Adobe Photoshop CS - Setting Plug-ins and Scratch Disk Preferences - Task 7

?Adobe Photoshop CS,  How To Setting Plug-ins and Scratch Disk Preferences

You might think that, out of the box and properly installed, Photoshop is

ready to go. If you have extra plug-ins or extra hard disk space, it’s not. While

Photoshop is great at handling memory to furnish your digital imaging requests,

it doesn’t know the location of third-party plug-ins and where to find that extra

hard disk space. Before opening up that next image, specify both of those items in

the Plug-ins & Scratch Disk preferences dialog box.

1. As a Macintosh user, you can open the Plug-ins & Scratch Disk preferences

dialog box, shown in Figure 7-1, by going to the Photoshop

menu and selecting Preferences ➪ Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks. As a

Windows user, choose Edit ➪ Preferences and select Plug-Ins &

Scratch Disks. If you are in the dialog box from the previous task,

select Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks from the drop-down menu at the

top of the dialog box.

Figure 7-1: The Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks preferences dialog box

note

• Photoshop continues to use scratch disks until you quit the program.

2. To set an Additional Plug-Ins folder, first select the option next to

the Additional Plug-Ins Folder heading. This opens a dialog box

where you can locate and select the plug-ins folder.

3. After you have selected the folder, you need to restart Photoshop in

order to use the new plug-ins.

4. If you have third-party plug-ins that work only with a previous version

of Photoshop (versions 6 or earlier), you can enter its serial

number in the Legacy Photoshop Serial Number input field.

5. You can assign up to four scratch disks. A scratch disk is a form of virtual

memory Photoshop can use if your system doesn’t have enough

RAM to accomplish a given task. By default, Photoshop uses the hard

drive or partition that the operating system is on as the primary

scratch disk, which can be any drive or portion of a drive with free

memory. You can assign up to 200 GB of scratch disk space on a

given hard disk or partition; the more scratch disk space you assign to

Photoshop, the better the system performs when handling your large

image files. Again, you have to restart Photoshop in order for the

new scratch disk settings to be active.

6. While editing an image, you can find out how much RAM is being

used by the scratch disk in the status bar at the bottom of the image

window. First click the triangle in the status bar.

7. Select Scratch Sizes and you will see two numbers on the status bar,

after shorthand for Scratch Sizes, Scr (see Figure 7-2): The first

number is the amount of RAM Photoshop currently uses to handle

the image; the second number is the total amount of RAM available

to Photoshop.

Figure 7-2: The status bar drop-down menu and the two Scratch Size values

tips

• Scratch disks should only be on a local drive; they should not be accessed

over a network.

• For best performance, select a large and defragmented drive or partition

for your scratch disk. Also, large scratch disks should not be on the same drive 

as the images you are working on.

cross-reference

• Setting plug-ins and scratch disk preferences provides greater control

and flexibility in your work environment. Of course, having more memory and

a larger image cache doesn’t hurt either. For more information on memory

and image cache, see Task 8.