Printing in Photoshop CS4

[dsheridan]

I recently "upgraded" to Photoshop CS4 from Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate and find the print functionality of CS4 cumbersome and very lengthy in overall time to produce the print. The time from selecting print to actually hitting the print button from the preview window is 10's of minutes between the two. I am printing the same size TIFF files produced in Lightroom via CS4 and Paint Shop. Any thoughts out there as to what I may be doing wrong that is resulting in such a lenthy time to move through each print function window? Thank you for any insights you can provide.

[Japaslavian]

The main thing you should realize is that CS4 is an industry/professional program, so many people like professional photographers, graphic designers, etc need all those tiny little printing details to be exactly how they want them to get the best results. For instance, getting a print ready for a press job of 500k copies for a magazine is a lot more complicated and complex than printing a picture you've taken through your desktop inkjet printer.
Basically, that's how CS4 is, so try to familiarize yourself with it and you'll get quicker at it.

[dsheridan]

thank you Japaslavian for your reply. Perhaps I did not express my issue clearly. I am quite familiar with the specific steps required to print an image. What I don't understand is why the "rolling donut" rolls for several minutes before the next window for the next step is available. It is taking 20 plus minutes to go from File - Print to Print on the preview window of the printer. And this is just to print a single 8 1/2 x 11 glossy. I just don't see how the expected workflow is to be improved with such a slow down in performance in getting an image prepped for printing. We run a photo lab in our home and often have large amounts of images to get produced in a short amount of time, especially after a shoot. We're very familiar with the printer settings needed for the various sizes and paper qualities we offer. I have to believe something in the imaging chain is not communicating well. Any other thoughts out there please? If it helps I just upgraded my computer to a brand new HP desktop PC with Windows 7 tricked out specifically for managing large image files. The video card is NVIDIA PhysX 32-bit and I checked with the manufacturer that the latest driver is installed. There is tons of RAM and disk space so I just don't know what else to to/check to speed up the rolling donut and get the various windows associated with printing up and selected faster. Can you tell I'm getting a bit frustrated by this? I've spent the past several days reading online and various text books I've purchased and have not found any reference to the slowness. Again, thank you for any insight you can shed.

[dsheridan]

I found the problem! It is a network issue rather than the software. Once I switched my default printer (the photo printer I use) to a text printer when I selected print the print window popped right up as I expected all along. Now why there is a network issue is another story but for now my frustration in the lengthy (sometimes resulting in software crashing due to the long timeout) rolling donuts is behind me. Thank you for your assistance.

[Japaslavian]

Oh, hahaha, well I'm glad you figured out the cause of the problem.