Adobe Photoshop is one of the most popular image editing applications that is used to create and manipulate images. It has the wide variety of uses including creating logos, touching up your pictures, tone and color corrections, creating gifs, small videos, charts, posters, infographics and so on.
Given its several uses, it is critical to ensure Photoshop is performing at a high level at all times.
Let us look at some ways you can increase the performance levels in PhotoShop
- Have enough and more memory space: Photoshop uses RAM to stuff the process it is working on. When RAM runs out, it uses scratch disks to distribute the workload. The application uses any free space that is available on hard drives.
- Add scratch disks: The more memory there is, Photoshop performs better. Scratch disks are external or internal devices with free memory. By default, Photoshop uses the memory drive, where your Operating system is installed. You can change your scratch disk settings in Preferences -> Scratch disks.
- Click on Edit -> Preferences -> Scratch Disks.
- To enable or disable a scratch disk, you can select or deselect the Active checkbox. Click arrow buttons to change scratch disk order and click Ok.
- Restart Photoshop for changes to take effect.
- Set performance-related preferences: You can go to Preferences -> Performance to make optimum use of system’s resources like memory, cache, graphics processor, display and so on.
- You can increase RAM allocated to Photoshop by changing the value in Let Photoshop Use You can also adjust the Memory Usage slider.
- Restart Photoshop for changes to take place.
To find the ideal RAM allocation for your system, change it in 5% increments and check the performance in the Efficiency indicator.
- Reduce history states: Scratch disk space can be saved by reducing the number of history states Photoshop saves in the history panel. The amount of space that is saved again depends on the number of pixels an operation changes. For instance, applying an effect to an adjustment layer takes little space compared to applying an effect to an entire image.
- To reduce the number of history states, go to Performance preference dialog box, select History & Cache > History States.
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- Stop pre-loading of fonts: When you open your Photoshop application, all fonts that are installed or pre-loaded into RAM also opens, which is not necessary.
Select Edit -> Preferences -> Type -> Type Options -> Font Preview Size.
- Monitor Efficiency Indicator: Click on the pop-up menu at the bottom of the image window and choose Efficiency from that pop-up menu.
If the value of the indicator shows below 100%, all the RAM has been allocated to Photoshop and is now using the scratch disk, which reduces performance.
If the efficiency is less than 90%, allocate more RAM to Photoshop in Performance preferences window or add more RAM to your system.
- Do not exceed file size limits: Handling large files can also lead to performance issues. The maximum file size that Photoshop can handle is 300,000 x 300, 000 pixels, with the exception of PDF files, limited to 30,000 x 30,000 pixels and 200 x 200 inches. Here are some file size limits for Photoshop – PSD – 2 GB; TIFF – 4 GB; PSB files – 4 exabytes; PDF – 10 GB (pages limited to the max size of 200 inches).
- Close Unnecessary Windows: If there are too many open images, Photoshop runs slowly and shows “Out of RAM” error message.
- Uncheck export clipboard: If you are not using any copied data except Photoshop, you can uncheck this option. It leads to data leakage once you copy data, but do not paste it somewhere.
Select Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Deselect Export Clipboard.
- Change your file compatibility options: If you do not need your PSD or PSB files in previous versions of Photoshop or in applications that don’t support layers, turn off the file compatibility feature to save your documents faster.
- In Preferences -> File Handling, for 16-bit and 32-bit PSD, PSB documents, choose to Disable compression of PSD and PSB files.
- In Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility menu, select Ask or Never.
- Reduce image resolution: Photoshop requires more memory and space to store, process and display large resolution images. This can slow performance, use additional scratch disk space.
To reduce image resolution, go to Image -> Image Size.
In the Image Size dialog box, ensure that Resample option is selected. Now enter a new value for the Dimensions width or height (entering a value for one changes both).
Repair corrupt PSD files with Hi5 PSD File Repair
PSD files can be corrupted due to a lot of reasons. Photoshop cannot access these files and it is imperative to remove corruption as soon as possible. Hi5 PSD File Repair is an excellent tool to perform psd file repair.
One of the best things about Hi5 PSD File Repair software is its non-destructive mechanism which ensures that your source file is not altered.
Once the file is repaired, you can check the contents of the file with Preview feature.
You can also repair compressed PSD images with this repair tool.
An easy user interface ensures that the repair process is completed successfully within few minutes by following some simple steps.
