Stuck with an achingly slow version of Adobe Photoshop? Do you have time to make a coffee while your Photoshop installation boots up? Like any machine, Adobe Photoshop benefits from regular tune-ups and maintenance. The following quick tips will have your Photoshop humming with joy!

Note: Screenshots are based on Adobe CS3 (although should be relevant to subsequent versions)

SET SCRATCH DISKS

Your photoshop scratch disk is the equivalent of the virtual memory paging file in Microsoft Windows. Increasing the size of the scratch disk (and locating it on a defragmented hard disk volume) will significantly increase the performance of Photoshop.

To add scratch disks:

1. Goto Edit | Preferences | Performance

2. Tick the box marked active next to each additional drive that will be used as a scratch disk

3. Press ok and restart Photoshop

ADJUST CACHE LEVELS

Every time you make a change to an image within Photoshop, the visual representation of hte image on the screen is redrawn. Higher resolution images take longer to redraw; slowing you down (so Photoshop will often use a lower resolution version of the image to more quickly update what you see on the screen). Changing the number of cached versions stored by Photoshop (between 1 and 8) can increase your performance.

To change cache levels

1. Goto Edit | Preferences | Performance

2. Enter a value from 1 to 8 in the Cache Levels textbox.

3. Press ok and restart Photoshop

Quick Tips:

1. When you are working on small images (i.e. intended for web use) it is safe to set the cache level to 1 or 2 to drastically speed up your work
2. For higher resolution images try setting the cache level to 4 or above
3. Image caching can affect the quality of the preview displayed by Photoshop. So always make sure you view the image at 100% before saving.

DISABLE THE AUTO LAUNCH FUNCTION FOR ADOBE BRIDGE

If you do not use the Adobe Bridge module within Photoshop, try disabling it. This will cut down on the time it takes to open Photoshop:

To disable Adobe Bridge:

1. Goto Edit | Preference | General

2. Untick the Automatically Launch Bridge option.

3. Click OK.

MINIMIZE THE MEMORY USED TO DISPLAY PANEL PREVIEW THUMBNAILS

When you use the layers, channels and paths palette, Photoshop uses memory to display and update the thumbnail images that appear in each of these panels.

To reduce the amount of memory used for panel preview thumbnails:

1. Open the Layers Panel

2. Select Palette Options

3. Choose the size of the preview thumbnail

SWITCH BETWEEN 8 BIT, 16 BIT AND 32 BIT

Beginning with Photoshop CS3, Adobe expanded our ability to work with 16 bit and 32 bit images. However, if you are working on low-resolution (i.e. web ready issues) you can reduce your images to 8 bits to improve performance (although note that this permanently deletes the additional data)

To change from 16 bit to 8 bit:

1. Goto Image | Mode
2. Tick your preferred option

 

At 24. Hannah Tovey is the Director of Brilliant Prints United Kingdom. She works with some of the top professional photographers in the UK, Australia and Singapore.