11
\$\begingroup\$

I'm generating some large imagery and am trying to find a decent application that can handle these well.

I realize there are various flash based ones for viewing on the web but I'd ideally like an windows app.

Any suggestions?

Improve this question
\$\endgroup\$
2

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
8
\$\begingroup\$

I spend a lot of time experimenting and working with pretty high MP images, as I have been researching approaches and algorithms for extreme digital upscaling of RAW images. I regularly take my original 12.2mp images to multi-foot dimensions comprised of anywhere from 220 megapixels (55x44" print @ 300PPI) to 2.4 gigapixels (96x72" print @ 600PPI.) I use photoshop for viewing my work.

In my experience, with a system that has 12 gigs of DDR3 triple channel memory, Photoshop is able to handle images several hundred megapixels in size pretty darn well. When I get up to around 600-700mp or so, things start to slow down (this is when all my physical memory is consumed, and swap usage starts.) Working with gigapixel images ultimately means that you just start churning on disk more. I recently upgraded to an SSD drive for my primary/swap drive, and the performance of working with 800mp or larger images has improved considerably, however it is best if you aren't running other apps when working with gigapixel images. It should also be noted that any processing you apply to a gigapixel image is going to take some time, regardless of what that processing is...and even with a very fast system.

Improve this answer
\$\endgroup\$
3
  • \$\begingroup\$ This is funny, because I process my 14MP images in a 1GB netbook with just a Intel Atom! \$\endgroup\$
    – tomm89
    Feb 2, 2011 at 3:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ Great, thanks.. I'm currently running with 6gb of ram on a 10k rpm disk, which doesn't quite seem to be cutting it at the moment for photoshop... I'll look into getting at least an SSD and perhaps a new set of ram \$\endgroup\$
    – easyjo
    Feb 2, 2011 at 13:10
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ You might need to tweak your Photoshop performance settings, @easyjo. By default, Photoshop is configured to use around half of your physical memory, only puts temp files on one disk, and is optimized for "average" image editing. You can increase the physical memory pool to 95% of available memory, and optimize photoshop's caches for "Big and Flat" images (high MP images). That should help your editing performance quite a bit, assuming you work on one at a time. Once your image size gets larger than the available physical memory, things slow down. \$\endgroup\$
    – jrista
    Feb 2, 2011 at 17:40
5
\$\begingroup\$

Microsoft has Deep Zoom (a.k.a.Seadragon, a.k.a Zoom.it, a.k.a.MultiScaleImage), which is part of Silverlight. The images need to be pre-processed by the Deep Zoom Tools or a similar tool, which breaks the image into tiles at many different resolutions, starting at a 1px x 1px version all the way up to the full version. The pre-processing will require some time, particularly for a 100+ MP image, but once it's been done, it can be very easily viewed using even a low-end system.

Microsoft didn't invent this type of image viewing, but their implementation is pretty good. The control only uses image information that's relevant to the current view, and doesn't bother to download or hold in memory every single pixel.

I don't know of any single-purpose Deep Zoom viewer program, but there could be one that exists. A Silverlight app can run out-of-browser as a standalone application (as of version 3). If you have any .NET programming experience, this would be trivial to write.

Of course, this won't be much use if you want to edit the image, but if all you're looking for is a way to open it up without bringing your system to its knees, it would be great.

Improve this answer
\$\endgroup\$

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.