Photoshop Lightroom Bridge

Hello everyone,

This is the last part of the series on Optimizing Performance in Photoshop. This time, we’ll talk on how to optimize your OS for Photoshop. How to make sure it all runs flawlessly on your computer.

Let’s start with Closing Unnecessary Applications.

Every application that you open uses RAM from your machine, so the more applications you open the more RAM they use and there is less RAM left for Photoshop to use. If you don’t use some applications, quit them.

Defragment the Hard Drive

As you keep on working on your computer and add or delete files, they are spread all over the hard drive. When the parts of the files get spread over the whole hard drive, it takes Photoshop longer to access them while trying to read or write.

On Windows, I would recommend a great application called Auslogics Disk Defrag – great application I have used for a few years (nobody likes built into Windows Disk Defragmenter). You can download Auslogics Disk Defrag from here:

Auslogics Disk Defrag.

On Mac, use the application called Apple Disk Utility that ships with your Mac or Micromat Drive 10.

Install latest updates for your OS.

Every Operating System manufacturer adds updates to their OS frequently. The updates improve the OS’s performance and security.

And that’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed it and I wish you a wonderful day!

See you tomorrow!

Good morning to everyone! It’s a special day here in the UK! A Royal Wedding day! It’s actually a Bank Holiday but I’m posting anyway because it’s Friday and the rest of the world goes to work!

It’s time for our last part on Optimizing Performance in Photoshop.

2 days ago we started talking about some best practices for working in Photoshop. We discussed files sizes limitations and Efficiency Indicator as well as Panels Thumbnails previews. Now, let’s add to it a few more items.

Maximize PSD And PSB File Compatibility

The Maximize PSD And PSB File Compatibility (found in the Photoshop Preferences) adds a flattened copy of the image to the file when you save it. This extra piece of information will ensure that PSD and PSB files can be opened in earlier versions of Photoshop, in Lightroom and other applications from other vendors that support PSD files.

Maximizing File Compatibility will increase the file sizes so you may want to disable this feature by going under Edit->Preferences on Windows or Photoshop->Preferences on Mac and navigating to File Handling section of the Preferences and disabling Maximize PSD And PSB File Compatibility (you can set it to: Ask or Never).

Reduce image resolution

The higher the resolution, the more memory and disk space Photoshop will require. Higher image resolution means slower Photoshop performance and slower printing. Speaking of printing, the ideal resolution will depend on the printing device you’re going to use.

If you want to reduce the image resolution, go under Image and choose Image Size. In the Image Size dialog box, lower the resolution and click OK.

Reduce number of Layers

Layers are a very important element of working in Photoshop. However, they increase the file size and the time it takes to redraw the image. You may want to flatten the layers (merge them) after you’re done with the design. Remember that after merging the layers, you won’t be able to access them as they all become one single layer (you can undo but after you close and reopen the document, there is nothing you can do to seperate the merged layer).

I hope you enjoyed it and learnt something new. Have a wonderful weekend and see you on Monday (another Bank holiday here in the UK ).

Hello everyone,

this is a follow up on the previous articles that try to explain how to make sure Photoshop runs smoothly on your computer, how to speed it up.

Today, we’ll move on to Part 3 of the process of improving the performance of Photoshop – Best Practices for working in Photoshop.

Let’s start:

File sizes and their limitations:

The larger the files you’re working with, the weaker the performance of Photoshop may get. You probably don’t have to worry about the pixel dimensions of your files as Photoshop supports files up to 300,000 x 300,000 px (PDF files are limited to 30,000 x 30,000 px). In terms of files sizes, Photoshop can work with PSD files of up to 2GB and TIFF files of up to 4GB. And if you use PSB files, they can be up to 4 exabytes(!) – that’s a 4 million terrabytes!

Efficiency Indicator

When I work in Photoshop, I keep an eye on the Efficiency Indicator that can be found at the bottom of the image window:

The screenshot also shows how to access it. This Indicator determines whether Photoshop started using the scratch disk or not yet. If the Efficiency Indicator shows less than 100%, Photoshop started using the Scratch Disk and it starts slowing down. If the Indicator goes below 90%, allocate more RAM to Photoshop in Preferences (more in the post here – Optimizing Performance in Photoshop – Part 2). Alternatively, purchase more RAM.

Close the Documents you don’t use

Photoshop uses a lot of RAM for all the images you have open so if you don’t use an image, close it. If you have too many images open, you may see the error message saying “Out of RAM”. Photoshop may also slow down.

Minimize or turn off panel preview thumbnails

Photoshop uses memory to display preview thumbnails in Channels, Layers and Paths Panels.

The more thumbnails Photoshop needs to render and the bigger the thumbnails, the more memory Photoshop uses. If you want to minimize or disable thumbnails, navigate to the panels options menu and choose Panel Options.

In the Panel Options dialog box, you can select smaller thumbnails or select None.

And that’s all for today. More information tomorrow in the last part of the Series. Enjoy!

Last week we started talking about optimizing performance in Photoshop, how to make sure Photoshop runs quickly and what to look for. Today, we’ll finish the topic.

As mentioned in the last week’s post (Optimizing Performance in Photoshop), one of the important steps is to optimize your hardware. Now, let’s talk how to optimize Photoshop Preferences. This is today’s topic.

If you want to read the previous post, here’s the link for you:

Optimizing Performance in Photoshop

Let’s talk Photoshop Preferences. The preferences you set in Photoshop Preferences dialog box greatly affect how Photoshop performs. To access Photoshop Preferences, go to Edit->Preferences on Windows (Photoshop->Preferences on Mac).

Here’s the most important section in Photoshop Preferences:

Let’s start with Memory Usage:

The more RAM you have (the more you assign to Photoshop to be precise), the faster can Photoshop process images. The Memory Usage area in Photoshop’s Preferences tells you how much RAM can your copy of Photoshop use. Photoshop also displays the ideal range of RAM to be assigned to Photoshop.

RAM displayed here is not your total RAM installed, just the RAM that is available for Photoshop. Photoshop automatically subtracts RAM used by your operating system.

By default, Photoshop uses 70% of available RAM. If you decide to change it, you will need to restart Photoshop so the changes will take effect. If you don’t run any other applications at the same time, you can increase RAM allocation to 100% (especially if you run 64 bit version of Photoshop).

Next, Scratch Disks:

This is any hard drive connected to your computer. Set your Scratch Disk to a hard drive that has plenty of space and has fast read/write speeds. Here’s an interesting information from Adobe:

Photoshop supports up to 64 exabytes of scratch disk space on up to four volumes. (An exabyte equals 1 billion GB.)

How great is that?!

Next, History & Cache:

Image Caching is important for redrawing high resolution images. Photoshop uses low resolution versions of the image to quickly update the image onscreen.

The more Cache Levels you have, the slower Photoshop will open the file but the more responsive it’s going to be later on while you work on the image. The fewer Cache Levels you have, the faster Photoshop opens the file but the slower it performs.

Setting Cache Levels for best performance:

• Low Levels – 1 or 2 – small files and many layers (roughly 1Mpx). NOTE: Setting Cache Levels to 1 disables image caching.
• High Levels – higher than 4 – big files (roughly 10Mpx and more). It improves performance by speeding redraw times.

Cache Tile Size – this is the amount of data that Photoshop operates on at one time. Photoshop is more efficient when working on bigger tiles but then these take longer to redraw. Operations like applying filters work faster on bigger tiles but for smaller changes (like brush strokes) work faster on smaller tiles.

History States – You can increase the performance and save scratch disk space by limiting number of states that Photoshop remembers in History Panel. Photoshop can save up to a 1,000 history states, by default it saves 20.

And finally, GPU Settings:

Photoshop CS5 uses your GPU (graphics card) to speed up redrawing process. If you want Photoshop to access the GPU, your video adapter needs to have a GPU that supports OpenGL. It also requires at least 128MB of RAM on a graphics card and a driver that supports OpenGL 2.0.

To optimize GPU acceleration, make sure you keep the graphics card driver up to date by visiting the card’s manufacturer’s website.