Improving the performance of Photoshop

Ever had one of those days where your Photoshop didn’t perform the way you’d like it to, sometimes even become so sluggish or unresponsive that its impossible to finish your work? You’re not alone, it’s actually quite a common thing and as Photoshop and our computers become more demanding this will most likely not go away. Let’s cover some of the reasons why these issues arise and try and find solutions for them. I am aware that the majority of readers viewing this blog probably use a mac (yes, you RIA dudes, you know who you are!) but don’t fret, even though I work on a PC most of the pointers are application specific and contain general system advice.

Make sure you have the latest updates

It is important to keep your Photoshop updated since it is a heavy program and with any software that comes with innovative features, there will be bugs. Adobe works hard on fixing these bugs but it’s up to you to update your software. You can go to Adobe downloads and retrieve it there or wait for your Photoshop to update automatically.

Manage your ICC profiles

It is important to keep your ICC profiles to only what you need. Having too many profiles can directly affect the performance of your documents. Your printer and scanner are usually the culprits for this, your printer might install a profile for every paper type and your scanner driver might have a profile for all the different scanner models it supports. You are better off using the Adobe defaults and if necessary whichever specific profile you require. You will see performance increases in larger files that go over a few hundred MB. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out where these profiles are located, you can run a search for .icc or .icm and just move them to an external folder.

Disable Plug-ins

It might be tempting for you to download all the shiny free and commercial plug-ins out there since they promise to do wonders for your work. The truth is however that the more plug-ins you install the slower your Photoshop becomes. Whilst Photoshop starts up it checks for and loads all the plug-ins you have installed into your memory. To improve performance you could disable the plug-ins temporarily and enable them for those occasions that you might use them. You can do so by going into your plug-ins directory and adding the symbol “~” in the beginning of the filename of the plug-in or moving your plug-in to a temporary directory.

Don’t have your font list display preview

If your system has damaged fonts it may result in your Photoshop performing badly or even crashing. You can prevent this from happening by disabling font preview. You can disable this by going to Edit > Preferences > Type - there should be a “Font Preview Size” checkbox.

Manage your fonts

It’s great to have a lot of fonts at your disposal when going through the creative process of shuffling through them for inspiration. The problem with this however is that this can have a dramatic effect on the performance of your Photoshop. There are many font managers out there that let you load/unload fonts for when you need them, some of them come with graphical explorers so you can pick and choose the ones you like for your project. There are cases when people have a few thousand fonts listed in their system fonts directory, this usually does not bode well for your experience in Photoshop.

Check for damaged fonts

It is common for fonts to become damaged over a certain period of time. If you are one of those people that enjoy having font preview enabled there is a quick way of finding out whether your fonts are healthy. Unload all the fonts you have in your fonts directory and re-upload them. If there is a damaged font it will fail.

History States

History in Photoshop can be a real life saver, there are several instances where you might have gone wrong somewhere and need to undo a few steps to rectify the problem. As wonderful as this functionality may be it can really slow things down. Everything you do is saved as a history state which you can fall back on and those states are saved in your cache. When your cache becomes too large you can end up with a unresponsive or slow Photoshop. The recommended amount of history states is 10, try to stick to this figure. You can edit this by going to edit > preferences > memory & image cache in CS2 and PS7 or performance in CS3.

Preset Management

Just like Plug-ins there are some great presets out there that give you new brushes, swatches, gradients, styles, patterns, contours, custom shapes and tools. These can come really in handy but you need to keep in mind that these get loaded into memory. Either delete the ones you never or rarely use or reset your presets so that its factory default. Even when you reset there are shapes and brushes you most likely will never touch.

Cache Levels

For every zoom state you navigate through in your document, Photoshop saves a cache level. If you’re working on very large files it is sometimes useful when it allows you to quickly navigate through different zooms. This however comes at a price of bloating your cache considerably. To prevent this from happening you can take down your cache levels to 2. If you find that you’re constantly zooming in and out of your file you might want to push it up to 4. If you set it on 1 you are effectively disabling cache levels.

Pixel Doubling

Pixel doubling is a performance enhancing technique where Photoshop doubles the physical size of each pixel in your document when moving pixels so that it wont have to redraw each and every pixel of your image. This effectively takes off half of the load, once the process is done the pixels go back to their original state. Pixel doubling does not leave any permanent change to your document.

Palette Thumbnail reduction

Palette thumbnails can be very useful, they’re the small pictures you see in your layers, paths and channels palette. Every time you do something these images have to update and cache themselves and as useful as they may be, they effectively slow things down. You can disable them or make them smaller by going to the palette options menu. I prefer switching them off and using my naming conventions to identify what I’m working with.

Turn off “Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility”

You’d want to disable this feature if you’re not going to be going between different versions of Photoshop. What this basically does is that when you save your document it makes a flattened copy of your document and stores it inside your file so that when you open it in a older incompatible Photoshop, it automatically loads the flattened version. This extra information increases file size and slows down the performance of your document. To disable this go to Edit> Preferences > File handling > Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility.

Don’t export the clipboard, drag and drop

I know most of you are used to using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V in your workflow with Photoshop. I know I am guilty of this 90% of the time. You’re most likely not using the clipboard for another program but for use in another document inside Photoshop. (Copy pasting between programs are bad, save your files as assets to be used in other applications.) To disable the clipboard in Photoshop go to Edit > Preferences General > Export Clipboard checkbox. Instead of using the clipboard you can drag and drop to another document, this way you are keeping your clipboard cache free.

Optimize the File Browser (CS3)

The file browser can be a very sluggish thing if not used properly. It surely is not supposed to act as a replacement for explorer, or rather.. it does not come close; think of it more as a lightbox. There are quite a few things you could do and a lot of insights to share about this so why not take a look at “What File Browser is and is not!” article for further details.

Filter Gallery

The filter gallery may not reflect directly on performance (actually, it’s really slow) but it can speed up your work by quickly previewing various filters in one window.

Remove Temporary Files

Temporary files build up over time, your files can sometimes go well over a gig with Photoshop so it is good practice to occasionally clear out these files. It depends which operating system you use but with Windows you simply need to search for *.tmp files.

Close or hide the Info palette

If you’re working with very large files the info palette might slow things down. When you’re mousing over your document with certain tools info is directly projected in this window.

Improving performance inside a Photoshop document

Flattening TIFF files

TIFF files can become extremely large, especially when working with multiple layers. It is suggested that when you save your file that you create a PSD copy with all your layers and a separate flattened version of your TIFF, because loading that TIFF with all the layer information could cause serious performance issues.

16-bit may be better than 32bit

If there is no particular reason for you to be using 32 bit for your images, then you might as well switch to 16 bit. There is a dramatic difference between these 2, keep in mind that you cannot revert these changes so you should always save a backup.

Know your output

It is important to know whether you’re outputting to print or screen since that can directly affect the file size and performance. CMYK files are generally “heavier” and bigger in file size so only use them if you’re outputting to print. If you’re not doing print you should be using RGB, converting to RGB will mean a 25% file size reduction.

Merge some layers

I love layers, couldn’t work without them.. sometimes I love them so much that I go a little overboard. Layers can doom Photoshop’s performance. Try to sort your layers logically and merge those that don’t need to be independent. Rasterize vector layers if you don’t plan on modifying them, vector objects take up a lot of your memory. If you have multiple layers with different levels of transparency this could also cause you issues.

Things you should already know

I won’t be going into details but things you should already be doing is working at the right file size, compressing your files accordingly and editing individual channels.

Improving Photoshop’s Performance on your System

Close unneeded applications and files

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that you’ve got other applications open, sometimes it’s out of comfort as some applications take long to load. Well, whatever the reason is you should try and keep your list of open applications to a minimum so that things will run faster. My advice is that you have an intimate understanding of your processes that are running. If you are not sure of a process try googling the filename, I’m almost certain that you’ll figure it out. In other words, run only what is necessary.

Get more RAM

I’m using 2 gigs of ram and on some of my other systems only 1 gig of ram. Sometimes even when I’m using 2 gigs of ram things go really slow. I would suggest 4 gigs of ram if you’re doing hardcore image editing, but if 2 gigs is all you can afford then go for that. If you’re going to be modifying web graphics at small resolutions it is possible to only get away with 1 gig as long as you optimize your application by following all the steps of this article.

Get a new video card

These days everyone is using high resolutions on their desktops. The higher your resolution the more your Photoshop has to redraw with every change you make to your document. Redrawing resolutions at a rate that you cannot notice requires serious performance so make sure you get a graphics card geared towards image manipulation. It won’t hurt getting one that performs well in 3D since Photoshop is introducing many features like 3D layers and whatnot. Photoshop also utilises 3D Acceleration to increase the performance.

Clean up and defragment your hard drive

This depends on your file system and operating system so you may or may not have to do this. If you’re running under Windows then you will have to defragment. Photoshop constantly scratches to your disk so the need for this sort of maintenance won’t go away.

Move your scratch disk to a different drive

Since Photoshop is constantly scratching to your drive it is important to have a hard drive solely dedicated to it.. and if you have more to spare you could have multiple hard drives allocated to Photoshop. It is also important to modify your page file settings depending on your operating system so that you get the most out of it. Don’t let your poor primary drive suffer from a heavy application like Photoshop. You’ll thank me later. Go to Edit > Preferences > Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks and do your magic.

Conclusion

I’ve read about other smaller and more specific issues that may also affect the performance of your Photoshop but this should give you a considerable head start in giving you a smooth and enjoyable experience.