Great tips for speeding up PS!

[jamie]

I just bought this really great book on PS to learn a little more about the program b/c more and more I'm realizing I don't use it to the full potential. I tend to stick with the same methods I've used for years and I know there's better methods :-) Anyway, the book had this info in it and i didnt' know this and thougth it was interesting AND could help some of you, especially with CS ...

- Recommended to have 512 MB of RAM - more if you can get it
- Photoshop writes huge amounts of temporary files (hundreds of MB) that it deletes when you close the program, but they build up while your using it. PS fits these files into whatever spaces it can find on your hard disk, so they become fragmented and PS will slow down - they recommend buying a second hard drive 4GB or more (yeah right lol) or to partition your drive (emma you are so smart ;-) and to assign the partition as PS's scratch disk. THey say if you dedicate this to PS it will have a large clean space to write files to and will speed up the processing power
- Get into the habit of using the Purge All command (under edit) while you work, just be sure you won't want to use Undo before you do this.

[mekstamper]

THanks for sharing Jaimie!!!!! So what is the title of the book????

[Lauren]

Other methods for optimizing ps - in the preferences you can adjust the number of history steps that Ps keeps for you. YOu can also adjust the amount of memory that PS uses . There is a patch on the adobe site which alters the refresh rate of your screen - I know that did help me a little as well.
Also remember to reset your patterns ,styles and brushes to default before you close and it will help speed up PS when it opens next time as it has to load all those presets youve been gradually building up and dont need at your fingertips all the time ( make sure you save any ones you have created before resetting though!!)

[jamie]

How to Cheat in Photoshop by Steve Caplin 2nd Edition - its really to learn how to create Photorealistic Montages, but when I flipped through it I saw it had a lot of techniques and shortcuts that would help me in my scrapping .. it was also fairly expensive, 36.95 at Barnes and Noble.

[rebecca burkett]

I found this thread searching for answers about scratch disk error in ps cs. I could not figure out what to do when ps started giving me this error. I would try to crop, and would get the error...ps cannot complete this task because your scratch disk is full. I counldn't do anything! My scratch disk is not anything special I set up. It is just my c drive. I have 40gigs of memory not being used, plenty of power and space. Then, I read something about resetting tools. I chose the option to reset all tools, and poof, it worked. I wonder if there is another underlying problem though, and if I need to set up another scratch disk. Anyone with any advice! TIA!

ps-I should add that it didn't work restarting ps so the scratch disk could empty, and it didn't help to purge either. Only when I reset all tools did it work.

[dkapp12]

Learn about setting up preferences and the scratch disk here: Free Photoshop Quicktime Tutorials (http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=118)

After learning about this I installed an additional hard drive and partitioned 5 gig just for PS - also doubled the RAM to 1G - I am very satisfied with the results.

Don't forget to save your preferences somewhere on your hard drive so that you can reload them. If PS resets itself, which does on occassion, it automatically will select the VM on the C drive for the scratch disk. Have a backup of the preferences will save you a lot of time and trouble.

[Lauren]

and also remember to save your presets and reset them before you close PS - Patterns in particular take AGES to load - it will speed up PS loading by a huge amount if you only have the default presets loading each time

[susan]

Jamie, sounds like you found a good book for technical info, but how do you like the book for it's photo montages? I'm always looking for good info in this area.