vrsions of anything I feel is print-worthy, named and ready to print. The originals are still in the other folders but this makes it easy to find something ready to print without having to go thru a hundred dates and I pretty much remember every image once named.

Then I completely back up the secondary drive to a third storage drive which is unplugged and placed in a safe for security and fireproofing.

I don't know how to ask this in a different way so be aware I am simply curious-thirst for knowledge and this is in no way meant to be an insult or anything but a real question so with that-why are you asking?

It looks like a decent macro, very clean.

I am just curious as to why the interest in the ratio and the sensor size?

Might help me as I go along and not sound like a fool later when talking about this stuff. :)