Soo, Photoshop is the topic of this post and the infinite amount of time it can take to load up on the average spec PC. In the past suffered hard, often clicking photoshop, going and making coffee and coming back to it finally loaded up. Thus, over the years, I’ve found various ways to speed up Photoshop…
1)Your bog-standard computer
The first and obvious solutions revolve around upgrading the PC you run Photoshop on… Upgrading to a faster processor or investing a dual processor setup is likely to provide you with your greatest increases in speed. However, this is hardly cheap and inexpensive, so the next port of call becomes RAM. I increased my PC RAM from 512MB to 2GB and the difference in Photoshop load time and real-time running during work is incredible. Although, it is important to remember that in earlier versions, RAM of over 4GB is said to have very little continuing effects on speed, so the relationship is not ever ongoing. Next, would be to increase available hard disk space, especially when working with larger PSDs. Many even suggest a dedicated internal hard disk just for your Photoshop work, and with the relatively low prices of internal HD’s, it might be worth doing for even the smallest increase.
2) Your Photoshop setup
As designers using photoshop and even a photographer, you most probably have hundreds and maybe even more fonts, brushes, plug-ins, presets, custom shapes and preference files. This is increased even more by the on-click availability of free download ons the internet. If you watch the photoshop splash when your loading up you will see it loading all these things. One of the worst culprits is fonts! So what I would suggest is not placing them in your main font directory, but creating a sepearte fonts directory and only loading fonts as you need them, so you probably need to take some time to just familiarise yourself with the fonts that you have. You then simply apply this principle to all the extras tat you phave to increase Photoshop’s load time.
A great tool for Windows users(one again Mac gets forgotten) is Photoshop SpeedUp which is a program that “significantly decreases the time it takes to load Adobe Photoshop by disabling the plug-ins that you may not need. There are several options such as whether to load the Adobe fonts, load the presets, and set the memory usage. You may restore to the original settings at any time. Adobe Photoshop SpeedUp is freeware” and available in many different languages. You can download the tool here: http://www.acropdf.com/photosu.exe and the developer website is http://www.acropdf.com/products.html with the Photoshop SpeedUp info at the bottom.
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Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.
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Adobe Photoshop is the best photo editing tool in my opinion.Photoshop has been my bread and butter software on my current job which involves a lot of photo editing.
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