Is Photoshop slowing down your workflow? There is nothing worse than waiting for your workspace to load and watching your cursor turn into a spinning wheel of doom. To save you from this pain, here are five ways you can make Photoshop run faster on your machine.
1. Upgrade your RAM – Upgrading your RAM is an important step if you want to ensure Photoshop can run at maximum efficiency. More RAM will help when working with large and multiple files, manipulating images, rendering, and other tasks. RAM is significantly faster than storage, which is why performance lags when files have to be cached on the SSD. If your files use more memory than what is available, Photoshop will rely on the scratch disk (temporary storage) which will slow down your workflow. Reduce Photoshop’s reliance on the scratch disk by upgrading your RAM! If you stream your work or work primarily with higher bit depths and resolutions, consider using between 16 and 32GB.
2. Raise the memory usage – If you’ve added more memory to your computer, you want to make sure Photoshop knows about it. By default, Photoshop uses 70% of available RAM, but this can be adjusted! From Photoshop preferences, click on ‘Performance’ and then adjust the slider upward to allow Photoshop to use more RAM. Adobe advises against allocating more than 85% of your computer’s memory to Photoshop since that can affect the performance of other essential system applications.
