Image editing programs - heavy memory usage

I am wondering whether the memory use I see is common to the Mac OS X - touted as the graphics pros choice - it's seems anything but to me.

I have a mid 2010 iMac 27"

• 3.2 GHz Intel Core i3
• 12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
• ATI Radeon HD 5670 512 MB
• Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4

That spec should be more than ample. No.

Pixelmator uses up to 5GB yes - GB) just opening the app. If I dare to open an actual image - let's say a 120mb jpg for editing - the memory usage is even higher - usually resulting in the image not opening at all.

GIMP is similar, but not as extreme - opening the file uses around 2GB.

Nevertheless, both of the above seem to me to be examples of excessive memory usage. Certainly, my machine slows to a crawl when doing anything related to images - pretty hopeless really.

Pixelmator developers ask for buckets of info (supplied) but no solution.

So, my question is, is this type of memory usage common for the Mac OS X?

If it is, it is, clearly, not the wonderful graphics solutions touted by Apple and it's followers.

NB. I am a very experienced user of PC's and fairly new to the disappointing world of Apple.

Any feedback welcome,

Cheers,

Mike

I have a 2ghz Core2Duo 13" Unibody with 4gb ram - Photoshop CS4 - no issues at all. Handles large, multi-layered images without issue.

I'll fire up my iMac and check the ram usage with Photoshop CS5 to get you some more comparable stats. Though I've never had a performance issue and deal with 100mb-200mb panoramic PSD files along with more regular 14mp+ images.

Don't use GIMP or Pixelmator.

Where's the RAM from? Genuine Apple stuff? or guaranteed compatible?

27" i7 iMac 2009, 8gb RAM

Photoshop CS5 'at rest' uses 277mb
with 200mb of files loaded it uses 1.92gb

While 2 gb is a reasonable chunk that's nothing more than I'd expect and no slowdown is noticeable in CS5 or system wide.

My gut feeling is that you have either a disk or ram issue.

The best place to start is a Permission and Disk repair in Disk Utility. Also make sure you have enough free disk space for the apps scratch disks etc.

You may also want to run the automated scripts in a tool like Onyx to clear down your caches etc.

Do you encounter issues day-to-day on the system or just using Pixelmator and GIMP?

Sir: something is wrong, and it's on your end.

Here's a screenshot from my Activity Monitor, seconds after opening Pixelmator:





So as you can see, your experience is not typical. That's probably why the Pixelmator developers wanted to see logs and such.