Larry Wrote:
>>On the other hand, you may notice that T.Lemke's shareware
>>Graphics Gonverter runs many times faster than Adobe's PhotoShop
>>(which is pig slow on our yesteryear progigy G3s).  Now, at the
>>risk of oversimplifying, I wager that both are chock full of home
>>brew convertion FN routines.  And I wager that Lemke is the
>>consumate goat using FNs as fast as Gariepy-Purves "GP2" FNs while
>>PhotoShop is programmed by a flock of sheep who wouldn't dream of
>>tailoring their code to minimize FN calling overhead.

Then Heather Wrote:

>I think it's a little unfair to compare Photoshop to
>GraphicConverter.  Photoshop is nearly three times as large as
>GraphicConverter and GraphicConverter doesn't do 1/4 of what
>Photoshop.  Don't misunderstand me, GraphicConverter is a great
>program but it is mainly an image converter.  If it was comparable to
>Photoshop it would displace Photoshop as an image editing program.  I
>know a number of graphic artists that use both but only for what
>GraphicConverter does that Photoshop wasn't designed for.
>
>I would wager that Photoshop was designed using C++ and maybe even
>some framework.  It's doubtful that a program with it's complexity
>could be quickly brought to market using C alone, squashing bugs and
>having time to optimize the program to a level appropriate to your
>liking.
>
>I'd also doubt that Mr. Lemke goes to extremes to optimize his
>program for ultimate speed.  From what I've heard most programmers
>leave the optimization to the compiler, it's designed for it.  In
>those rare cases of speed freaks that just have to squeeze the last
>bit out of the processor there is still a lot of hand-coding that one
>can do but the compiler usually does a better job because of the
>complexity of the PPC processor.
>
>Having used Photoshop and GraphicConverter quite a bit, I don't see
>how it's possible to truly compare the two.  Most operations in
>Photoshop that require a lot of time to process use filters.  Few, if
>any of these Photoshop filters work well in GraphicConverter so a
>direct comparison is unlikely.
>
>I also think it's a little unfair to characterize the team of
>Photoshop programmers as sheep.  The only sheep in programming are
>using Microsoft products.  Just imagine Photoshop written in Visual
>Basic!
>--
>Heather Donahue
>--
>non sum qualis eram


Larry, I don't know what you mean by "runs many times faster"...not sure
what parameters you are measuring that by.


(Photoshop is or used to be built on a MacApp shell by the way)

Photoshop is blazingly fast, even on my old Quadra 630 (v3.01) and current
Umax 603ev (v5.0). I am not even on a G3!  It does take a while to boot up.
But it is a monolith of imaging power.

The algorithms can't be beat. You can bet that most all of them have been
optimized...those that matter at least.  I speak from the process of
matching some of the algorithms' performance or capability.

Photoshop will be slow generally only if there is a lot of scratch disk
activity going on. More RAM will usually solve that. But my experience is
with from v5.0 on down. The newer versions might be slower due to all that
Web bloat added.


GC is decent, great for opening a lot of images fast. Not that great for
editing them other than color and brightness things and a quick crop in my
opinion. It is in dire need of optimization in places. The rotation code
Graphic Converter uses is pathetic for an application of that caliber. I
can rotate a large image with FB code in 30 seconds. The same image, same
angle, at -less- quality is about 2 minutes in GC.  Photoshop can rotate
the same image in  about 10-15 seconds. Lemke's median uses the wrong
algorithm. His redeye filter just desaturates the pixels without repairing
them. His scaling code leaves moire patterns (rounding error I would bet,
given my experience with same)

Photoshop's programmer's know what they are doing. Lemke is a fine
responsive programmer, but the app is like an old creaky ship in places.

There are places where his speed is notable. But there are also places
where I don't know how it can be that slow unless it was made using
Hypercard.

Photoshop is also keeping a history file that lets one have multiple undo's
while GC is a once undo, it's gone type of thing.

GC uses one gWorld per image generally or a refresh from disk, any mouse
click invokes a full disk write of the undo file....very long for a large
image..that is slow to me.

Lest one think I am slamming GC, I wrote him recently about these issues
politely and even told him how to fix the redeye filter to do a proper
recolor of the afflicted pixels, thus giving away my own upcoming version
of one for my own app Compositor.

Compositor isn't there yet, but is getting there.

Photoshop is a max app. One has to program a similar thing to appreciate
how elegant it is in places, particularly in interface approach, etc..

Way beyond Graphic Converter for other than conversions, is Color-It! from
MicroFrontier, and the related versions of recent. The best value out there
for ages.

Robert Bob