Photoshop Tutorials

Description

Photoshop Setup

To take advantage of Photoshop CS2 with a fast 64-bit computer, there are several things that need to be setup.

Enable access to 2+ GB RAM

If your computer is running a Windows and has more than 2 GB of RAM, you may need to modify the boot.ini file to set the 3 GB switch. For more information on this, please visit the Microsoft® support website and search "3gb".

Scratch Disk

If your computer has a separate internal hard drive dedicated as a scratch disk, make sure that it is set as your primary scratch disk.

1. Inside Photoshop, choose Edit> Preferences> Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks.
2. Change the primary scratch disk to the hard drive you've setup as our dedicated scratch drive.
3. Set the second, third, and/or forth scratch disk as your other drives. Keep the fastest and least used hard drives first and the slowest last.

{mostip image=tipon}To keep your hard drives at its optimal speed, keep them defragmented. We recommend defragging the hard drives once or more a week.{/mostip}

Image Cache

When redrawing a high-resolution image, Photoshop can use a low-resolution version of the image to update the image on-screen so that we're able to continue working faster. To enable this:

1. Inside Photoshop, choose Edit> Preferences> Image Cache.
2. Set the Cache Levels to the amount that fits your computer specifications. The default setting is 4. More levels make editing high resolution images faster but also make it slower to open the file.
3. Restart Photoshop.

Bigger Tiles Plug-In

The Bigger Tiles plug-in allows Photoshop to process image data in larger chunks to reduce overall time and increase responsiveness. This plug-in is recommended only for computers with more than 1 GB of RAM.

1. Browse to the folder Adobe Photoshop CS2\Plug-Ins\Adobe Photoshop Only\Extensions\Bigger Tiles folder. On a typical Windows computer setup, this folder is usually found c:\Program Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\Adobe Photoshop Only\Extensions\Bigger Tiles.
2. Remove the ~ from the beginning of filename of ~Bigger Tiles.8BX. The file name should now be "Bigger Tiles.8BX" instead of "~Bigger Tiles.8BX".
3. If Photoshop is opened, restart Photoshop.