Photoshop

Adobe is a bit rude when it comes to respecting users.

Goodness knows what happened to them but whatever.

You should check a few settings in your new Photoshop installation, for optimising its performance and also protecting your system from getting damaged. Yes, Photoshop's default settings can actually damage your computer.

Settings to configure:

• Scratch disk usage — most important

• Memory usage

• GPU usage

• Old rendering method

How to get to Photoshop's settings:

• Ctrl+, or is it Ctrl+K ?

• File → Preferences → All

• The categories are expanded in the submenu, and are visible down the left side of the window.

Scratch disk usage — most important

The scratch disk is the space where Photoshop stores temporary data while you are editing your images. I suppose it's a bit like extended RAM (memory) space, but stored on the computer's hard disk (storage — SSD, HDD) so that it doesn't get lost if the computer loses power.

I'm not super clear on the hows and whys of the scratch disk, but what I do know is that it involves a lot of reading, writing, overwriting and deleting. Any digital storage device is still a physical object and so it suffers from degradation through usage and time. The more that one part of a disk gets used, the faster it degrades — and SSDs are prone to faster degradation, due to their nature.

If you want your SSD to last a long time, try to put Photoshop's scratch disk space on a secondary disk. Using a HDD will be noticeably slower, so if you have a second SSD (of lesser importance — smaller, older, cheaper, lower-grade tech), use that for scratch disk space instead.

Memory usage

Photoshop's allowance can be configured, too. For some reason, it still uses more than you set in the preferences, but it's close to the value you set, so you do have some control over it. I assume this means that the usage is only limited for graphical processing, and does not include the RAM used by the application itself.

GPU usage

Old rendering method