Image Editing slow in Fedora

[Jon Shorie]

We have some 300 dpi 24x36" greyscale scans of some of our plans.  I am 
looking for an image editor that works with linux that is reasonably quick 
for working with these images.  The fiels are saved as a tif image and are 
about 4 mb in size.

When I load one of them into gimp, it balloons to about 90mb in size and 
performance is extremely poor.  I have verified that gimp is not converting 
the image to RGB, but it still is too slow to use on a daily basis.

If I load the image into windoze imaging, it stays as a 4mb image and 
performance is reasonable.

I went through the documentation for gimp, but I did not see anything that 
looks useful.  Any suggestions?