Images for most common uses aren't really large enough to be a concern:
- Web image: 600 x 600 = 1/3 mega-pixel
- Screen background: 1024 x 864 = 1 mega-pixel
- 4" x 6" print @ 300dpi: 1200 x 1800 = 2 mega-pixels
- Tee shirt: 2000 x 2000 = 4 mega-pixels
- A2 chart @ 80ppc: 3360 x 4752 = 16 mega-pixels
Even images over 50 mega-pixels won't seriously strain the resources of the program, if your computer has enough resources.
- Large poster @ 200dpi: 7000 x 4600 = 32 mega-pixels
- A0 poster @ 80ppc: 6728 x 9512 = 61 mega-pixels
- Biggest we've ever done: 10,000 x 10,000 = 95 mega-pixels
These large images may take a while to render, but will probably take even longer to save to disk! The PNG compression process can take quite a lot of computation on an image this big.
We've generated 10k x 10k images on both the Windows and Macintosh version. Our computers have 512 Meg RAM each and are a 1.2GHz Pentium and a 800MHz G4 respectively. It takes under 5 min. or so to generate and save. (We don't know exactly, we got bored watching it and made tea...) The images look great!