File size too large.

[Atomelectron]

I have been creating illustrations in Photoshop. I want the printed illustrations to be 48" x 48". I want the illustrations to be crisp and sharp. I have been setting my PSD file size to 48" x"48" at 300 dpi. From the starting point the blank file is 593 megabytes. As I build the project the file size quickly grows to 4GB and this will drastically overwork my Mac and working on a 4GB file becomes too slow. Am I doing something wrong? Any suggestions for me? I am working off of a Mac Pro 6 core i7 with 32 megs of Ram

 

[nurgle]

300 dpi at that size is huge, but unless you are printing to photographic laser printer on photo paper, it mass overkill. 200 DPI is more than enough to any large format inkjet printers, and I owned sever, including a 44" epson, 24" epson etc (lost in the floods) th eproblem is not the file size but the layers, which multily th eproblem.. but I am using a 2012 27"iMac and my PSD's can go up to 1 gig with no poblems... beyond that yes photoghop had a problem... the internal temp files that photoshopmakes are the cludge where all the backlog happens... I can only suggest adding a SSD as the scratch disk file tospeed things up, and have plenty of hard drive space available.. the common advise... (minimise the number of fonts, I have 200,000, (but not all active at the one time). etc. regards, Sandy.. (I know this is not much help.. it is a problem we are all caught up with...)