Comments on: Optimizing Photoshop CS4 Mac Performance for Digital Photography

By: Nils

Nils — Mon, 17 May 2010 06:58:35 +0000

Thanks for the Suggestions Yuri!

I don’t like the 8bit thought! If you work on a 8bit TIFF file and you have to tweak your histogram (Hotkey: CTRL/MAC+L) since your shot was e.g. outdoor you will cause “holes” in the histogram. Take a picture with a small dynamic range. For example. Outdoor shot on a overcast day in the snow. To get a bettter contrast you will have to move the sides of the histogram to the center. If you do this with a 8bit file you will reduce the color transitions which will lead to artifacts and will destroy the smoothness of your histogram.

One thing that really drives me nutz with Photoshop CS3/CS4/CS5 is the external harddisk problem. I often work on my macbook pro when I travel and since my SSD only has 120GB I have the files on my external harddrive. If you liquify with the external harddrive photoshop will ALWAYS want to use the Ext. HDD as Scrap Disk, making the liquify filter VERY VERY slow. No matter how much RAM or GB you have available on your MAC. This is only the case with the liquify tool. I have googled for weeks and still found no solution to this really anoying issue. Adobe claims its a hardware problem, but it is defintly a Bug !
Sofar the only solution is to unplug the external harddrive everytime I want to liquify which gives the tool back the normal speed. I would be very grateful for any solution. Thanks!

By: Peter Payne

Peter Payne — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:55:17 +0000

So basically, CS4 is unusuable to me because it cannot show more than 8-10 windows in Expose. In my workflow I need to open 20-30 at least, and pick data from each PSD file as I create web graphics for my site, J-List. The failure of the program to support Expose and more than 8-10 windows — yes, I tried turning off the OpenGL thing entirely — is a big fail whale that has me wondering what I’ll do if CS5 isn’t improved. Can anyone tell me if they have found a way to get CS4 to show 20+ windows in Expose? Using a Mac Pro that’s top of the line, with 8 GB of RAM so it shoudldn’t be an issue.

By: Yuri Arcurs

Yuri Arcurs — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:15:22 +0000

To Daniel: You said: So basically, in photoshop, you wont get to use alot of that 32GB RAM mate, a 32Bit application wont be able to address more than 4096 MBs in total (and this is a theoretical limit, in a real world scenario, id say you will get 3.2 GB – 3.4GB tops).

I am well aware of this. Sad, truly! However, I most often run five six applications at once because of workflow optimization and that’s where all that extra RAM kicks in. Good point however – waiting for the new platform!

By: Daniel Mouritsen

Daniel Mouritsen — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:56:20 +0000

Just FYI, i know you big on macs and probs dont want to hear this, but due to some internal weirdness at apple (they WANT developers to stop using C++ and start using Objective-C , for god knows what reason) CS4 is not 64BIT enabled on MAC OSX (since in effect, adobe is going to have to recode/port photoshop to apples new favorite framework, which is quite a big task).

So basically, in photoshop, you wont get to use alot of that 32GB RAM mate, a 32Bit application wont be able to address more than 4096 MBs in total (and this is a theoretical limit, in a real world scenario, id say you will get 3.2 GB – 3.4GB tops).

People are annoyed with Adobe about this, but its really not their fault to be honest. Theres no reason that apple couldn’t support 64bit carbon applications, except they wont (insert picture of steve jobs stamping his feet), their just being control freaks. It would be the equilliant of adobe saying “from now on, we ONLY support the DNG raw format, because we like it better”.

If microsoft had done the same with Vista 64Bit, said “you NEED to use .NET to get 64Bit support” we would have had another antitrust case.

By: MikLav

MikLav — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:11:14 +0000

I think it’s worth to add that Windows XP users need to tell Windows explicitly to use memory above 2 GB by adding ” /3GB” switch in the Windows entry under [operating systems] in boot.ini file (i.e. C:\boot.ini)

By: Ann

Ann — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:02:02 +0000

Thank you, Yuri. What great timing for so much detailed, useful information – I just installed CS4 on PC this week. Will have my computer guru carefully go over article and comments to see how it all fits for PC, and go from there. I DUGG IT.

By: Uwe Noelke

Uwe Noelke — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:11:27 +0000

Hi Yuri, thanks a lot for allthis hints. All works very fine. I have better performance now.

By: dist

dist — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:27:09 +0000

I was annoyed that PS CS4 was opening files so much slower than CS3. Now I adjusted some of the settings, and even big files open instantaneously. Amazing! (It’s probably the scratch disk, which I didn’t realize to change before.)

By: Debbi_in_California

Debbi_in_California — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:11:20 +0000

Yuri, What do you think of this new monopod? Expensive, but maybe better than the Monfrotto you talk about?
http://www.computer-takeaway.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=141:trek-tech-announce-the-trekpod-xl-and-magmount-pro&catid=45:press-releases&Itemid=38

Thanks for a great blog,
Debbi

By: gskibum

gskibum — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:16:55 +0000

What I was getting at regarding my experiment and Safari is that Flash is an absolutely atrocious CPU hog. Leave open a few Flash heavy web pages and see for yourself.

I have many times shown people how bad it is simply by showing them with Activity Monitor all that load on the CPUs placed there by Flash web sites.