The basics

Minimize History states >>
The Photoshop Elements Undo
History palette is a great feature
especially if you make mistakes as
often as I do. Each successive edit is
recorded as a step in the palette,
enabling you to step back through
the changes, gradually reversing your
edits as you go. But such a great
feature does come at a cost. Each step
uses memory resources and, when
you make complex changes to large
fi les, you can imagine how much
memory is used to store a collection
of steps.
Thankfully Adobe provides a setting
in the Edit > Preferences > General
dialog that can be used to alter the
number of History States (or undo
steps) stored by your system.
By default it is set to 20, but if you
fi nd that Elements is running slowly
after making a few editing changes
then try reducing the number. Less
History States does mean less
opportunity to reverse editing
changes, but this action frees up
memory resources and can bring new
life back to a slow running machine.
Multi-page documents >>
When working with large PSE or
multi-page projects you can increase
the speed of working by creating the
project and then immediately saving
and closing the fi le. After reopening,
the images in the Photo Bin are
thumbnail versions of each page, but
only page 1 is fully open in the Editor.
Other pages will open when you click
the thumbnail or navigate to them. In
this way you can limit the number of
open pages when working on large
books.
ADVANCED PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 5.0 FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHERS
Reduce the number of open fi les >>
It may seem like stating the obvious,
but the more pictures you have open
in Elements the more of the total
resources of the machine is taken up,
just maintaining each open fi le.
When you add in the memory used
to ensure undo or multiple History
States for each fi le, it is not too hard
to imagine that you will very quickly
run out of RAM, forcing Photoshop
Elements to use the much slower
Scratch Disk space.
To speed up the processing, make
sure that you only open (and keep
open) fi les that are essential for your
current editing task.
Scratch Disk versus Virtual Memory >>
Both Photoshop and the Windows XP
operating system use hard drive space
as extra ‘fake’ RAM. Adobe
recommends that Photoshop Scratch
Disks be positioned on a different
drive to the one used by Windows for
its Virtual Memory system. On most
set ups the Windows swap fi le is
stored on the start up or C drive.
To help with overall Photoshop and
Windows performance, ensure that
you don’t position the Scratch Disk on
the same drive. To set the location of
your scratch disk select Full Edit: Edit >
Preferences > Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks
and choose the drive to use from the
drop-down menu. Remember, don’t
select Startup or C drive unless you
have no other choices.
Alter the Image Cache setting >>
Photoshop Elements uses a special
image cache to help redraw highresolution
images quickly. Instead of
displaying all the information
contained in these big fi les, Elements
creates lower resolution versions of
the photo that are then used to
update the screen quickly.
You can elect to store from 1 – 8
cached versions of the photo. A value
of 1 disables the caching. Higher
values store multiple versions of the
fi le, which in turn produces faster
screen redraws. The default setting is
4, but inputting higher numbers will
help speed up the redraw process.
When a high cache number is set, it
will take longer to open fi les as
Elements creates the low-resolution
versions of the photo at this point.
To alter the Image Cache setting
select Full Edit: Edit > Preferences >
Image Cache and enter a value from 1
to 8 in the Cache Levels text box.
Run Photoshop by itself >>
A simple measure to speed up
Photoshop is to make sure that no
other programs are running at the
same time. Seemingly simple utilities
such as iTunes, Outlook and Word all
chew up memory and processor
resources that could be used to drive
Photoshop more effi ciently.
The golden rule is that if the program
is not essential for the editing task
then close the software.
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APPENDICES