Let’s say you are an average windows/mac user. If you use a Photoshop user, you might know how much time it takes to load and work on it on your low-end system. The latest Photosop CS4 has some improvements in speed and performances, but it may be a tough work for your computer for sure.
Today, I am going to give you some tips to boost your overall Photoshop speed, making it faster to load and work in it. Note that these tips would not do any miracles on your computer, but they definitely may help you to improve your work with this professional photo editing software from Adobe.
Note: I am using the latest Photoshop CS4. Below screenshots are related to that version. Other versions also should have these options, but I can not guarantee you that.
First thing you should do is to go to the Preferences box in Edit > Preferences – or use a Ctrl+K hotkey:
Performance Settings
From that box, choose Performance tab:
You can setup many important things here, which may affect your overall performances and speed improvements like:
- Memory Usage – Photoshop usually uses a lot of your system RAM memory. The amount of RAM that Photoshop would use is easily adjustable here. Depending how much RAM you have, you should use from 55% to 65% of all available RAM reserved for Photoshop. If you have 4 or more GB’s of RAM, you could set this up to 75% to speed up your Photoshop performances.
- Scratch Disks – Like with RAM, Photoshop uses a Virtual memory of your HDD drives. This information is displayed under Scratch Disks feature in the performance tab. Anyway, if you have more than 1 drive, you can drastically boost your Photoshop speed by enabling others to work with it.
- History & Cache – By default, History States is set to 20 and Cache Levels to 4. For the slower systems, this is just too much to work with. You can set these values to 10-15 for History States and 1-8 for the Cache levels. You should note that all these changes would be effective after you restart your Photoshop.
You should leave GPU Settings on default value to ensure the maximum compatibility between your graphics accelerator and Adobe Photoshop software. Note that this option is available in the latest Photoshop CS4 suite.
Defragmentation
A disk defragmentation is a very important task which can help your system to be more stable and faster. Defragmentation affect your overall computer performance and reliability. Of course, including software on your computer like Photoshop.
Defragmentation is most effective for the computers with loads of software and applications installed. There are many ways to defrag your computer, for all operating systems of course.
Computer Cleanup
An unnecessary applications, temporary files and other files you do not need may greatly affect your overall system performances. Including your software and computer to work and load slow in many occasions.
To improve a speed, a good way is to clean up your computer from these kind of files. If you use Windows, there is a great tool, called CCleaner which can help you to quickly clean your computer completely for free.
If you use other systems, try to delete all unnecessary applications and software that may cause your system slow.