Improve performance in Photoshop CS2 on computers with more than 1 GB RAM
What's covered
About image tile size in Photoshop CS2
Activating the Bigger Tiles plug-in
Adobe Photoshop CS2 uses complex memory management procedures. On computers with 1 GB of RAM or more, you can optimize Photoshop to take advantage of the quantity of RAM in your system and manage memory more efficiently.
About image tile size in Photoshop CS2
When Photoshop processes image data, it divides the image into sections called tiles. By default, the maximum size of each tile is 132 KB of RAM.
You can activate the Bigger Tiles plug-in to increase the tile size. If you assign 261 MB to 1 GB of RAM to the Memory & Image Cache preference in Photoshop, the tile size increases to 260 KB. Likewise, if you assign more than 1 GB RAM, the tile size increases to 1 MB. Activating the plug-in reduces the overall amount of time Photoshop takes to process an image, especially on computers with more than 1 GB of RAM.
After you activate the Bigger Tiles plug-in, Photoshop takes longer to draw each tile and may appear to draw images on screen slower, especially large images or when applying some filters. However, the total time Photoshop needs to display the entire image is less because it has fewer tiles to draw.
Activating the Bigger Tiles plug-in
To enable the Bigger Tiles plug-in:
1. Quit Photoshop.
2. Locate the ~Bigger Tiles plug-in file:
-- Mac OS: Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Plug-Ins/Adobe Photoshop Only/Extensions/Bigger Tiles
-- Windows: Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Plug-Ins/Adobe Photoshop Only/Extensions/Bigger Tiles
3. Rename the file, removing the tilde (~) from the file name.
4. Start Photoshop.
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