Over processing??????

inches mean little in the digital world. saying 8x10 can be 8x10 at 72 ppi (pixels per inch) or 1200 ppi. what's the actual pixel count you are working with?

filters vary a great deal in render times. it all depends on what's under the hood. your machine and operating system can make a large difference also. vista tends to be a hog all by itself. i'd upgrade to win7. it's more stable and doesnt suck up the resources of the machine quite so badly. also, are you running vista 32 bit or vista 64 bit because just because you have 4 gigs of ram in the machine doesnt mean it's being used. 32 bit can only use a max of 3 gigs and on most 32 bit machines it wont even use that much. also, i seem to remember that FF has a limit of using a max of 2 gigs, but you might want to verify that from one of the FF, inc. folks.

additionally, filters are not always optimized for speed by their authors, although the ones you've mentioned do tend to do a pretty job of it, especially vladimir, since he's the owner of the company still, there are a lot of filters that could stand some help in this area by other authors.

you can also help your speed a bit by turning off windows processes and services that you dont need. go to http://www.blackviper.com for help with this.

also make sure in the options of FF that you set to use all cores of your machine.

Size is relative to need of print, I print nothing less than 350 DPI resolutions, so that would be like, 8X10=2400pxX3000px at 350 DPI, 11X17= 6144px X 4096px at 350 resolution, or standard wall piece is 25200px X 16800px at 350 DPI ETC.

Processing can take a long time which I will worry less about than that the filter as a plug-in or a standalone can not process 6144pxX 4096px 350DPI and simply hangs, a fader might help more than doing all the math, say a opacity slider, & an apply to new layer check box.

I guess my idea of taking these wonderful filters and applying them to the images like Nik plug-in is something that would be wonderful to do, I wonder if there is a way to link its processing directly to the photoshop limits, or even a system rescource tab, set limits manually.

Thanks Guys I am going to continue to play with this until I get a good understanding of how it all works, maybe blocking the bip maps will be enough to gain functionality

Chas, a couple of hints:

1. Use the standalone version for huge images.
2. Turning off anti-aliasing will speed things up drastically.
3. If FF shows as 'Not responding' don't kill the process, let it do its job.
4. Consider buying at least a 2-core CPU (the more the better). The rendering speed almost doubles when doubling the number of cores.

And, already mentioned, you may want to edit the filter and remove unneeded Blurs, Sharpens and High Passes.