Quickie: Tips to make Photoshop love you more
March 2, 2010
So recently on GraphicRiver, a forum thread came up that basically outlined the following: “PHOTOSHOP IS SO SLOW WHY GOD WHY?” In further investigation the author did admit he had some aging hardware, which really should be addressed.
For those of us – myself included – that cannot simply afford to drop good coin on a 9-dimensional quantum quad core extreme dx processor, 5 gigatonne atomic video card, and RAM the equivalent size and girth of China, we have to make do with what little things we can.
In this case I’ve come across a selection of little tweaks you can do to speed up Photoshop. Maybe not by a massive amount, but when you’re used to 10 seconds of lag, taking a couple seconds off that can make a huge difference. To your sanity, and to the survival of you and those near by.
And so I’ve opted to take them from that forum and post the tips here, complete with screenshots. I apologize in advance as these screens are done on my mac. The concepts should still be the same though.
Preferences
Performance Tab
Navigate to Preferences > Performance:
- Up the amount of RAM Photoshop is allows to use. Basically, the more the better, but remember that your computer needs some to do other things. I suggest somewhere between 70-80% if you can spare it.
This is all relative. If you have 8 gigs of RAM 6.4 is a crap-tonne, but you still have 1.6 for the rest of your computer, which is decent assuming you’re not doing anything else crazy. On the flip side, if you only have 2 gigs, you donate 1.6 to Photoshop and leave 400 for the rest of the computer… this will probably make your computer divorce you, and you will lose the kids.
- If you have a good video card, enable 3D acceleration if it’s available. I assume that letting your card do the work will help take the strain off of your CPU. If anyone with knowledge greater than mine on the subject can comment on this, please do. I’m guessing a bit based on common sense reasoning.
- Keep your History States low. (This is how many times you can hit undo) The lower the better, but be practical. If you usually hit “undo” 20 times, then set it to 20. Mine is set to 40 because I’m a chronic “nudger” and it helps.
- Lower your Cache levels. I don’t know what this does per say, but keeping it low seems to help performance. If someone can speak to this one as well, that’d be swell.
- If you have a spare hard drive sitting around, consider hooking it into your rig and allowing photoshop to turn it into a scratch disk. That apparently helps a butt-load, though I’ve never had the opportunity to do so. Rigging one into my laptop would be a little difficult; Apple hates my soldering work so very much.
Type Tab
Navigate to preferences > Type:
- You can turn off Font Preview, which can help if you have a whole mess of fonts. This may or may not become a total pain in the ass to those that nitpick fonts, but honestly Photoshop doesn’t seem to do the greatest job handling the renders. If you have a proper font management program, I’d suggest using that anyways to pick out your fonts.
Panel… Stuff
Go to your Layers/ Channels/ Paths panels.
Turn off the thumbnail previews, that will apparently help out a lot. I’d suggest doing this if your files start getting larger/ more complex to help out. Just remember that you will have to have descriptive layer names or you’ll start getting lost. I can’t really live without my thumbnails, but that’s because I am hopelessly visual in nature, and the ikle pictures help.
No Ickle is not a typo.
- To do this, navigate to the panel(s), and under the palette menu, go to ‘Palette Options…’
- Turn off your thumbnails. The Layers, Channels, and Paths panels all have this option.
Having said all this, if your hardware is truly in need of updating, these fixes will only help you so far.
Got one of your own?
If you’ve got a comment to make about my tips here, or have your own you want to add, please feel free to leave them in the comments. I’ll add them to the post!
Categories: Mac Microsoft Random Thoughts Technology
Tagged under: Photoshop, Technology, tips
