Some time back, it seemed to me that the Smart Sharpen suddenly was taking longer than it used to, and I chalked it up to the increased file size. I would wait and wait even for the preview to finish. If I dragged the preview box around, it would leave a transparent background which would slowly fill in.
It seems like it's not writing to scratch. Opening PS, I see about 75 MB in scratch. Opening a file in PS, it jumps to 570 MB, but now, it does not increase in size after sharpening. That's not the behavior I've seen before. After Smart Sharp on similar sized files, I would see scratch size go up to2 or three Gigs, sometimes as large as 6G. Now, no change at all!
I'm not complaining, mind you, but I want to know why, so as to be able to go back to this condition should it revert to the slower one.
I run Smart Sharp usually with some degree of Highlight fade. It is usually sitting between 50% and 80%, with some forays up to 100%. Last week, I sharpened a file that had no significant highlights, so I took the opportunity to move the slider to zero. That's what t did it.
Last night, I had to fade it again and there it was! Turns out that at any setting other than zero, the timing increases by an order of magnitude. At 100%, the timing for 90% of the time it takes to complete, then finishes.
100% is faster than at 50%, by about 10%.
Because I keep the slider at some Highlight fade as a matter of course, I didn't see that it was causing the delay. What I see is that the Progress bar stops at about 1/3 of it's length. At zero, it does not stop.
Just opening the Smart Sharp with the slider non-zero adds a huge amount to the Scratch disk. With the slider at zero, Scratch does not increase.
Smart sharp seems to be generating an algorithm or some sort of tuning of the filter for the slider.