Speed up Photoshop

Posted on September 23, 2008 by Phil   no comments yet

Photoshop is a wondrous piece of software that never ceases to amaze me, but all it’s wonders come at a price, memory. Once your skills develop and you start creating documents with a multitude of different layers and adjustments you will soon see the effects. We can give Photoshop what it wants by changing a few settings under the preferences menu but first I want to suggest a few things.

Buying a new computer

I’m not suggesting you go out and by a new computer but if you are and you want to get the most from Photoshop then here is a great tip. Ask your computer retailer to create a small partition on your hard drive solely for use with Photoshop which should ideally be above 5gb and no more than 10gb (you can have more but it’s not necessary). Another thing to consider is RAM, anything less than 1gb of Ram simply won’t cut it, I would recommend at least 1gb but more likely 2gb. If you are like me and work with multiple programs running you’ll soon see everything grind up to a halt without plenty of memory.

Changing Photoshop’s settings

Once you have your partition and a decent amount of RAM open up Photoshop and go to Edit>Preferences>performance. Below is an image of the preferences dialogue box with the labels 1-3 which I will now explain.

1. Scratch disk is the partition we talked about earlier. Photoshop continuously writes files to the hard disk as you work and therefore can get pretty messed up if you are using the main partition where all your windows files and program files reside. Set this to your new partition and this will help speed things up as well as help reduce fragmentation on your hard drive.
2. Memory Usage is where we can allocate how much of our available RAM to give to Photoshop. I have mine set pretty high but somewhere in the middle of the suggested range would be just fine, 1gb is great if you have it!
3. History states, now you have a dedicated scratch disk solely for Photoshop bump those history states up to 50+ and give yourself that little extra security when working on those big files. Below the history states is the cache levels which I would recommend leaving at the default of 4-6.

I hope this helped you all get the most from your favourite piece of magic.