Speeding up PS?

[JohnT]

If anyone has any suggestions on speeding up PSCS3, I'm all ears. Over the last couple of days, I was working on several files (not all at once) that exceeded 120MB each at times, and man did PS get awfully slow with saving, running Portraiture plug-in, and PhotoKit Sharpener. Buying a new system isn't an option right at the moment so any tweaks would be appreciated.

[Sonny]

First and foremost...max out your memory.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...nalId=kb401088


If you're using Vista & CS3:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/

http://www.windowsvistamagazine.com/...pc-part-1.html

[110240]

my old ps tutor said having less history states helps but that was way back in an early version (5,7?)

[canoflan]

Originally Posted by 110240

my old ps tutor said having less history states helps but that was way back in an early version (5,7?)

This still applies. RAM is used to store those versions as each change occurs. The best way is to max out the memory, then ensuring your computer is running efficiently. A google search will answer this quite will with some good how-to's.

Pat

[luis_relampago]

I work a lot of images in raw at the same time(28.9MB images) and I have photoshop CS3 set up with more than 140 history states also memory use at 80% and never gives me any problems. I ran photoshop in my iMac 2.8/4GB and also on my MacBook Pro 2.4/4GB. It's all about having sufficient ram, I think 2MB ram is sufficient for photoshop but I also do Video editing so I need to max my memory capacity, you need to check your ram and maximize it.

[mbradley]

if you have a second hard drive on your system, move the PS cache over to it (mac and pc).

Keep the machine defraged, preferably with an aftermarket Disk defrag tool such as Diskeeper (pc users).

Max out your Ram (windows 32 bit os =4gb of which you'll only actually see 3.12GB of). The system takes the rest. PS won't use it all without making some boot ini modification to the os, and then it'll only be able to access up to 3gb.

Make sure to turn off any applications and system services running that aren't needed. Limit active fonts to 100 or so by using a font management tool.

and last but not least, start saving up for a 64 bit machine so when Adobe finally releases a 64bit version of PS, you'll be ready. :) I'd suggest a new quadcore, dual processor Mac Pro which will run the 64bit version of Windows since Adobe (according to their press releases) doesn't plan to release CS4 in a 64bit version for Mac...

[JohnT]

Thanks, everyone. I'll look into all of your suggestions and see what I can do.

This community is great for getting information on just about anything photo/computer related. :-)

[JohnT]

One thing that just occurred to me that I can do to immediately speed things up is stop working in 16-bit mode. I've been doing this over the last few months since reading several articles on it, but doing so is just bogs down my system. Back to 8-bit for now.