The print-screen you are looking at reflects some of my setting so don't go HEY! mine does not look like yours! I know, I know. What interest us right now is to set PS so that it reflects your hardware capabilities. I have lots of memory (1) and I means lots look at the numbers 22GB! Yes, I know I am a nut case to have so much. Let's move on. PS gives you an estimate of what you should use(2). In my case, because I have lots, I selected the upper range. At the moment, you are likely not sure of how much you need and I understand your reserve. The way I am going to ask you to look at this is that when you are in PS, you likely will have a few programs running in the background. Give them some room and use the mid range for memory, nothing more. You can do this by either typing the memory amount in (3) or by using the slider (4).
Ok, so we are done for the memory, now the scratch disks (5). What the heck is that??? Well, think of it at a scratch pad where you jolts quick note when you in a meeting of thinking about something you will need to remember later on. This is basically what a scratch disk is for PS. One big difference, the notes PS writes? Well shut down the program and it erases all of them! So, you can also think of these notes as temp files. PS loves, I mean loves to write at the top of a disk hierarchy so it will creates it's files where ever it can, namely your boot drive. YOU DO NOT WANT THAT. so, you need to get a new drive, just for this purpose. I am kidding you? Absolutely not. Damned thing is the one you should be yelling at, not me! Oh, did I mention that if you want the very best performance you should purchase a fast hard drive or better yet, a SSD. Stop screaming, these drive are now about $100.00 a pop for 128GB. They are fast, reliable and barely produce any heat (A plus if you have a small case). Anyway, once you install your new SSD, you can point PS to it, using this menu. In the mean time, if you have other drives, add them as I did on my PC. The T drive is a SSD. I use it exclusively as a temp drive so that all my programs, not only PS, run like champs if they need to use temp files.
Ok, now that we are calm and cooled off we must look at history & cache (6) or not. Just leave the default alone. I have pushed mine to really high numbers because I can afford it (22GB memory, remember?) If you have more than 8GB memory you can push to big and fat (7). I just realized that I did not use my SSD as I should have, damn it. I did not place it on top of the list as I should have. See? Even when explaining something I find stuff to change in my own setup. Moving on. The history state (8) is the number of steps you can backtrack or in simpler terms, the number of undo you can perform before PS loses track of your activities. I just pushed mine to 80. Do not ask me why, I just did. Note that if you do not trust my simplistic explanations, you can read Adobe's as THEIR explanation appear in the description area(9). Useful hints but then again... What is a scratch disk??? ooook, moving on again. Cache levels (10) I would suggest 4, just because. If you run into problems to can go up and down at will but not higher than 8. Note that the selection can be made by either typing a number or by using the sliders hiding under the arrow keys. Cache tile size (I hear you groaning) Cache level (11) is the chinks of data size modified by PS at a time. Adobe explains it better than I do so follow their advice.
What? The advanced settings? (12) Forget it, this is a setup for photography editing, not 3D, beside, as is PS works great. Just make sure that the check box is checked (13) if your graphic card has a processor on it. They all do now-a-day so no brainer. Thirteen is a bad number??? Ok then...
Time to take a break, Click ok (14), close PS and see you later!
Oh! You are back already???
Did I mention that many of the changes we made here will be activated only after PS is restarted? I did not? Well, now I just did and if you followed my advice you would have done it anyway! GOT YOU!
