Performance Tips

From PSDTUTS Wiki

Photoshop is well known for being a bit of a beast and a resource hog, though it generally runs fine on my old Mac mini when preparing images for the web. Users are always looking for a way to speed the program up. The easiest way is to go and splurge money on more RAM, a better processor, a whole new computer, and so on—but there are things you can do to make Photoshop run that little bit faster.

Performance Preferences

By altering some of Photoshop’s Preferences you can enhance performance both within Photoshop and within the operating system so it becomes more tolerable to use in general while Photoshop is open.

To open Preferences, hit Ctrl/Cmd+K and navigate to the Performance section. The first thing you’ll see here is the big RAM slider, and adjusting this to between 60% and 70% is perhaps one of the first performance tips you’ll hear from any Photoshop veteran. Some people think boosting this to 100% will help, but what that will do is drain RAM away from your operating system—your operating system becomes unusable, and because Photoshop runs on your operating system, it certainly won’t be getting any performance benefits from this. So 60% is optimal, 70% is still good—just don’t go higher than that.

If you have a secondary hard drive installed, you can set it as a scratch disk and then use the arrows to move it to the top of the list, so that Photoshop uses it first. A scratch disk is most efficient when it is being used only for that purpose, and the startup disk is used to run the operating system and all your other apps too, so it does a poor job. Do not use external USB or FireWire hard drives; it should be a fast internal drive with plenty of spare space (1GB free at the minimum).

Also on the Performance Preferences pane are Photoshop’s caching options. As a rule of thumb, lower cache levels are better when working with smaller images, so a cache level of 1-2 is useful when working on web slices, for instance. However, when working with large images, the cache actually improves performance, so you can turn it up between 4 and 8.

It’s worth noting that a cache level of 1 effectively turns caching off.

Before you leave the Preferences pane, go back to the General section and switch off the Automatically Launch Bridge checkbox; this app is known to be slower than Photoshop itself and you most likely don’t need to use it. While you’re here you can also uncheck Export Clipboard which may provide some extra memory.

Improving Performance in the Workspace

One easy adjustment to make, if you’re using medium or large layer thumbnails, is to use smaller thumbs. These are quicker to load and use up less memory. Under the minimize/close buttons on the layer palette, there’s a down-facing arrow next to three horizontal lines. This icon indicates the palette menu—choose the option at the bottom of this menu, Palette Options, which will allow you to change the thumbnail size. Setting it to None will make things even faster, but may make it harder to work with the file.

Before performing resource intensive operations, save your file to free up some active memory. When a preview window accompanies that resource intensive operation, zoom out to make the preview smaller before attempting it.

You can purge much of the junk that accumulates in active memory using the Edit > Purge > All command, though you should be judicious in your use of this and ensure you won’t need the image’s History anymore for any reason.

If you have a very large collection of fonts, this may be affecting Photoshop’s startup times. Whenever you launch Photoshop it pre-loads all necessary fonts. Use a font management utility to activate fonts when you need them, rather than having them all on, all the time.

Use the preset manager for your brushes, gradients and so on to keep them minimalist and delete things liberally. Load extra brushes on demand rather than with the rest of the app, because again, Photoshop loads these things on startup.

You should also drag and drop layers between open files, since copying and pasting stores and retrieves from active memory. This will only make a difference as a cumulative habit, but if you copy and paste a lot, it’ll be a huge difference.

Related Links

• Add a link
• Add a link

Register/Login | Community Portal |Random page | Subscribe | Help