Plugins & scratchbook – new user

D
Posted By
DavidAGreen
Jun 7, 2004
Views
266
Replies
2
Status
Closed
G’day all,

Please go easy on me as I am new to Photoshop CS. My system that I am running is a 2.0 GHZ G5, 160 GB HDD with 2.5 Gb of ram (one partition only called HD). How important is it to Partition your disc for Photoshop. I have been advised by a friend that his OS9 Mac, running PS 7 and has two partitions (HD & Scratch) is setup so that in PS\prefernces\plugins and scratchbook the First = scratch disc. In my Mac I have just left it as defauft, as startup disc.
I am led to believe that a file the size of 10mb takes up approx 100 mb of ram and that’s why the above settings are completed in PS. I was under the impression with OSX that what ever that application needed in the way of RAM then OSX would compensate accordingly.

I hope I have made sense.

regards,

Dave Green
Related Tags
new plug-in

Master Retouching Hair

Learn how to rescue details, remove flyaways, add volume, and enhance the definition of hair in any photo. We break down every tool and technique in Photoshop to get picture-perfect hair, every time.

R
Ram
Jun 7, 2004
David,

If you have only one hard drive, partitioning will not give you any performance or speed gains, as your drive still has only one set of read/write heads. In order to gain some speed, you would have to have your scratch disk on a separate hard drive, not just a volume of the only drive you have. The ideal is to have at least two internal hard drives, then partition the second one (not your boot drive) so that your scratch disk resides on a dedicated volume of that second, separate drive.

You can still partition your hard drive if you wish, but you won’t see a performance gain. Of course, in order to partition, you have to erase and reformat the drive, so make sure you have reliable backups of everything.

The size of your scratch disk will be determined not just by the size of your files but also by your workflow and your preferences, things like layers, history states, etc. 30 times the size of your files is not uncommon.

The OS X allocates memory dynamically, but you still have to set the maximum percentage of dynamically changing memory that Photoshop is allowed to use at any given time. Start by setting it at around 75% or so. Photoshop will use up to 75% of whatever RAM is available at any moment after the system and other applications grab the RAM they need. You can set that in Photoshop > Preferences > Memory & Image Cache > Memory Usage > Maximum Used by Photoshop > 75 %.

That is totally independent from the scratch disk. You can’t define the size of your scratch disk, only where it resides. As I said, a separate hard drive is preferable.
D
DavidAGreen
Jun 7, 2004
Thanks Ramon, you have explained in great detail.
I think I will keep travelling as I have set up then and just change the percentage of dynamically changing memory in Photoshop.
Thanks again.

regards,

Dave Green.

Master Retouching Hair

Learn how to rescue details, remove flyaways, add volume, and enhance the definition of hair in any photo. We break down every tool and technique in Photoshop to get picture-perfect hair, every time.

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