12-27-2023, 10:34 AM
Gimp work on uncompressed image, which is all the better, because compression uses CPU. And you would be very surprised if your 200K image (because it(s all white) blew up to 500MB just because you added some noise in it...
So yes, your image is 3400 * 15000 = 51Mpx so with 4 channels at one bye each, a single layer of the image is a bit above 200MB. So you have the 200MB background layer, a 200MB buffer where the whole image is rendered, and likely a 51MB selection mask, so it all adds up to a bit more that 450MB.
After that it all depend on what you do with the image (undo steps are often copies of the modified layer...). The very important setting is the "tile cache size"(*) which is essentially how much RAM Gimp will use before overflowing data to disk (which it can do a more efficiently than the default system swapping) but can still slow it down considerably (but at least only Gimp is bogged down). I set it to whatever the system+usual apps don't use. So you can create any image size in Gimp, but beyond some size, it depends on your patience.
Also, don't overdo it, it you very rarely need to create an image that is bigger than 24Mpx.
(*) Preferences > System resources > Resource consumption > Tile cache size
So yes, your image is 3400 * 15000 = 51Mpx so with 4 channels at one bye each, a single layer of the image is a bit above 200MB. So you have the 200MB background layer, a 200MB buffer where the whole image is rendered, and likely a 51MB selection mask, so it all adds up to a bit more that 450MB.
After that it all depend on what you do with the image (undo steps are often copies of the modified layer...). The very important setting is the "tile cache size"(*) which is essentially how much RAM Gimp will use before overflowing data to disk (which it can do a more efficiently than the default system swapping) but can still slow it down considerably (but at least only Gimp is bogged down). I set it to whatever the system+usual apps don't use. So you can create any image size in Gimp, but beyond some size, it depends on your patience.
Also, don't overdo it, it you very rarely need to create an image that is bigger than 24Mpx.
(*) Preferences > System resources > Resource consumption > Tile cache size