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Photoshop Elements

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Power for Pushing Pixels

I am not an artist. I am not a graphics wizard. I do, however, dabble in pixels for site-related imagery, digital photos, and Keynote presentations. As such, I needed a tool with some power and capability, but I didn't really want to fork out the cash for the full version of Photoshop. So when Photoshop Elements came out for $99, it looked perfect for my needs. There are some downside, of course, when compared to the full program, but for the most part, I've been very happy with Elements.

As of this writing, there is no "G5 Plug-in" for Elements (nor do I think there ever will be such a thing), so this is really a test of just the raw horsepower differences between the G4/733 and the new Dual G5. The same image, a 2048x3072 pixel TIFF that was about 18mb in size, was used for testing on both machines. I then chose a semi-random assortment of filters and timed how long it took to apply each one on both the G4 and the G5. I didn't necessarily use the default settings for each filter, but I did use identical settings on both the G4 and the G5 (the actual settings on each filter aren't shown in the following table).

The first entry in the following table is the time required to launch the application. Unlike the application launch timings in the Rob's Benchmarks section, these are the times required for the second (or subsequent) launch, not the first. First launch times are in a similar ratiio, but clearly take longer on both machines. The last row of the below table is the total amount of time required to load the program and run each of the filters. This time does not include the time necessary to set up and move from one test to the other; it's just the total of each test's time and the application loading time. All times in the following table are in seconds, and shorter bars are better.

I'm not sure how well a Dual 1.42ghz G4 would score on a similar benchmark, but clearly, a 3x performance increase (40 seconds for the whole test versus 126 on the G4) over my previous G4 is very noticeable in day to day use of the program.

I suppose I should break down and buy the full Photoshop package to take advantage of the G5 optimizations and get things done even quicker. But I just don't do enough pixel pushing (nor do I have enough artistic talent!) to justify the expense, so for now, I'll put up with the still-speedy but un-optimized Photoshop Elements.

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