Mac Pro "Westmere" 3.33GHz Photoshop Workstation

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Originally Posted by Damien

wow... I want one or two or twelve

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I know, it was definitely Christmas in April around here!! :D

Apparently, new in CS5 (or maybe Intel?)- the actual Photoshop temp file aka scratch file...

..is no longer visible to the user.

http://macgurus.georgemiddleton.com/...ratchFile1.png

I tried all the usual tricks- making all invisible files persistently visible, operating in root, booting in 32bit kernel, running Photoshop in 32bit mode- to no avail.

Right now, the only way I can confirm it's location is by it's listing in the "open files and ports" tab for the Photoshop process in Activity Monitor, or by audible disk activity or the disk activity lights on whatever drive..

http://macgurus.georgemiddleton.com/...lesProcess.jpg

MsNikon,

Welcome. I believe that your post got lost in the celebration of new hair on fire MacPro. Wanted to make sure you knew we were glad to have you here. Keep an eye out as Boots figures out how to pour some more octane into his Westmere engine and try and blow up the neighborhood. He already dims all the lights around the block.

This is a fun place.

Rick

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Originally Posted by MsNikon

Hi Boots,

Thanks for the great welcome! I'm here for good, that's for sure. I emailed Rick a while ago about what I shall call a "Drobo-Problem" and he worked with me through the ins and outs of setting up a stellar Burly solution: Safe, secure with peace of mind. Everything a photographer could ask for with respect to their data!!!

regards,
MsNikon

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From what I've read that Drobo is a unique but somewhat problematic massive storage solution..

Rick's tech support- indeed all the staff at MG and Burly- is second to none. Helped me thru many a jam... :dance:

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Originally Posted by ricks

MsNikon,

Welcome. I believe that your post got lost in the celebration of new hair on fire MacPro. Wanted to make sure you knew we were glad to have you here. Keep an eye out as Boots figures out how to pour some more octane into his Westmere engine and try and blow up the neighborhood. He already dims all the lights around the block.

This is a fun place.

Rick

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Thanks Rick!! I've been meaning to post a hello, and after reading about Boots' "hair on fire MacPro", I had to jump in. Amazing machine and photos as well!


I'll hand back your thread here Boots, thankfully, the Burly now rules my desktop!

MsNikon

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Originally Posted by MsNikon

...a first time and HAPPY Burly owner....

MsNikon

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There is nothing quite like the first time.... that you have to ask for help to lift a Burly. ;)

I have a 4 bay a 2 bay and a somewhat rare single bay Burly. All in beige... I'm a traditionalist. :dance:

;)

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Originally Posted by Damien

All in beige... I'm a traditionalist. :dance:

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Hi Damien,

Hmmm, didn't know it came in beige...
I would still have gotten the black, as black goes best with pearls ;)

Meanwhile, I've been doing a steady stream of Mac tech support work for friends and local customers, and in be-tween-

I've been learning Logic Pro these last 18 months. What a can of worms!! But a great app. :)
It runs really well in SL but Mountain Lion apparently has a deep foundational bug that practically cripples it in terms of real-time mixing.. it shows up most glaringly when working with open plugin windows..

Happy New Year everybody!

So I've got PS CS5 and PS CS6 installed on my main startup drive running Mac OS 10.8.2.

With CS5 and 6, Photoshop has become this giant lumbering beast.

Personally, I'm finding CS6 doesn't work so well with 10.8. Lot's of freezes, delays, and other weird glitches..

CS5 works pretty well with ML, but I am considering (never thought I'd think this) of back-grading to Snow Leopard. Shit just plain worked in Snow Leopard and the last 2 OS's feel like giant iOS's to me..

I mean, making the ~/Library folder invisible?! What!?

So Adobe...
This "Cloud" thing is kinda funky; they've decided to make certain features in PS (and maybe other Adobe apps too, I'm not sure) only available if you rent their software with a cloud-based subscription.. Lovely.

Plus, in the last month, they've pulled some doozies:

<Without> telling anybody ahead of time or in the release notes. :weeskull:

They did several point updates for PS CS6:

In the first, they installed Photoshop Extended (if you weren't already running it) without any warning. When opening PS after this update, you were informed you were now running a "trial version" of the software and were then prompted to purchase it. It was unclear and abtuse, but some users figured out to re-enter their original SN and that would make the "trial" go away. Others (many) got caught in an endless loop and couldn't figure out how to get back to the normal, causing many to have to re-install Photoshop..

Then, for the next point update, billed as new support for Retina displays, one suddenly found they had removed the "View Print Size" option from the View menu.
It turns out many, many users rely on this function (myself included)..
Apparently, after the outcry and outrage, they've declared this change to be "temporary" and they've made a hack script available as an Action to restore this functionality, but it's a 3-step process now instead of a keyboard shortcut..

But the really egregious thing to me is> they didn't even mention these changes in the release notes. The user was rudely treated..
It shakes my confidence in Adobe.

Hey boots!

Good to see you out of the studio for a second. Actually, great to see you around. Happy New Year.

Rick

Adobe makes some fine and needed products but I have never once accused them of actually listening to their customers or bothering to get any feedback prior to removing things people use/installing things people don't want etc.

Hi you guys!!
It's great to be back..
Rick, you're lookin' in fine fettle.
And Damien- you just get younger every year! ;)

Happy Joyous New Year's day to you all :)

You put it so well Damien- tho they do have some very responsive and helpful "employees" who frequent the Adobe forums. Often, these folks are the conduit for getting the engineers to fix stuff brought to light by the users..

And also on the bright side, the new "mixer brush" in CS5 is <frikkin' awesome>. :dance:
With it, PS can pretty much do anything brush-wise that Painter can do..

So now I don't have to try and deal with Painter anymore, which despite my eternal optimism for improvement with successive versions- is still pretty quirky, overly complicated, and just does not handle larger files gracefully. I can now work mostly in PS and use Painter for small specialized sub-files which I then bring back into PS.

I pretty much stopped with the speed testing of PS after CS4.

It was taking huge amounts of time away from just doing the artwork..

Things that have contributed to this decision-

1) they apparently decided to make the scratch file invisible to the Finder, making it hard to monitor what was actually going on with scratch I/O to disk..

2) with the implementation of 64bit unlimited RAM use by the program, I felt my work was done in so far as the 'basics' of performance enhancement were outlined: use a fast machine with lots of RAM and fast drives- especially for larger files..

3) the program seems to reliably get faster and faster with successive versions, and I know from my contact with certain employees, they are very concerned with speed performance.

I can only agree on having learned what you set out to learn, enough! Do some of that fancy art stuff. (I was gonna say 'fancy art shit', but didn't want to offend :D )

Glad to have you back. BTW, there are pretty simple ways to get around Apple making the Users Library invisible.

Great to see you around and about.

Rick

BTW, If you have your users directory on another drive the Terminal command string to make your user lib visible would look more like this:

chflags nohidden /Volumes/Local/Users/yer name/Library/

That is where Local is the name of the user drive and your short name next.

Rick

Thanks Rick. And you can call it "art shit" anytime you want:p (I do- as I age I have even worse trash mouth)

Yes, thanks on the Terminal command. I just use Cocktail's checkbox for it- along with the invisible items checkbox.

I've retro-graded to SL..

Photoshop working much better now, thank you, and Cloud me not too :)

But seriously, I feel like I have my Mac back (oh wow, I can "save" a document again!), it's fast as hell and frankly, I don't see anything super-compelling to make me wanna be in Mountain Lion land just yet.. I figured it was gonna be awesome but.. me thinks it's still a work-in-progress.. and from what I saw, ML didn't "feel" as fast as SL- but that's subjective I know..

:dance:

I have always been a Snow Leopard fan. Its feeling of powerfulness far exceeds that of Lion and ML, which seem to add a lot of stuff for iPads and iPhones that a pro may not need, while complicating the ability to do simple stuff.

I am running ML. Someone has to do so to find out where the problems are - like that silly security setting Apple puts into your preferences that by default says only downloads from Apple are safe and secure, to disallow all others. That is the level of annoyance for the little piddly stuff. The larger things all effect productivity and are less negotiable with a simple trip to the preferences control panel.

R

yeah I've got ML on one of those KC 21 external FW enclosures.......still work in SL and like it much better!