Smaller than usual PSD Photoshop thinks would be over 2GB?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
October 14, 2020
3 replies
181 views

Normally I have fairly large PSDs (over 4 GB is not unheard of - large canvases with lots of layers and sometimes lots of nested smart objects).

Today I was saving a simple iPhone X resolution file with only 5 rasterized layers, but Photoshop gave me an error that it couldn't be saved due to being over 2 GB (I couldn't believe it would be that big plus I have PSDs that are larger than that). I was able to save it as a PSB which came out at 500 MB.

Does anyone know what's going on / how to prevent it / fix it?

Thanks in advance (and sorry for any post etiquette failure, it's my first time having any issue and trying to post about it).

Current version of Adobe CC

Windows 10

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D Fosse

Community Expert

You can't have PSDs that are larger than 2GB (file size on disk). It's in the file format specification.

TIFF can be up to 4GB, but anything bigger than that can only be saved as PSB.

Remember that a file format is a storage format. An open file doesn't have a file format, it only gets one as the data are packaged for storage. The different file formats are different formulae for that packaging. In other words, the file size on disk cannot be precisely determined in advance. There is no size until the saving is complete - or the saving process hits the size limit.

Sven.GGAuthor

Participant

I want to believe you, but this is just one PSD I have which is clearly larger than the file size you're alleging.

This one is 43800 x 24600 at 600 PPI. With around 20 layers including smart objects, so it's obvious why this one is huge, but it has no problems saving as a PSD.

I understand that it wouldn't know the file size in advance, but it just seems weird to suddenly hit a limit after almost 2 decades of working in various versions of Photoshop.