There are many, many things that can slow Photoshop down, and a lot of them have to do with settings; however, we are a material website, and so we will tell you the hardware issues this can prevent Photoshop from working as it should (although some are also configuration related, of course). Dark.
Causes and solutions if Photoshop is slow on your PC
The first thing we would tell you is, did it work well at first, and over time did it work slower and slower? Or on the contrary, has it always worked slowly, from the start? If so, you should know that Photoshop has certain hardware requirements to work properly. Therefore, if you have a PC that is too old, it might be time to upgrade it. However, let’s see what you can do about it.
Your PC is running out of RAM
Photoshop is a program that requires a lot RAM quantity, so the developers have decided to limit the amount that the program can use based on the total amount installed on the system. This amount is set to 60% by default, but of course on PCs with very little RAM this means very little amount available for the program.
If you go to Preferences -> Performance, you can manually set how much RAM you want Photoshop to consume at most, but keep in mind that if you allocate too much, there will be too little left for other things. and your PC slow down in general. In the end, the ideal is that you extend the RAM memory capacity of your PC.
Also keep in mind that if you spend a few hours editing images in Photoshop, the program will slow down more and more as it saves the action history in memory, as well as caches and such. For this reason it is also good close and reopen the program from time to time.
In this same menu you can see on the right “history and cacheis precisely what we have just been talking about. Reducing the defaults will make it less memory intensive and faster, but keep in mind that you will also reduce the number of steps you can undo when editing images.
Your Storage Can Slow Photoshop Down
The storage unit also has a lot to do with Photoshop performance, so you would already assume that if you have a SSD it will work better than if you have a conventional hard drive. On the other hand, you should also keep an eye on the amount of free disk space, as Photoshop requires 20% free space to run smoothly.
In the screenshot above (by accessing Preferences again) you can see that we have marked an option which, by unchecking it, we remove the possibility of Photoshop taking what you have copied to the clipboard , limiting you to using “drag and drop” only. It may sound silly, but it allows the program to use less memory and be less dependent on the storage unit.
On the other hand, again regarding storage, keep in mind that Photoshop works best when manipulating images that are on your hard drive or SSD; If you are using files that are on a USB stick or network drive (like a NAS, for example) as your source, this can also be a cause of slow performance.
Another trick to speed up Photoshop
If you’ve already considered what we’ve covered so far but things haven’t improved much, there are other things you can try. Reopen the Preferences (CTRL+K) and go to the Performance tab, where you will find (depending on your version of Photoshop) the options related to the graphic processing (Of course, we recommend you only do this if you have an old or very low-end PC).
When you click advanced options, the default drawing mode is Advanced, and the recommendation to improve performance is to select basic mode.
This will make the brush cursor smoother and there will be no “lags”. Also make sure you’ve selected the option to use your graphics card to speed up calculations, but only if your PC has a dedicated graphics card (if you’re using an integrated graphics card, you won’t get much out of it of performance).
Table of Contents
