Photoshop CS – optimising efficiency

A
Posted By
agreen
Apr 27, 2004
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280
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4
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Closed
I’m using a P4 3.2ghz, 1gb ram, WinXP Pro, 1x 40gb HD (breaking Adobe’s golden rule of keeping the paging file off the Primary Scratch, and it’s not partitioned or recently defragmented). Currently running Photoshop CS and working on a server.

My Photoshop files are for large format output. Often 255cm x 83cm at 125dpi, layered PSD.

I need to be able to Open the file, paint some brush strokes, do some cloning, duplicate a layer, more brush strokes, merge that layer down, move the layer into position, and finally Save.

I’ve already tried copying the file to the HD – speeds increase. However, increasing the Memory allocated to Photoshop in the Prefs does little – in fact it slows the Layer Duplication and Moving down by a lot.

How can I set up/clean up the computer to work with these files in the quickest way? Will adding RAM or another HD make significant differences?

Any help much appreciated.
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A
agreen
Apr 27, 2004
Should have also mentioned that I have an Nvidia GForce 5200 128mb graphics card.

thanks.
JH
Jim_Hess
Apr 27, 2004
I doubt you would gain much performance by adding additional RAM. It is my suspicion that you are experiencing most of your performance loss because you are trying to run Photoshop from the server. I think you would find a definite improvement if you installed Photoshop on your local hard drive. It doesn’t matter so much about having a separate scratch disk. However, it seems to me that you have a rather small primary hard drive for such an otherwise "well endowed" computer. I would probably add at least a 120 GB secondary hard drive. I would leave Photoshop installed on the 40 GB primary drive.
A
agreen
Apr 27, 2004
Jim, thanks for the advice. I do have Photoshop installed locally, but take your point about the secondary hard drive. Would you then set that as the primary scratch disk?
JH
Jim_Hess
Apr 27, 2004
There are probably others who are much more knowledgeable about this. But this is the way I have my system set up an I’m satisfied with it. I have a 40 GB primary hard drive, an 80 GB secondary hard drive that I use for video editing, and a 60 GB external FireWire hard drive that I used for my Photoshop images. I have Photoshop installed on my primary hard drive and use the 60 GB external drive for my images AND for my scratch disk. I suppose I could use my secondary hard drive for the scratch disk, but I usually have so much video stored on it that I decided not to do that. Anyway, from what I have read and from what I understand, the main issue is to have the scratch disk designated to something other than the disk where Photoshop is installed. But I don’t know how big of an issue that really is, because many people only have one hard drive. Personally, I would rather have bigger hard drives than what I have, but they were given to me by my kids as gifts so I am showing my gratitude to them.

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