I recently bought a new high configuration laptop. The main purpose was to work evenly on the large PSD’s having more than a thousand files. And the system which I was using was struggling a lot to operate on those files. The only way that seemed correct to me was to buy a new system with high configuration. Initially, things were not as good as the old one but after 10 to 15 minutes my system was ready to work with the PSD files. The time taken was around 60 times higher than my older PC which opened the same file in 10-12 secs. Moreover, the system used to slow down incredibly, making it very difficult to work on it. So, what went wrong with my new PC? Was it the problem with the hardware or with the Photoshop application?
I contacted Adobe support to help me out with the issue. Having discussed my problem with many Adobe experts, I got to know that there was nothing wrong with my PC but it was all because of application-level settings that made things worse. One of my previous blogs was based on the chaos of Pixel-Perfect UI in Adobe Photoshop. In this blog, I will be discussing how you can optimize Photoshop on your PC without any problem and what settings should you choose for best results.
Useful Tips To Optimize Photoshop Speed :
Using history states:
This setting authorizes you to set the number of times you can undo a particular function while working on Photoshop. I usually prefer 30 history states while working on my PSDs. More numbers will result in the creation of History Palette that is likely to consume too much of RAM and having less than 8GB of RAM would make your system perform very slow. However, you may add up to 1,000 history state levels in Photoshop depending on your hardware configuration.
Using cache level:
By a default setting, there are 6 cache levels which can be raised towards the maximum of 8. This will increase the rendering speed. It is worth doing when you are working on high-resolution pictures. With smaller view-sizes, i.e. viewing an image at 50% Zoom level, the cache levels will have an impact on the number of “down samplings” allowing Photoshop to perform operations faster.
Photoshop uses Image Caching and having a good amount of RAM, about 8GB or higher you can make it easier to work on high-resolution images. In that case, set the cache levels to 8 as the speed performance will compensate for the memory loss. But if you have a low RAM and you usually work with small images only (1-4MB), you may want to lower this value to 1 or 2 as the RAM will be better allocated – storing the images rather than caching.
Also Read: BEST AND FREE PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES MAJORLY USED BY DESIGNERS
Using cache tile size:
Adobe Photoshop basically processes data as tiles. The Cache Tile Size specifies the quantity of data that Photoshop will function on at a time. If you are using a complex function in Photoshop, a large Cache Tile size will ensure faster operation. However, it does make onscreen operations a bit slower. Again, it comes down to how you use the software.
The settings under the Cache Tiles size was the main cause for my problem that I discussed above. It was initially set to 1024K and lowering this value to 128K solved the problem.
Specifying memory usage:
You can allocate the quantity of RAM to Photoshop as per your priority of operations. I would recommend allocating at least 70% of the system’s RAM to Photoshop to make sure your system does not lag. Photoshop is a very RAM hungry application and having at least 16GB would ensure flawless operation.
So, that’s how you can optimize Photoshop performance that is suitable for your hardware and your requirements. Do let me know your views in the comment section.
Conclusion:
Photoshop is a widely used tool and most of the time due to the heavy files sizes system’s speed decreases. In this case, using these tricks for improving the speed of the system are very important from a user’s point of view. These tips to optimize photoshop are crucial because it helps designers in designing.
