System Requirements

Magic Bullet PhotoLooks supports the following host applications. The product does not run in Photoshop Elements.

• Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS4, Photoshop CS5 and higher.
• Aperture 3 and higher.
• Lightroom 2, Lightroom 3 and higher.

For the Macintosh platform, PhotoLooks does not support PowerPC systems. We only support Intel-based Macs.

For the Windows platform, we have three PhotoLooks 1.5 installers: A 64-bit installer, a 32-bit installer and a Lightroom installer. The 64-bit installer works with the 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4 and CS5. The 32-bit installer works with all other supported versions of Photoshop. The Lightroom installer installs for Lightroom 2 and 3. There is no installer for Aperture as it is a Mac-only application.

Rendering with PhotoLooks

Once you have chosen your color design, the PhotoLooks plug-in needs to render its output. PhotoLooks renders using your computer's CPU and GPU, which makes its renders extremely fast. Once the render is complete, you will be back in Photoshop proper with the color design applied.

To properly run PhotoLooks 1.5, we recommend having a minimum of 2 GB of RAM. Photoshop requires 1 GB RAM to operate and Lightroom and Aperture each require 2 GB RAM to operate properly, so we do recommend having 4 GB RAM or more if possible. NOTE: Version 1.0 and 1.1 of PhotoLooks require a minimum of 1 GB RAM.

To properly run PhotoLooks, we recommend having a minimum of 15 GB of free hard drive space. This amount lets you properly use the maximum file size supported by Photoshop, whcih is 30,000 pixels by 30,000 pixels. Please note that if you are working with a large image, the PhotoLooks render can take several minutes to process the final render.

This recommendation is based on PhotoLook's need to accommodate a temporary tiling process used during its render. In this process, small 'tiles' get written to the hard disk in order to break the work up into manageable chunks. At times, if your image is large enough, this required space can be multiple gigabytes of data. The disk usage is only temporary. When PhotoLooks is finished rendering and you come back to Photoshop, the tiles are removed from disk.

Since the processing requirements vary wildly by the number of tools in a look, it is difficult to give exact output or render speed expectations on every system with every look. On the highest-end systems such as a Mac Pro or PC workstation with the Quadro 4000 series of graphic cards, you can expect relatively speedy rendering.

Color Profiles

PhotoLooks supports a number of color profiles. A 'color profile' is an association between two different color models. In this case, we are talking about those shared by your monitor and by PhotoLooks for color management purposes. The list of supported color profiles is:

• Monitor RGB - Color LCD
• ColorSync RGB - Generic RGB Profile
• Adobe RGB
• Apple RGB
• ColorMatch RGB
• ProPhoto RGB
• sRGB
• CIE RGB
• Generic RGB Profile
• SDTV NTSC
• SDTV PAL

Graphics card suggestions

Due to PhotoLooks GPU/CPU rendering capabilities we recommend that you have these types of graphics cards for a faster render.

PhotoLooks supports a wide range of cards from both ATI or NVIDIA. For ATI cards, we suggest a 9600 XT or greater, or an X series card starting with the X700 series

For NVIDIA cards, we suggest the 6600 model and higher or QuadroFX 1300 and up. Cards with higher model numbers and a minimum of 128 MB of RAM can run PhotoLooks. For users working with larger images, we suggest that the video card have at least 256 MB of RAM. In all cases, we suggest using the latest video drivers for your graphics card.