Friday 3 July 2009

More bits and pieces...

First off i just saw that the lovely Courtney Brims has a new flash site with some cool new work, if you havent already, go check out her work, the flash makes the site a little slow to actually view the full-size images- although it could just be my connection.. still great work anyway.



Secondly, Diskursdisko have a good interview up with Kevin Dart. Kevins work on his Yuki 7 project seems to be everywhere at the moment- and rightly so, its beautifully crafted and imagined. I have been a fan of his work for years, ever since i started seeing his retro posters start appearing in places like cgTalk and its a real pleasure to see the Yuki work gain momentum! Check out the interview with him here.



Im postponing my process piece about the book cover for Forbidden Sea, ive had another last minute alteration and until i get an official sign-off from the publishers i cant really do anything about posting any images up. Hopefully i will be able to sort it out next week.

Something i just wanted to share on a tech type note, recently my secondary monitor started packing in so i purchased a new tft, i run a dual screen setup so i have a 24" w/s for my working area and upgraded from an old 15" to a 22" w/s for palettes from apps like photoshop, painter, illustrator and the like and have room to have mail or anything else open i should need. Anyway, after adding the larger monitor and reorganizing my palettes etc i noticed a really bad lag while painting in photoshop. I would do a brush stroke and then the timer would appear for a second as if the CPU was stressed a bit just by the application of a few pixels. Not a major thing but irritating. So thinking it would likely be the graphic card drivers or the OS needing updates etc i did the usual updates and promptly killed my system.

Now i would think that if you got the latest drivers for your graphics card it wouldnt mean a near terminal problem for the machine but thats exactly what happened. So after wasting practically an entire day messing around un-installing driver, rebooting and traveling back in time i got the system stable again and cleaned up. After thinking that it may be the higher res of the new monitor killing the graphics card then finding that it probably wasnt the problem, i turned my attention to photoshop itself- after all, thats where my original problem started.

After more research and trying various possible fixes it turned out to be something so stupid i almost wept. With my new found screen real-estate i had opened the info palette (as well as a few others i dont usually have active), turns out that was the problem. Working on hires files which have quite a few layers, the info palettes live updates on x/y, color etc was basically killing the CPU. Close it off- no more irritating timer lag! Bear this in mind if you start noticing the same behavior from PS.

No comments: