Hi all,
I have been through the ringer on this one. I am an amateur photographer and I use Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Bridge on almost a daily basis. About a month ago, I opened one of my images of a silhouette. Instantly I was struck by the noise it contained, particularly where the colour transitions were. In other words, there are thin circles of noise radiating outward from the sun itself instead of having a smooth transition from one tone to the next. Of course I began to inspect closely all of my other images and started to see the same thing to varying degrees. I had my PC in the shop for five days while the technician tried everything including three different graphics cards, reinstalling Windows XP, PS CS3, etc, running things from his HARD drive, etc. I have replaced the power supply with a 460 W unit, replaced the monitor, power cords, etc. And still have this issue. What's really interesting is that it also happens on the tech guys PC, but did not show up on my friends until today (using those same images saved to an SD card). I have had the camera into the camera tech guys (Nikon D80 with Nikon lenses) and they say it is fine. Final clue: When I saved some of the images to an SD card, I brought it back home and tried it again on my PC. No noise. I looked at the original from my hard drive and, lots of noise. I went back to the SD card version of the same image that a minute ago had no noise and, yup, tons of noise. I have had this problem for over a month now and am ready to lose it. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Paul.Paul,
First off Welcome Aboard !

The monitor; vid card and camera have all been replaced and checked out, so that leaves the remaining as common denominators:
The Flash card/cards...how many were used here and how old are they ?
The hard drive...again how old and are there any other problems/issues with the drive that you know of ?
The Photoshop software itself...can you re-install it ?

Run disk clean and defrag for the hard drive.
Re-install Photoshop
The flash card...still more info needed here as if it's more than one card it's happening on then it may be the card reader itself.

Just a few things to start on look forward to an update.As a photog and image worker myself this is an INTRIGUING problem to say the least.

I don't have any real answers but am thinking that the image files must (in theory) be intact (not corrupt) themselves as I'd have thought you'd either get a CRC type error or incomplete image etc ... as against an all over noise effect.

To have that makes me think or wonder if there is a software aspect at all - and I don't think you mentioned file types. If this was on JPG files then wondering if the decompression is causing trouble. So - wonder what occurs with BMP or TIFF - the former in particular as that will have no COMPRESSION. Just thinkin out loud really.DO NOT SAVE THE FILES after opening-

it sounds like your computer is running at a lower colour depth then the photos. when you open then, they exhibit the SYMPTOMS- you subsequently save it. viewing that same file on another computer will exhibit the same problem.


Also- file format, as ChrisXPPro stated, could be an issue. GIF- for example, would cause this.Hi guys,
First, thanks for all the great responses. Thus far I have tried what patio recommended and ran a disk clean on all drives (there are three). That worked for a while but seemed to stop working. I purged all Photoshop caches and it went back to working. Now it is back to not working. I defragmented drive C and am now in the process of doing the same for D. All files are RAW format (NEF) and have never given me this sort of problem before. The problem is occuring with all images whether they have been saved to hard drive, copied to hard drive or are viewed directly from the original card. I think there is some small progress here as it was momentarilly resolved. I am not sure what the process is, but I know that when any of my software opens a RAW image (or JPEG for that matter) there is usually a moment where the image looks completely pixelated and then it kind of "settles" in and becomes clear. That step doesn't happen anymore. Hope that makes sense. Again, I appreciate all your input. Cheers, Paul.How much RAM on this machine ? ?

DLoad and run MemTest one evening before bedtime...let it run overnite. Just for the halibut....