This article is based on an article by Marco Sousa. Our thanks to him for the ideas.
Before getting started with Photoshop, we all should have first visited the “Edit > Preferences” menu and change the “Performance” settings to fit our personal taste and computer specifications.
Some of these simple changes can greatly improve how Photoshop performs.
If you never changed the default performance settings in your Photoshop or you just want to double check them to improve the Photoshop performance, here are 9 important and useful points that you may want to consider.
Maybe you already went through that bad feeling of clicking “undo” dozens of times and realising that Photoshop would not provide you with more previous steps, but this problem can be easily resolved by changing the History States setting in the “Edit> Preferences > General” menu.
If you use Undo a lot, you may want to consider adding more states, e.g. set them to ’50? However, be aware that too many states on a single image will usually result in History Palette literally “eating” RAM and if you work with less than 2GB of RAM, you probably should not be using the Undo Feature that often!
Overall, you may add up to 1,000 history state levels in Photoshop!
The Cache Levels setting can be found inside the “Edit > Preferences > Memory and Image Cache” menu, right under the History States. It controls the histogram and the time it takes an image to reappear on the screen after an action is applied to it.
The cache stores thumbnail and file information to make loading times quicker when you return to a previously viewed folder. Purging the cache frees up disk space on your computer.
To purge the cache: Choose Purge Cache from the File Browser menu.
By default, there are 6 cache levels; the number of levels can be increased to the maximum of 8 which will – obviously – increase the rendering speed. It is particular effective when you are working with high-resolution images. When working with smaller view-sizes, e.g. viewing an image at 50% Zoom, the cache levels will determine the number of “down samplings” allowing Photoshop to perform operations faster.
Photoshop uses Image Caching and if you have a good amount of RAM, like at least 2GB and work with high-resolution images, you might want to raise the level to 8 as the speed performance will compensate the memory loss, but if you have a low RAM amount and usually work with small images only (1-4MB), you may want to lower the value to 1 or 2 as the RAM will be better allocated – storing the images rather then caching them.
This option should be turned off! Its sole purpose is to speed up the rendering of histograms in the
Levels dialogue when working on your image at views other than 100 percent. Although the speedier
histogram may seem like a good thing, you’re not getting the real histogram from the full image, but rather a
histogram rendered from whatever cached version happens to be presently in use.
Photoshop really likes RAM and will use every little bit it can grab, but it also allows you to limit the RAM resources of your computer that Photoshop will use, and it even gives you good suggestions for the appropriate range of RAM values it wants [PS CS].
This setting can be found in the “Edit > Preferences > Memory and Image Cache” menu.
The amount of memory (RAM) Photoshop Elements needs is approximately three to five times the file size of your open images. When the amount of memory is insufficient, the application uses any available hard-disk space. To improve the application's performance, you can increase the amount of memory reserved for the application.
Tip. If you use other applications simultaneously with Photoshop Elements, make sure you leave enough memory for the other applications to use.
The displayed available RAM is the value left for applications after the Operating System loads into memory. If you are going to use mostly only Photoshop, or if you have a low amount of memory, you will probably want to give it 75-80% of the available RAM. But if, on the other hand, you are more of a multi-task kind of person with browser, word processor, mail, Twitter client etc. being always opened, then you might want to limit Photoshop to around 50%.
After setting up your memory values, you can keep an eye on how Photoshop is performing. At the base of your image window, click to the right of the document size information and you will be able to choose “Efficiency” which will show you a percentage value. If this value is not 100%, it indicates that if you allocate more RAM to Photoshop, the operations would perform faster. Closing applications or images that you are not using can also increase the efficiency – not exactly a secret, but worth mentioning nevertheless.
Similar to what happened with RAM, Photoshop also uses a good amount of your hard drive space as the so-called “scratch disk” which works as the secondary memory resource. Photoshop assumes that your primary hard drive is its scratch disk, but you can set it up differently with a secondary internal or external hard drive.
If you are going to work with large images, it is recommended that you have a dedicated scratch disk that is different from the one containing the image file. Using different scratch disks is good, especially to avoid killing your primary boot drive when you have just a few gigabytes left.
When your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation, Photoshop Elements uses a proprietary virtual memory technology, also called scratch disks. A scratch disk is any drive or partition of a drive with free memory. By default, Photoshop Elements uses the hard drive that the operating system is installed on as its primary scratch disk.
You can change the primary scratch disk or designate a second, third, or fourth scratch disk, to be used when the primary disk is full. Your primary scratch disk should be your fastest hard disk and have plenty of defragmented space available.
The following guidelines can help you assign scratch disks:
- You can use up to four scratch disks of any size your file system supports. Photoshop lets you create up to 200 GB of scratch disk space.
- For best performance, scratch disks should be on a different drive than any large files you are editing.
- Scratch disks should be on a different drive than the one used for virtual memory.
- Scratch disks should be on a local drive. That is, they should not be accessed over a network.
- Scratch disks should be conventional (non-removable) media.
- Raid disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes.
- Drives with scratch disks should be defragmented regularly.
Important: The scratch disk file that is created by Photoshop Elements must be in contiguous hard drive space. For this reason you should frequently defragment your hard drive.
Displaying preview thumbnails in the Layers, Channels, and Paths palettes will cause Photoshop to consume some more of your RAM as it will be constantly updating the thumbnails to reflect the changes you will be doing in your project. The memory consumption will keep growing with the amount of thumbnails you have opened at the same time as well as their size.
You could use the smaller thumbnail size or no thumbnail at all to increase
your Photoshop performance. To do so, in each palette, select “panel options”
from the palette menu as it is shown on the picture above and select the smallest
thumbnail size or “None”.
When you are working on your images, Photoshop stores image data for the Undo, Clipboard, and History features. This data consumes memory, especially if you have been working for a while and have a high number of History States defined (see Point 1 for more on History States).
To eliminate that extra image data consuming your RAM, go to: “Edit > Purge > ( option )”. Keep in mind that clearing History will remove all the history states saved previously and you will not be able to undo your latest actions.
Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility increases the size of your file by attaching a flattened copy of your image when you save your image. A small amount of extra data is included in the file when you choose this option that ensures that PSD files saved in Photoshop will open in previous versions.
Additionally, if you want to use the Edit in Photoshop feature in Photoshop Lightroom, this option needs to be on. To change the Maximize File Compatibility option choose “Photoshop>Preferences> Saving Files”.
Note also the comment about the Recent file list. This indicates that when using the File>Open Recent there are 10 files that you can choose from.
Of course, you can easily find an enormous amount of free stuff to add up to the default Photoshop brushes, fonts, patterns, etc. but that does not mean you need to download every freebie that comes in your way. Keep it simple! Having too many plug-ins and other resources installed in Photoshop will greatly decrease performance. Most top designers use a small selection of fonts and brushes that define their style and that can be used in a great amount of ways for literally millions of different results.
If you are using a shared machine for your Photoshop needs there is a little Photoshop start-up trick that may come in handy. When the application is launching, if you press and hold:
Alt + Control + Shift (Windows) or Command + Option + Shift (Mac), a window will pop up asking you if you want to delete the Photoshop
settings file, resetting all of the preferences to their default.
