Rangefinder Magazine
July 2006
Photoshop CS2 How2 by Michelle Perkins
Boosting Your Efficiency in Adobe Photoshop CS2
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Figure 1—Displaying the Efficiency field at the foot of your image
lets you check for time-wasting memory deficiencies.
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If there’s one universal complaint about digital imaging,
it’s the time photographers (or their staffs) now need to
spend staring at a computer monitor. While playing with
images can be a lot of fun, there inevitably comes a time
when you just need to get things done—and not spend all
day doing them. When that time comes, the following are
some timesavers that can help put you on the right track.
Check Your Efficiency
If you’ve spent some time poking around at the bottom
of your image window, you’ve probably noticed the little
black triangle that opens a fly-out menu you can use to
change the data displayed at the foot of your image. If you
click on this and go to Show > Efficiency, you can keep an
eye on how well Photoshop is running on your system.
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Figure 2—If the Efficiency reads below 100%, it’s time for a RAM upgrade.
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Once you have this field displayed, begin working on some images
as you would normally—you might even want to monitor this over the
course of a day’s image editing. If, after working on an image for a while,
you notice that the value is below 100%, this means that your computer
is using the scratch disk(s) instead of the RAM.
Because RAM is faster than the scratch disk(s), this means that Photoshop
is not running as efficiently as it could. If this is happening, you’re wasting time
waiting for things to happen (previews to render, filters to run, etc.). The best solution
is to add more RAM to your computer. In this day and age, if
you’re running with less that 1GB, it’s probably time to start
shopping for an upgrade anyway.
Reduce the History States
The History palette is a wonderful asset when editing images,
but it also eats up memory. At its default setting, the History
palette will record 20 states. If you set the number higher (in
Preferences > General dialog box), it will eat up more memory,
but you’ll have more options for backtracking when something
doesn’t go as planned. If you set it lower, you’ll use less memory
but have fewer undos at your disposal.
Ideally, you’ll want to strike a balance between the two. To do
this, monitor your work. If you’re constantly looking for states
that have disappeared, set the number of states saved to a higher
value. If you rarely need to backtrack, you may want to set it even
lower than 20 and allocate those memory resources elsewhere.
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Figure 3—The number of History states you’ve asked Photoshop
to store can effect how efficiently the program will run.
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Purge, Purge, Purge
The Purge command lets you instantly free up memory
being used by the Undo command, the History palette, or
the clipboard. To apply this command, go to Edit > Purge
and select the desired field (if a field is already empty, it
will be dimmed in the pop-out menu).
Note that using this command permanently clears
whatever was stored by the command or in the buffer.
You cannot undo this. Therefore, it’s best to use this command
when the amount of information stored in memory
is so large that Photoshop’s performance is noticeably
affected. You may find the command useful when:
1. You’ve set Photoshop to record a high number of
history states but have reached a point in your editing
process on an image where you know for sure that you
will not need to use the stored states. For example, you
may have completed retouching a subject’s skin using
a hundred strokes with the Clone Stamp tool. If you’re
satisfied with the results and are ready to move on to another
process with the image (say, adding a vignette), you
may want to dump the stored history states. (Hopefully,
you’ve done your retouching on a duplicate layer anyway,
so you could return to the underlying original image if necessary.)
2. You’ve copied and pasted large amounts of data into an image—say, for constructing
a large, high-resolution composite. Once this data is pasted into a new layer, you may
want to purge it from the clipboard.
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Figure 4—The Purge command can be used to clear stored
data and free up memory.
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To Improve Filter Performance
Some filters are very memory intensive—especially when
you are applying them to high-resolution images. The
Lighting Effects filter is one notorious memory hog. To
make these complex tools run more efficiently, try any or
all of the following:
1. When you want to experiment with the effect of a
filter, try running it on just a portion of the image. You can do this using a selection or
by applying the filter to just one channel rather than the composite. (Note: With some
filters, the effects produced will vary when you apply the filter to only one channel, so
this won’t work for every filter.)
2. Use the Purge command (see above) to free up memory before applying the filter.
3. Allocate more memory to Photoshop or quit other applications
to make more memory available.
4. If you plan to use your image at a low resolution (perhaps
it is destined for use as a web-only graphic), reduce
the resolution and/or image size to the final, smaller values
before applying the filter.
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Figures 5—Eliminating the tilde
(~) in front of the file name activates
the plug-in, allowing it to load when
you restart Photoshop.
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Install the Bigger Tiles Plug-In
When you open an image in Photoshop (or transform it or do anything that requires
Photoshop to process the image), the software handles the file in small rectangular
blocks called tiles. The less RAM you have, the smaller the tiles Photoshop must work with. When the tile size is small, more tiles have to run through the processor
for each operation.
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Figures 6—Eliminating the tilde
(~) in front of the file name activates
the plug-in, allowing it to load when
you restart Photoshop.
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The default tile size is 132K, regardless of how much RAM you have. If,
however, you have lots of RAM, you can get Photoshop to
increase this tile size so that images will process faster—for
example, you can set Photoshop so it will only have to process
four tiles instead of 16.
To increase the tile size, activate the Bigger Tiles plug-in,
which is installed with Photoshop but disabled by default.
Here’s how:
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Figure 7—In the Memory & Image Cache preferences you can set the
percentage of total RAM allocated to Photoshop.
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1. Quit Photoshop.
2. Locate the “~Bigger Tiles” plug-in file. On Mac OS X,
you’ll find it on your system drive at: Applications > Adobe
Photoshop CS2 > Plug-Ins > Adobe Photoshop Only > Extensions > ~Bigger
Tiles. Windows users will find it at: Program Files > Adobe > Adobe Photoshop
CS2 > Plug-Ins > Adobe Photoshop Only > Extensions > ~Bigger Tiles.
3. Rename the file, removing the tilde (~) from the file name. (Removing the
tilde is what activates the file, allowing it to load upon restarting
Photoshop.)
4. Start Photoshop.
The next step is to access the Memory & Image Cache preferences
in Photoshop. If you assign 261MB to 1GB of RAM,
the tile size increases from 132KB to 260KB. If you assign
more than 1GB RAM (and this is where you will really notice
the difference), the tile size will increase to 1MB.
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Figure 8—Enabling pixel doubling makes some tools and commands
more efficient by halving the resolutions of the previews they display.
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Once the Bigger Tiles plug-in is activated, it may appear
that Photoshop actually takes slightly longer to draw images on the screen
(especially with large images or when applying memory-intensive filters).
This is because the bigger tiles require more time to draw. However, because
the number of tiles is so much smaller, the total time needed to completely
process an image should be noticeably reduced.
Pixel Doubling
If you don’t have a lot of RAM to work with, Bigger Tiles isn’t
really going to help you. However, Pixel Doubling can still let you
speed up you work. This option, set by activating Use Pixel Doubling
in the Display & Cursors preferences, speeds up the preview
of a tool or command’s results by temporarily halving the resolution
in the preview. This has no effect on the pixels in the file. As
soon as you’re done, it snaps back to the “real” resolution.
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Figure 9—To have Bridge build its caches in advance, go to
Tools > Cache > Build Cache for Subfolders.
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Supercharge Bridge
Sitting around waiting for thumbnails, metadata, and file info to
load in Bridge is a big time waster. You can speed things up by having
Bridge build its caches in advance—say, while you’re returning
phone calls or meeting with a client. To do this, open Bridge and
select the folder that contains the images you’ll be working with.
With the folder selected, go to Tools > Cache > Build Cache for
Subfolders. When you return to the computer from attending to
your other tasks, you’ll be able to whiz through your images.
There are two things to note:
1. The more files in the folder you select, the longer
it will take Bridge to build the previews. Therefore, if
you know you plan to spend the day working on images
from the Smith wedding, it’s best to select only the folder
that contains those images, rather than the folder that
contains all of your wedding photography from the past
month.
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Figure10—Disabling the Export Clipboard feature will improve
Photoshop’s performance.
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2. The cache files this process generates take up a fair
amount of room, so make sure you have plenty of hard
drive space available to hold them.
Deselect Export Clipboard
When anything in Photoshop is copied to the clipboard, Photoshop saves it
as a file that is automatically exported whenever you quit Photoshop or switch
to another application. This is time-consuming. If you do not need to use this
feature, disabling it will improve Photoshop’s performance. To do so, go to the
General preferences pane and deselect Export Clipboard.
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Figures 11-Disabling Digimarc’s digital
watermarking plug-in will improve Photoshop’s
performance. Note: this is the inverse of the
process used to enable the Bigger Tiles plug-in
described earlier.
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Disable the Detect Watermark Plug-In
Digimarc’s digital watermarking plug-in, included in
Photoshop, checks each image you open for a digital
watermark. If it finds one, a copyright symbol appears
in the title bar of the image. It’s a minor delay, but if you
don’t use this feature on your workflow, waiting at all is
pointless. You can avoid it by disabling the plug-in. Here’s
how:
1. Quit Photoshop.
2. For Mac OS X users, go to Applications > Adobe Photoshop CS2 > Plug-
Ins > Digimarc. Windows users will find these plug-ins at: Program Files >
Adobe > Adobe Photoshop CS2 > Plug-Ins > Digimarc.
3. Type a tilde (~) at the beginning of the file names for the plug-ins located
in this folder.
4.Restart Photoshop.
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Figures 12—Disabling Digimarc’s digital
watermarking plug-in will improve Photoshop’s
performance. Note: this is the inverse of the
process used to enable the Bigger Tiles plug-in
described earlier.
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As you can see, this is the inverse of the procedure we
used above to enable the Bigger Tiles plug-in—and it can
be used to enable or disable any plug-in. In general, the
fewer plug-ins Photoshop has to load each time it starts,
the more efficiently the program will run. Of course,
eliminating plug-ins also reduces functionality, so you
need to be judicious when messing around with these
settings.
So, there you have it—a myriad of simple ways to spend
less time waiting for things to happen when working with
Photoshop. Good luck, and speedy imaging!
Michelle Perkins is a professional writer, designer and image retoucher. She has written for PC
Photo and is the author of Beginner’s Guide to Adobe Photoshop, The Practical Guide to
Digital Imaging, and Color Correction and Enhancement with Adobe Photoshop (all from
Amherst Media).
