Working on project with hefty dpi

Hello all. I'm relatively new to all this. I'm working on my second book. It's a picture book which is nearly A3 sized as a double spread. I work by scanning line drawings into Photoshop 7 then adding colour digitally. Had a bit of a blow this week as the publisher on my current book requested 1200 dpi. The weight of the dpi is bogging down the computer badly. We're doing everything we can to free up memory but it's hellish. I just wondered if any other designers/illustrators out there have encountered requests for colour work with such a high dpi for work which is unlikely to be printed too large. I'm hoping to negotiate the dpi down with the publisher.

Thanks folks
Lou

 

What's the spec of your PC?

No doubt those files are pretty big, but a good workstation will handle it with few headaches.

 

Could you reduce your canvas size down to a fraction, keep the dpi the same as it is, do the work and then free transform the image back to A3 at the end? I've done this in the past when someone wanted images at a huge canvas size that was slowing my computer down painfully. Wasn't sure it would work but it speeded up the digital painting dramatically and the final quality was good. It was the canvas size that was bogging my machine down rather than the dpi but maybe it's worth a try?