[hydrid]

Eeek. It was fine when doing web sites. Now that I'm making large, high res posters Photoshop is turning into a slug. I have 256 ram and an ok 450 Mhz processor. I've assigned over 80% of RAM to PS and I've put scratch disks at 1. Anyway to give it an engine tune-up?

Thanks

[Mindsiphon]

I have 256 ram and a PIII 450 Mhz and Photoshop runs pretty fast.
What version of PS do you have?
I heard 6.0 is pretty sluggish.

[Frost]

Loki has already gone through the trouble of posting tips on that at his website: (I imagine the last one on that list pertains to you).
http://www.vigilante.net/~loki/pages/digital_ill_main.htm

cheers,
frost.

[Boeman]

To add further towards your goal of optimizing Photoshop, you may wish to:

• Reduce the amount of actions your history state holds by editing the history state amount in the General tab under preferences.
  
  
• Delete currently saved history states by selecting the clear option from the history state tab button (located at the top right of the palette).
  
  
• Remove any filters that you don�t utilize by deleting them (or moving them elsewhere from) the Photoshop plug-ins directory. Photoshop will otherwise load these filters into memory during startup.
  
  
• Discard the contents of your clipboard by selecting Edit > Purge > Clipboard (or �All� which subsequently clears your history states, clipboard, and undos at once). This option may have the most profound affect if you tend to copy large files in between documents.
  
  
• Keep the number of layers to a minimum. Use the channels palette to store saved selections and whenever possible, employ the use of Adjustment Layers for flat colours. This is particularly effective when you maintain your highlights and shadows on separate layers of their own.
  

Possibly the best advice for managing Photoshop however, is to constantly evaluate your workflow and deduce whether or not you are consuming valuable memory with unnecessarily features. If you are, then a change may be in order.

[Loki]

Hey guys - I made an action for 'Purge All' - I just assigned it to F12, and hit it quite often when I'm working in highres images - helps a LOT. Especially before I save I purge everything, because otherwise it takes forever ...


good tips, Boeman ... didn't know the thing about the filters ... excellent - all I need is 'gaussian blur' anyway (well, maybe a wee bit more)

[Digital Genesis]

Make sure you turn off the little thumbnail previews in the layers menu. They take up a lot of cpu time being updated. As does the zoom navigator.

Make sure you set histograms to 1 and no cache under preferences.

While there, uncheck 'save composite image preview' or whatever it's called. It takes time and effort on PS's behalf to do all that, when all YOU want is to save a progress picture.

[hydrid]

Thanks a lot. All of those tips make it less laggy and I'll be sure to purge all while working more often (I've been doing it on occasion).

On a totally different note: I've just ordered the parts for a computer I'm building for when I go off to college. It's very exciting. I'm going with Athlon for my first (pentium just seems to expensive).