1

A colleague is trying to edit a large piece of work (350cm x 152cm) at a very high resolution (300 dpi) and we noticed that the hard drive was becoming very full (4kb remaining at some points).

I realise that Photoshop uses temporary files while it's open, but they were using 300gb+ of hard drive space.

Is this normal behaviour? Are there any other ways to fix this (other than buying a bigger hard drive)?

The settings for the image themselves need to stay as they are but if there are any Photoshop settings I could play with, that would be great.

Improve this question
0

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

If consistently working with large files, I would recommend upgrading to a larger drive so that free space is not an issue.

You should not let the scratch disk completely take up your hard drive space, it could interfere with using other applications. As short term fix you could attempt to delete some temporary files on your disc to free up space for Photoshop. Note that if you have multiple hard drives, you can move your scratch disk to another drive.

Some fixes that you can implement (I am not sure what version of PS you are using). In the Preferences under performance:

  1. Specify the maximum number of History States that appear in the History panel.
  2. Specify the Cache Levels and Tile Size for image data. There are some presets you can use, for your use I would recommend Big and Flat.

You must restart Photoshop to apply the new settings. For more information see Photoshop / memory and performance.

Improve this answer
3
  • 1
    The computer itself has 8gb of ram, 70% of that is allocated to Photoshop. If the temporary files are 300gb+, how much would upgrading the RAM affect the issue? (assuming we could probably double that)
    – Jamie Taylor
    Jul 5, 2013 at 13:29
  • 1
    You are correct, that part really won't make much of a difference, I'll edit my answer to reflect that.
    – peanut_butter
    Jul 5, 2013 at 13:51
  • Thanks, it's what I assumed but it's always good to have a second opinion!
    – Jamie Taylor
    Jul 5, 2013 at 14:02
0

Wow, 350x152cm at 300dpi is HUGE ammount of data. If you are making a banner where people usually stand at 2 meters from it, you can lower the DPI to 50.

When I work editing outdoor images, we usually work instead of a 900x300cm at 30dpi, we work with 90x30cm at 300dpi.

It's much less stressfull for PC and the blending options effects dont take a whole much time to process because we are editing a 90x30cm instead of 900x300.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .