My system is a workstation, 2x xeon x5450 quad cores oc to 4.0 Ghz..., 128 gigs of ram, I run photoshop on a 64 gb ramdisk... I can't imagine any of my system specs are the limiting factor, such a setup will most certainly outperform any stock i7, and be quite similar when both are maximum oc'd... As I am using server memory, it is fully buffered and slightly slower, but has some benefits of accuracy and stability...
I am using CS6, the 32 bit version will only let me allocate 3.2 gb of ram. The images I am working with are 8"x10" 5760 dpi, so 46,080x57,600. But I am working with 4 instances of each of them and using them as 'smart filters', one for each color.
Everything runs smooth and fast, up until I click on the vanderlee filter, then every click takes 90 seconds of full cpu use, locking up the system and generating the error, I have contacted the VanDerLee people about the issue, maybe they will have some insight. So I am just not certain what is causing the issue.... I really wish it supported 64 bit Photoshop though! It would certainly solve all my issues. Too bad the project isn't open source, it wouldn't be too hard to make it 64-bit compatible, as long as one had access to the source code...
Regarding the color change, if I split the image into its grayscale cmyk components and then halftone with bitmap the colors turn out perfect, but I get very limited control of the dots. If I halftone those same grayscale layers with VanDerLee I get a similar result, with much more control, however my colors are getting all wonky. In both cases I am using 'multiply' to re-merge the layers. I have made sure to turn off all other possible effects in VanDerLee, smoothness set to '0', etc. I even made sure both cases were at 200 lpi, left VanDerLee small dots at 0, large dots at 100, etc.
I am going to try making the dots specifically black&white with VanDerLee's, then overlay colors on each layer with a 'mask' in CMYK mode, that also might help fix my color situation.
That sounds like a wonderful workaround to the 200 lpi issue, I can certainly handle that... The projects I am currently working on are 300 LPI. However doubling the resolution seems completely out of the question in my case without 64-bit support...
I am certain I will use VanDerLee's halftone filter in many of my future projects, however I think for this one I am sticking with the photoshop 'halftone' filter, combined with 'variations', in order to achieve my desired result.
To summarize and clarify exactly what I'm doing and why. Using a calibrated scanner a screen printed 200 lpi page at 4 different angles all 90 degrees apart is scanned, the 4 angles are then combed to get a very clean scan. I then remove all the dots with a Gaussian blur, followed up with a sharpening. I then split the image into its CMYK components, I then recreate halftone dots, and adjust the images midtones with variations in order to get a color match, which seems to result in a dot-size and spacing match. I then print the image on an inkjet printer and examine the image at a far and with a 500x microscope, it is nearly indistinguishable from the original.
I use the exact workflow and settings with all of my photos, and other things I want to print at a high quality image. The final result is undeniably superior to just printing an RGB image. I think this is the best that I can achieve without a proper RIP. Very high quality prints, on a very limited budget.
