Subtitles of the Movie

When it comes to ram in Photoshop you can compare it to a giant whale and plankton. A whale in order to stay alive needs to eat a lot of plankton and Photoshop is pretty much the same way. The more ram you have in your computer the better Photoshop will run. So when you install Photoshop and you notice that you know it requires a certain amount of RAM on the box, that RAM is not to actually work with images. That RAM is to install Photoshop in the opener. So what you are going to have to think about is getting more RAM if you have a pretty basic system. And in my computer I have about two gigabytes of RAM and that's more than enough for what I do. I don't do a lot of crazy stuff in Photoshop. I mean I do a lot of special effects and I have files that have maybe fifty, sixty layers. But I don't you know go to far and I compress my files every once in awhile. And to do that what you do is you merge the layers down, which I talk about in another lesson. But I just want to show you that when you work with a file in Photoshop you want to try to have a good chunk of RAM in your system. Now I'm gonna go to the option here, I'm gonna go to Photoshop, I'm gonna preferences, and then I am going to go to general and then I'm gonna to show you a section in Photoshop so that you can actually increase the performance. So we can go to the performance section here and you can check out what's going on in your computer system. I'm also gonna show you how to allocate a part of your hard drive or an additional hard drive that may not be in this area here in a moment. Now first of all on my computer it tell me I have uh, pretty much just under you know fifteen hundred megabytes available, which means I have that much memory allocated in my computer that is not being used by the system itself. So even though I have two gigs of RAM, Uh Macintosh OSX is using some of that to stay alive. Photoshop is using to open up and whatever application I'm using to do other things is currently taking up this RAM. And down here it tells you that you can allow Photoshop to use what portion of that RAM. So in my case I'm using seventy percent of my available RAM to run Photoshop. Now I don't want to put this at a hundred percent because when I am using Photoshop on my computer I often have illustrator open or I have some other application open so I can drag and drop files. And its very important, you don't want to max out this usage if you don't have to because Photoshop will then take over your entire computer. There will be no more RAM left or no more thinking power left for any other applications. I guess the best way to think of RAM is, think about your own brain alright and you've spent the entire weekend cramming for a math exam and you know somebody wants to talk to you about something else like you know what movie you want to go see this weekend. Well your brain is too tired, you don't have time to think about going to see a movie, because you've maxed out your RAM. You can only think about that math test so what we can also do is apply a scratch disk to help Photoshop out. Now what does this mean, scratch disk? Well let's say that we did crank this all the way to a 100 percent and Photoshop has no more brain power to do any of your calculations. It has no more room to think about how to apply this filter or how to do this or how to do that. A scratch disk is a back up so Photoshop can use your actual hard drive or an external hard drive that you have indicated here to do its calculations. It's a little slower of course then a physical RAM because its not really RAM its your hard drive and Photoshop is using that to calculate the math. But it is an option none the less and as you see here I have one of my hard drives called danger zone and on that hard drive it has twenty-two point ninety-one gigabytes available, which is a lot of space and I have this added. So in the case I'm doing some absolutely insane Photoshop work and have all kinds of special effects and my RAM does run out, Photoshop will then switch to my hard drive and use this available space to perform this calculations. So once again the more Ram you have in your computer, the better. RAM is extremely inexpensive now so if you can max out your system or get you know a gig or more of RAM its, its great so I would max it out if you can,if not just make sure you have about two gigabyte, three gigabyte or so on and always allocate a scratch disk. So it's a back up plan just in case you do eventually run out of your physical RAM.