I need to have more than 8,000 layers in my Photoshop document

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
October 13, 2023
4 replies
427 views

Is there any way to work with more than 8,000 layers in Photoshop? I only need another 1,000 or so.

I’m at the stage where the duplicate command (and button) is disabled. If I delete one layer, the command is available again.

I don’t yet want to seperate my document into sub-documents.

The 3840x2160 pixel document uses around 100GB of disk cache. It is only 270MB when saved.

Thanks,

Alex4D

macOS

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A

Alex.4DAuthor

Participating Frequently

Turns out I only had 4,400 layers. The restriction was because I have 24GB of physical RAM on my computer.

I think I need to create some Smart Objects with Layer Comps.

Cheers!

Alex4D

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

That will likely increase memory usage!

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

My suggestion is to split the image into multiple modules of a managable size. Stephen has suggested a similar approach and his method has the advantage that you can double click any of the Smart Object layers to open it in another window where you can edit. The disadvantage is that it still adds up to a strain on your system.

One of the biggest Photoshop projects ever completed is Bert Monroy's Times Square Gigerpixel image. Bert used 750,000 layers in total saved out to thousands of separate files. Each file had a flattened layer which was added to the main project document. The finished project was revealed in 2010, so harddware capabilities were nothing close to what we have now, but he made it work.