BASIC PS SETTINGS
 
Scratch Disk Settings
 

This is something you should do first of all.

The Scratch Disks in Photoshop are responsible for the performance of the program, its memory - when you paint a large painting, it may happen the Photoshop begins to "lag". This means it takes a while for PS to think and actually place the brush strokes where you put them. And this is due to the Scratch Disks. In the worst case, it will give you an error message that it couldn't perform an action because the Scratch Disks are full.

So, to improve the performance of PS, and also (partly) resolve such issues, change the settings of your Scratch Disks.

 
 
1. Check the space of your hard drives first. You can do so by clicking on "My Computer" (in Windows) - right-click on a drive and select "properties" from the pop-up menu or simply hover over it, then you'll see how much space you have on that drive.

Even if you only have one physical hard drive, usually this is partitioned, and in most cases into C (for your system and programs) and D (for your personal documents).
 
 
2. Open Photoshop. Click on Edit in the main menu, then on Preferences, and from there go to Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks.
 
 
 
3. The Scratch Disk Settings will pop up:
 
 
Under Scratch Disks, you see four pull down menus. Most likely you will find in them "Startup", C, and D (or whatever your drives are called). For the first, select the drive that has the most space on it, and work your way down. - No, not your Floppy or CD Rom drive.

On a side note, Adobe recommends that the first drive should NOT be the one that has all the programs and system files on it, since this would slow down PS when you have more than one program running at the time of working in Photoshop. Also, it is preferrable to not use external hard drives for this.

For more information on how to increase the performance of PS, search the Adobe website.
 


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