Last week it was my turn to upgrade to CS5 and with the joy of all the new features – linking mask to smart objects – comes the pain of resetting your Photoshop. These are just a few settings I change to make Photoshop run the smoothest and minimize the crashes that have plagued Photoshop for years. If your running an old Macbook Pro or PC these changes will definitely help you start, load and work faster.

1. General

Most of the items in here are personal preference but these 2 could slow down Photoshop.

• Animated Zoom: Turn this off. This could have some effect on your GPU & CPU but I also find it annoying.
• History Log: Turn this off unless your writing a tutorial and want to save out your full history log.

2. Performance

It takes me a few weeks to correctly get the performance panel correct. Balancing the RAM slider to suit your computer/workflow always takes time.

• Memory Usage: I start the slider at 55% and that is normally pretty low. I tend to have a lot of applications running while using Photoshop like some rocking music. Play with slider if you ever find your not getting enough out of photoshop, or if you think Photoshop is taking up so much ram. You’ll know when you have it to high if your music starts to skip when you get an adium message.
• Scratch Disks: Scratch disks are primarily used for filters, 3D objects and history. Always try to have a scratch disk enabled on a secondary drive. This will allow you to have more history states and higher cache levels. I also find it funny how Photoshop tells you to ‘not use a boot drive as a scratch disk’ when by default it’s automatically turned on your boot drive and you can’t turn it off.
• History States: This setting should depend on your scratch disk drive. Don’t have a scratch disk? Try to keep the history levels below 30.

If you have applied levels, a reduce noise filter, and an unsharp mask filter to your entire image that’s 5 MB in size, the image will need 20 MB of scratch space. When you reduce the number of history states available, you potentially reduce the number of copies of your image using scratch space.

• Cache Levels: Cache levels are used to help speed up the document rendering when zooming in and out. I try to keep my cache levels low. I don’t mind Photoshop having to redraw all my layers if it means it free’s up more RAM for other applications.

3. Extensions

Seeing as I don’t currently run any extensions I make sure they don’t load and don’t connect to the internet.

4. Type

One key change I make here is turning off font preview. Not only does it make Photoshop load faster, I also find I run into less crashes when using the type tool due to bad fonts.

Conclusion

These are just a few settings that I have learnt about over the years not to mention all of my other personal settings. I also make a lot of changes to my color settings for the best color matching when saving for web. But make sure to leave a comment if you know of any other changes or degree with any of mine.