How To Speed Up Adobe Photoshop and Reader; Quick Tips

Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Reader is a very important and essential software from Adobe family. I do really use the Photoshop for some touch ups and kind of small editing working for blog posts. I know its not the Photoshop is all for. But, sometimes this products really get laggy and slow  to run in the Windows, especially while editing large size images and while reading big PDF articles. Then i decided to have a deeper look into the topic ‘How to speed up this’. I come up with few things, which i really wanted to share with you.

Faster Adobe Photoshop

1.Allocating Scratch Disks

Scratch disks are portions of the hard disk used by Photoshop to run itself. When working with large image files, for instance, when you add layers and perform editing operations on it, these states are stoned in this virtual memory called Scratch Disk. To set your scratch disk select Edit->Preferences->Plug-ins and select Scratch Disks. You should choose a drive which has the most free space, as you don’t want Photoshop to prevent you from doing your work, if your scratch disk is full. Majority of the professionals install specific fast access drives just to be used as Scratch disks.

This can be tried on Adobe Premier Pro too

2.RAM percentages

Photoshop will share the system RAM with the underlying OS and programs running at that point of time when Photoshop is open. Under Edit->Preferences, there is a slider that allows you to select the amount of RAM Photoshop can use. Under ideal conditions setting a higher percentage should translate into speedier Photoshop, right? Not really.

If the percentage is kept higher, then Photoshop and your OS may need to move information between the faster RAM memory and slower hard drive memory. This is called page swapping and that can end up slowing down Photoshop. If you have 2GB of RAM keep the application at 50 to 60 percent whereas anything more than 2GB you can go up to 70 per cent.

3.Other quick tips

Always have only Photoshop open while using it and close all other applications that run in the background as they will tend to slow down the performance of Photoshop since they sip a lot of the CPU processing power.

Minimise the number of history states as each successive edit in the history state is stored in the palette. It uses some memory resources. Go to Edit->Preferences and under the Performances tab, you will notice the default History states kept to 20. If you are working on high resolution images, and the number of history states is something like 30-40, then you do get lots of opportunities to undo a step that was done sometime back, but Photoshop performance will take a hit. So ideally, try to keep History States to minimum level to free up some memory resources.

Finally, though this may seem like stating the obvious, only keep those files open on which you are currently performing any tasks for the simple reason that each open image will use up some memory. More so if you perform some operation and then forget about the image, the History and layers palette will use up some memory.

Faster Adobe Reader

Opening PDF files may take ages for some and this has prompted many users to switch to other readers like Foxit. But you can speed up the opening up of the Adobe Reader quite easily. All you have to do is disable all the plug-ins.

Go to plug_ins folder in Reader. The path in our case was something like this: C drive->Program files->Adobe->Reader 9.0->plug_ins. Move all the contents of your plug_ins folder somewhere on your hard drive. After the plug_ins folder is empty, try restarting that PDF file which took ages to open and notice how quick the reader opens that PDF file. Don’t worry, the absence of default plug-ins will not affect your Reader performance. You can always paste back the plug_ins from the backup folder into its original folder, in case you notice any problems.

I hope you all will try this and share your experience. If you got more points to add, you are always welcome.

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