What system spec for large images?

[Taz]

I'm due to get my film scanner in the next day or two and was wondering if my PC will be able to handle the enormous file sizes that will be generated from the scans. I'm planning to scan at the highest possible quality so the images are going to be 50-70MB in size.

I've got Corel Paintshop Pro XI as my image editting software and plan to use this to transcode the scanned images down to JPGs for sharing with family and friends.

Now, my PC is getting on a bit. The basic spec is:

• Athlon 64 3550+ CPU
• 2 x WD Raptor 74GB drives
• 2GB RAM
• nVidia 7800GT video card

I'm guessing this should be fine to manipulate large images but would appreciate comments from anyone who has done something similar. I don't really want to have to upgrade my PC!

[Bobster]

i don't know how PSP works, but with PS you take the size of your file, say an A4 @ 24MB and multiply by 5 and thats the amount of physical RAM needed to open without hitting PS Scratch

2GB of RAM will do just fine

oh these days a huge file size is 200MB+

A3 = 49MB in 8bit or 99MB in 16bit

do you really need to scan that high for sharing with family and friends?

i'm currently editing some photos for a book with the option for the photographer to have large prints made and they're running in @ 400MB @ 16bit i have 2GB of RAM

[Funkstar]

gone are the days when photo editing demanded a higher spec PC than most other things.

[Nick F]

You should be fine, I mess around with 40-50mb files on my Mac Mini in Photoshop and it runs smoothly

[Taz]

i don't know how PSP works, but with PS you take the size of your file, say an A4 @ 24MB and multiply by 5 and thats the amount of physical RAM needed to open without hitting PS Scratch

2GB of RAM will do just fine

oh these days a huge file size is 200MB+

A3 = 49MB in 8bit or 99MB in 16bit

do you really need to scan that high for sharing with family and friends?

i'm currently editing some photos for a book with the option for the photographer to have large prints made and they're running in @ 400MB @ 16bit i have 2GB of RAM

Thanks for the info. What I want to do is initially scan everything into the highest possible quality and save to a lossless format. From there i'll scale them down to JPGs for sharing but I still want to keep the original high quality scans as my permanent photo archive.

I got the scanner today so i'll be trying it out this evening. I just got the figure of 50-70MB from a few review sites. I'll know the final file sizes when i've tried it out.

Anyway, i'm glad the PC spec seems to be okay as I really didn't want to spend any more money at this time of the year!

[Edit]: The scanner came with a copy of Photoshop Elements 2.0. Is this any good (i.e. worth installing)?

[Bobster]

Elements is a cut down version of photoshop - u can upgrade to a full version of PS from it tho'

[vicar]

Photoshop Elements 2.0.is worth installing, if you like it you can upgrade to v3.

[Bobster]

v5 u mean

[vicar]

Typo error V5.