Ten tips to speed up Photoshop that no one told you about

When you purchase Photoshop CC license, you can start using it straight away. However, there are some adjustments you can make to have the program run much faster and more smoothly. In this video, Colin Smith of photoshopCAFE will give you ten lesser-known tips for speeding up Photoshop that will make your workflow much faster and more efficient.

1. Lose the welcome screen

The first thing you can do to speed up Photoshop is get rid of the welcome screen. Go to File > Preferences > General (or hit Ctrl/Cmd + K). Check the “Disable the Home Screen” option, and when you restart the program, it will be gone.

2. Shrink the “New Document” window

Under the same set of Preferences, you can also make the “New Document” window smaller. Again, hit Ctrl/Cmd + K and select the “Use Legacy ‘New Document’ Interface.”

3. Increase recent documents to 100

Next, under “Preferences,” go to “File Handling.” You can increase the number of recent files to 100. This way, when you go to Start > Open Recent, the last 100 files will be accessible, which can make your workflow much faster.

4. Use 80% of RAM memory

The next category Colin adjusts under “Preferences” is “Performance.” Within this category, you can increase the use of RAM to 80%. Colin suggests that you can also go up to 90% if you only use Photoshop, but generally, 80% is a good number.

5. Fix display issues

If you’re experiencing some display issues in Photoshop, Colin notes that this can often be fixed. Under “Preferences,” go to “Performance” and turn off the GPU. If this doesn’t help, go to the advanced settings and turn off the features one by one until you find which one was making a problem.

6. Legacy compositing

You may have experienced some problems with blending modes in Photoshop CC 2019. You can fix this by checking “Legacy Compositing” under the “Performance” panel.

7. Scratch disk

If Photoshop runs out of RAM while you’re processing an image, it moves the work to a hard drive and works from there. But, if you only have one hard drive set, and it’s nearly full, Photoshop will become sluggish. You can fix this by applying more than one disk. Colin suggests that you install another hard drive and make it an SSD. Under “Performance,” go to “Scratch Disks” and select that disk to be primary.

8. Don’t copy and paste

Copying and pasting one image to another can take up some memory. So, Colin suggests that you rather drag and drop one image into the other, because it doesn’t copy the photo to a clipboard and saves you memory.

9. Free up resources

If you try to apply a filter and Photoshop warns you that it’s out of resources, you can fix this too. Go to Edit > Purge and select “All.” This will clear history and anything on the clipboard and free up some resources.

10. Resetting your preferences

If you want to reset Photoshop to factory settings, you can easily do it, and it can fix a lot of problems you may experience with the program. But, make sure to save your presets before doing this. Go to Edit > Presets > Export/Import Presets and save any custom presets that you’ve made.

Now, you can reset your preferences. Exit Photoshop, and before opening it again, hold Ctrl + Alt + Shift on Windows or Cmd +Option + Shift on Mac. You’ll see a dialog box asking “Delete the Adobe Photoshop Settings File?” Click “Yes,” and you’re done. Your Photoshop is now reset to factory settings.

Have you used any of these tips so far? Have they helped you fix Photoshop issues? Share your experiences in the comments.

[SPEED UP + fix PHOTOSHOP with 10 tips NO-ONE told you about | photoshopCAFE]

chrishester

I recently installed a 128GB SSD in my PC purely for use as a scratch disk by Photoshop Elements. I used to run out of memory if I opened more than one photo. Now I can open several and it works as normal!
Richard Doktor

To 1: Never needed that and I think it’s not really important.
To 4: Just watch out with that. Normally, not only PS is running when designing. I suggest to stay at 75% maximum, just to have more headroom for other things.

To 10: A big point regarding performance that is often overlooked: Loaded Brushes and patterns (but of course also others like gradients etc. but not as much). Over time, there can be a vast amount of things stored. Especially if you a (heavy) user of “graphical PS actions” like the ones you find on Creative Market and the like.

Because both, brushes and patterns, can contain very heavy items (x000 x x000 size brushes, big sized textures in patterns), loading PS and then working with it can lead to viscous workflow over time. So, before restoring PS preferences I would recommend to clear out all brushes and patterns and then load in again what is needed.

Helped a lot for me.
And this would be what I wish for years: The possibility to load/unload defined sets containing brushes, patterns, gradients, etc. This way, it would be easy to use a set and also unload it afterwards. One could create sets for different tasks and PS wouldn’t become so cluttered over time.
But I guess, Adobe will never make this real …
A K Nicholas

Many of these suggestions have to do with conserving memory. Memory is relatively cheap, and maxing out the machine is my first step. By adding resources you won’t need to worry so much about freeing them up. Photoshop rarely needs more than 30GB or RAM and on a Mac you can have 64GB. The next is to get the fastest 1TB SSD you can and work off of the internal drive.