Speeding Up Photoshop CS5

Roberto Blake New York Graphic Designer Web Designer Illustrator Photographer

Speeding Up Photoshop CS5

4 July 2011 4 Comments

Optimizing Photoshop (CS5 or otherwise) is something that many designers overlook. Just because you have a great computer to run Photoshop, doesn’t mean you’re taking full advantage of your setup and getting all the speed and power out of it you can. Today I’m going to talk about how you take your Photoshop experience to the next level.

How much RAM can Photoshop use?
Most of you probably think that Photoshop already is using all of your RAM just because you have 4GB or more. It’s not! By default Photoshop is only using 70% of the available RAM (not including RAM needed for the OS). Also depending on whether you are running a 32bit or 64bit version of Photoshop and/or your operating system, will also determine how much RAM Photoshop can use. Here are the RAM specs for Photoshop CS5:

CS5 32 Bit Version, Windows OS 32 Bit Version: Max RAM 1.7 GB
CS5 32 Bit Version, Windows OS 64 Bit Version: Max RAM 3.2 GB
CS5 64 Bit Version, Windows OS 64 Bit Version: Max RAM As Much As Your Computer Has!
CS5 32 Bit Version, Mac OS: Max RAM 2.1
CS5 64 Bit Version, Mac OS: Max RAM As Much As Your Computer Has!

The info above defeats the argument of Mac’s Being Better than PC’s for Graphic Design, also known as the Mac Myth. In a 64 Bit environment it is completely irrelevant and have no baring on performance.

Photoshop Hard Drive and Scratch Disk
Photoshop reads and writes image information while working on an image, the faster the scratch disk or the disk that contains the image, the faster Photoshop can process image information. To improve Photoshop performance, use a disk with a fast data transfer rate, such as an internal hard disk.

If you’re going to use a dedicated scratch disk, (which I highly recommend) the a Solid State Disk (SSD) is your best bet. Their performance and read/write speeds are better than the average Hard Disk and will work even better if you use more than one and setup a RAID 0 array.

Processing Power
Just get a machine with multi-core processors running over 2GHz, 3GHz or higher is best, Dual core is enough but you don’t need more than Quad Core to work with Photoshop, most of its heavy lifting is done in RAM and Hard Disk space and speed.

Notes:
There is an “Efficiency Indicator” in Photoshop toward the bottom left hand corner of the screen. If it displays less than 90% Efficiency try enhancing your performance setting in Edit > Preferences > Performance… this will let you control what Scratch Disk are being used, in what order, and how much RAM Photoshop is using.

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Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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4 Comments »

designfloat.com said:

Speeding Up Photoshop CS5…

Graphic Designer and Digital Artist Roberto Blake teaches you how to improve Photoshop CS5 speed and performance….

# 4 July 2011 at 8:49 am

Ben said:

Nice post. CS5 on my iMac tends to grind down every now and then. Especially after a few weeks open. I think I need to get a decent external drive and use that as secondary scratchdisk by the looks.

ben

# 21 July 2011 at 9:37 am

James Brow said:

@Ben – I’m not 100% certain that the principle is the same for Mac’s, but on a PC running anything for weeks at a time will inevitably cause your system to perform worse over time due to the clipboard and cache filling up with tons of temporary files. Be sure to shut down/restart or run a program like ccleaner by piriform (it’s free!) when ever you notice your system performance degrading.

@R. Blake – Love the article. I was unaware of the performance gauge at the bottom of the screen. I was surprised to see I had managed to ignore it this long. (for those who haven’t seen it, open a file (new or old it doesn’t matter) and by default right next to the zoom display % there’s a little bar with an arrow at the end which typically reads “Displays in X bit only”, click the arrow to change what information you want to show there. Options include: Exposure, Efficiency, Size, Profile, Dimension, Scratch, Timing, and Current Tool.

I also think it might be worth noting that you can increase performance by changing several options in your preferences tab in CS5 such as disabling things like ‘animate zoom’, Adjusting how many steps the History will remember, The # of Cache states, and the Cache Tile Size.

If you’re not sure what each of those items does just mouse over the option in the preferences panel an either a tool tip (has to be enabled to work) will pop up, or a small description at the bottom of the panel will explain the options.

Hope this helps!

# 27 December 2011 at 8:22 pm

David Cousens said:

Never noticed the efficiency indicator until now! Thanks Roberto for the helpful blog post and also thanks to James Brow for the excellent detailed instructions on how to access the efficiency indicator.

# 9 April 2012 at 11:10 am