Setting Preferences & Troubleshooting
Tutorial requested by slyvicious
Setting Preferences for Plug-Ins and Scratch Disks
Setting Preferences for Memory and Image Cache
When you apply a tilter, or resize an image, Photoshop uses memory to complete the operation.
Solve Performance Problems
Photoshop is a memory monster. It wants as much free hard disk space and RAM as it can get. This is understandable, since Photoshop performs mathematical calculations on every pixel in your image every time you apply a filter or alter your entire image by resizing, transforming, or applying any number of other changes. The general rule of thumb is that Photoshop wants five times as much memory (RAM) as the image size you’re working on. If you’re working on a 60MB (megabytes) image with 256MB of RAM, you’ll see sluggish behavior. The bigger the files you work on, the more memory you need to work with Photoshop. Although Adobe says that Photoshop needs a minimum of 128MB of RAM as a minimum, 256MB is more of a realistic minimum requirement. If you work on images for print, you should have 512MB of RAM or more. If you’re running Photoshop with 256MB of RAM or less, consider not running other programs at the same time if you start to run into slower than normal performance.
Free Scratch Disk Space
In addition to RAM, Photoshop uses free disk space on your hard drive as temporary memory while processing images. Through normal use, as you install applications, delete, copy, and move files on your computer, information ends up scattered across your hard drive. This is called disk fragmentation. What Photoshop wants and needs are big chunks of free disk space, uncluttered by information. To free up space on your hard drive and make Photoshop happy, use a utility to defragment your hard drive, or hard drives.
Before running a defragmentation utility, it’s best to close down any programs you have running. On Windows, select Start Programs / Accessories / Disk Defragmenter. Click the Show Details button on the Disk Defragmenter to get a good visual sense of what a fragmented drive looks like.
The Macintosh operating system does not contain a disk defragmentation tool. However, there are several third-party utilities for the Mac that will defrag your hard drive, including Norton Utilities, and Alsoft Disk Warrior.
Free Up Disk Space
As noted above, Photoshop wants plenty of free hard disk space. It’s a good idea to check to see how much free disk space you have to make sure you’re not running short. To see how much free disk space a drive has in Windows, go to My Computer, right-click on the drive you want to check, and select Properties from the drop-down menu. As shown here, you will see a screen that gives a visual representation of how much free space is remaining on that hard drive.
To find out how much frcc disk space you have on a Mac, select Apple Menu / Apple System Profiler from the Apple menu. Select the Devices and Volumes tab. Once you’ve taken a look at the amount of free disk space remaining on your hard drive, you may find that you want to make more room on your drive by deleting files, or moving files to another drive, a Zip disk, or CD ROM.
Set the Scratch Disk Settings
Once you’ve cleaned up your hard drive and it’s happily humming away, you’ll want to make sure that Photoshop is using the correct hard drive for image caching. You need to worry about this only if you have more than one hard drive.
Update Drivers for Hardware
If you’re having display problems, or your scanner isn’t working as it should, it’s a good idea to check for new drivers for your hardware. Although every hardware manufacturer and software manufacturer tries to make products that are compatible with other software and hardware, sometimes it takes a while for everyone to work out solutions, it’s a good idea to check for new drivers for your printer, scanner, and video card every six months or so. Every manufacturer should have a web site where you can download updated drivers for your hardware.
Launch Photoshop Faster
If you want Photoshop to launch more quickly, you can speed it up by uninstalling fonts or by removing plug-ins you don’t use. Every time Photoshop launches, it loads the various fonts and plug-ins you have installed, which can bog down the program.
Uninstall Fonts
In Windows, go to your Windows Fonts folder and delete or move any fonts you don’t use. On the Mac, for 05 9 and earlier, remove fonts from the System folder. For OS X, you will also want to check in the Library / Fonts folder and the Users / Usemame / Library / Fonts folder.
Remove Plug-ins and Filters
it’s easy to get hooked on adding plug-ins to Photoshop, but if you find that you don’t use all of your third party plug-ins, you may want to uninstall them. Photoshop also ships with a filter called the Digimarc filter, which checks for a copyright watermark embedded in images created with Digimarc software. To prevent this preinstalled filter from loading, go to your Photoshop / Plug-Ins / Digimarc folder, and rename the folder to ~Digimarc. (The tilde symbol (~) is located to the left of the 1 key on the top row of your keyboard.)
Remove Extra Brushes, Styles, Gradients, Contours, and Presets
If you really want to run a lean version of Photoshop, you’ll want to use the Preset Manager to remove extra presets. Select Edit Preset Manager, and browse through your presets to eliminate any extra presets that you don’t use. Make sure to save any custom presets you’ve created first, by selecting all of the presets you wish to save, then selecting Save Set. You can then return to the originally installed set of presets by selecting Reset Presets.
Purge Your Memory
If you’ve copied a large image to the clipboard, the image will take up memory until you either copy something smaller or purge your clipboard. Since that copied image is taking up memory, you may notice that processes like applying a filter slow down.
To purge your memory, select Edit / Purge / Clipboard. You’ll see there are other choices too. You can choose to purge your Undos, History, and All.
Trim Your Image to Free Memory
If you’ve pasted in a large image, but are using only a small portion of it, you can choose to
trim the larger image to match the size of the image you’re working on. This reduces the file size and also frees up memory.
Select the layer you’d like to trim in the Layers palette. Select Image / Trim. If you’d like to see what you’re deleting before you use the trim command, select Image / Reveal All.
Check for Photoshop Updates
Every few months, you should check to see if there have been updates for the latest version of Photoshop. You can do this
by clicking the Photoshop image at the top of the Photoshop 4 toolbar, as shown on the left. Patches and updates can sometimes
solve conflicts with hardware or software.
Can’t Get out of Full Screen Mode
Click the F key, which cycles between full screen display, full screen with menu bar, and standard screen modes.
Photoshop is Behaving Oddly
These are symptoms of a corrupted Preferences file in Photoshop. Other symptoms can be that the program won’t launch, colors display oddly, or you can’t get tools to function the way that they should. Your best bet is to reinstall Photoshop. Your customized settings will be lost, such as palette locations and Preference selections.
Printing to Fit a Page
Setting Preferences for Plug-Ins and Scratch Disks
- Additional Plug-Ins Directory
One of Photoshop’s best features is that you can keep adding onto it with plug-ins. Plug-ins add additional functions, such as filters, special effects, and export abilities. If you’ve installed 3 plug-ins to any place other than the Photoshop Plug-Ins directory, you can have them load every time Photoshop opens by selecting the correct directory. - Scratch Disks
Photoshop loves memory and it needs a lot of virtual elbowroom to work in. The general rule of thumb is that you need up to five times as much RAM as your image size in order to work in Photoshop. If you’re working on a 40MB file, you’d better have at least 200MB of RAM available. Scratch disks are different from RAM in that RAM is memory and scratch disks are space on your hard drive that Photoshop uses temporarily while processing files. If you have multiple hard drives, use the drive with the most space available as your primary scratch disk.
Setting Preferences for Memory and Image Cache
When you apply a tilter, or resize an image, Photoshop uses memory to complete the operation.
- Cache Settings
Photoshop generates your image at several zoom sizes (the default is four) to speed up your work when you zoom in and zoom out. Depending on how much memory you have, you may want to raise the number of cache settings to make your work go even faster. - Physical Memory Usage
This setting determines how much of your RAM Photoshop can use. In most cases, it’s best to leave this at the default setting.
Solve Performance Problems
Photoshop is a memory monster. It wants as much free hard disk space and RAM as it can get. This is understandable, since Photoshop performs mathematical calculations on every pixel in your image every time you apply a filter or alter your entire image by resizing, transforming, or applying any number of other changes. The general rule of thumb is that Photoshop wants five times as much memory (RAM) as the image size you’re working on. If you’re working on a 60MB (megabytes) image with 256MB of RAM, you’ll see sluggish behavior. The bigger the files you work on, the more memory you need to work with Photoshop. Although Adobe says that Photoshop needs a minimum of 128MB of RAM as a minimum, 256MB is more of a realistic minimum requirement. If you work on images for print, you should have 512MB of RAM or more. If you’re running Photoshop with 256MB of RAM or less, consider not running other programs at the same time if you start to run into slower than normal performance.
Free Scratch Disk Space
In addition to RAM, Photoshop uses free disk space on your hard drive as temporary memory while processing images. Through normal use, as you install applications, delete, copy, and move files on your computer, information ends up scattered across your hard drive. This is called disk fragmentation. What Photoshop wants and needs are big chunks of free disk space, uncluttered by information. To free up space on your hard drive and make Photoshop happy, use a utility to defragment your hard drive, or hard drives.
Before running a defragmentation utility, it’s best to close down any programs you have running. On Windows, select Start Programs / Accessories / Disk Defragmenter. Click the Show Details button on the Disk Defragmenter to get a good visual sense of what a fragmented drive looks like.
The Macintosh operating system does not contain a disk defragmentation tool. However, there are several third-party utilities for the Mac that will defrag your hard drive, including Norton Utilities, and Alsoft Disk Warrior.
Free Up Disk Space
As noted above, Photoshop wants plenty of free hard disk space. It’s a good idea to check to see how much free disk space you have to make sure you’re not running short. To see how much free disk space a drive has in Windows, go to My Computer, right-click on the drive you want to check, and select Properties from the drop-down menu. As shown here, you will see a screen that gives a visual representation of how much free space is remaining on that hard drive.
To find out how much frcc disk space you have on a Mac, select Apple Menu / Apple System Profiler from the Apple menu. Select the Devices and Volumes tab. Once you’ve taken a look at the amount of free disk space remaining on your hard drive, you may find that you want to make more room on your drive by deleting files, or moving files to another drive, a Zip disk, or CD ROM.
Set the Scratch Disk Settings
Once you’ve cleaned up your hard drive and it’s happily humming away, you’ll want to make sure that Photoshop is using the correct hard drive for image caching. You need to worry about this only if you have more than one hard drive.
- To adjust the scratch disk setting, choose Edit / Preferences / Plugins & Scratch Disks.
- Under First Scratch Disks, make sure that the drive with the most free space available is selected.
Update Drivers for Hardware
If you’re having display problems, or your scanner isn’t working as it should, it’s a good idea to check for new drivers for your hardware. Although every hardware manufacturer and software manufacturer tries to make products that are compatible with other software and hardware, sometimes it takes a while for everyone to work out solutions, it’s a good idea to check for new drivers for your printer, scanner, and video card every six months or so. Every manufacturer should have a web site where you can download updated drivers for your hardware.
Launch Photoshop Faster
If you want Photoshop to launch more quickly, you can speed it up by uninstalling fonts or by removing plug-ins you don’t use. Every time Photoshop launches, it loads the various fonts and plug-ins you have installed, which can bog down the program.
Uninstall Fonts
In Windows, go to your Windows Fonts folder and delete or move any fonts you don’t use. On the Mac, for 05 9 and earlier, remove fonts from the System folder. For OS X, you will also want to check in the Library / Fonts folder and the Users / Usemame / Library / Fonts folder.
Remove Plug-ins and Filters
it’s easy to get hooked on adding plug-ins to Photoshop, but if you find that you don’t use all of your third party plug-ins, you may want to uninstall them. Photoshop also ships with a filter called the Digimarc filter, which checks for a copyright watermark embedded in images created with Digimarc software. To prevent this preinstalled filter from loading, go to your Photoshop / Plug-Ins / Digimarc folder, and rename the folder to ~Digimarc. (The tilde symbol (~) is located to the left of the 1 key on the top row of your keyboard.)
Remove Extra Brushes, Styles, Gradients, Contours, and Presets
If you really want to run a lean version of Photoshop, you’ll want to use the Preset Manager to remove extra presets. Select Edit Preset Manager, and browse through your presets to eliminate any extra presets that you don’t use. Make sure to save any custom presets you’ve created first, by selecting all of the presets you wish to save, then selecting Save Set. You can then return to the originally installed set of presets by selecting Reset Presets.
Purge Your Memory
If you’ve copied a large image to the clipboard, the image will take up memory until you either copy something smaller or purge your clipboard. Since that copied image is taking up memory, you may notice that processes like applying a filter slow down.
To purge your memory, select Edit / Purge / Clipboard. You’ll see there are other choices too. You can choose to purge your Undos, History, and All.
Trim Your Image to Free Memory
If you’ve pasted in a large image, but are using only a small portion of it, you can choose to
trim the larger image to match the size of the image you’re working on. This reduces the file size and also frees up memory.
Select the layer you’d like to trim in the Layers palette. Select Image / Trim. If you’d like to see what you’re deleting before you use the trim command, select Image / Reveal All.
Check for Photoshop Updates
Every few months, you should check to see if there have been updates for the latest version of Photoshop. You can do this
by clicking the Photoshop image at the top of the Photoshop 4 toolbar, as shown on the left. Patches and updates can sometimes
solve conflicts with hardware or software.
Can’t Get out of Full Screen Mode
- Help! I selected full-screen mode, which hides all the palettes and menus and now I can’t figure out how to get back to my menus!
Click the F key, which cycles between full screen display, full screen with menu bar, and standard screen modes.
Photoshop is Behaving Oddly
- My palettes aren’t showing up, icons are missing, and some of the menu items are gone.
These are symptoms of a corrupted Preferences file in Photoshop. Other symptoms can be that the program won’t launch, colors display oddly, or you can’t get tools to function the way that they should. Your best bet is to reinstall Photoshop. Your customized settings will be lost, such as palette locations and Preference selections.
Printing to Fit a Page
- I keep getting a message that the image I’m trying to print is too big for the page. How can I easily get my image to fit on a page?