Running multiple instances of Photoshop in 2025

[saltwatercolours]

I know this has been asked in the past but my question is a little different.  I know how to do it, but I'm trying to figure out if we're allowed.  

On my design PC, I run actions all day on artwork.  These actions are not only mostly single or low-threaded, but they take 2-10 minutes to complete.  

Very commonly after waiting, I need to tweak the action because I did not like the result.  So, I run it again.  

This is obviously a huge waste of time.  With my CPU barely scratching 10% and having 128 GB of RAM, I am thinking I can just use fast user switching on my PC and run another instance in parallel to cut my time in half.

It says 1 copy per device and only 1 person at a time.  These are being satisfied since the other user is still me on the 1 device.  Some grey area in there.  

Does this lie outside of Adobe's intention or still within it for licensing, as I am not sharing my license.  

What's the "spirit of the law" here?

[D Fosse]

I doubt anyone anticipated this scenario when they formulated the license terms. I'm not sure there even is an answer to your question.

That said, processes tend to take the time they take. They're not sitting around just for fun. And the two PS instances would need to draw from many of the same machine resources.

The CPU isn't always the bottleneck in Photoshop - writing to and reading from disk can also be what everything else is waiting for. Or the GPU. RAM isn't all that important; that's just a cache for the most current data. The full history is continuously written to the scratch disk. You can try to see if reducing history states to 1 speeds things up. 

[saltwatercolours]

It's a good point you make and relevant to point that out.  But the case here is that the bottleneck is the actions having nearly all single threaded steps, sometimes hundreds of steps in each.  My two m.2 drives are 3-4GB/s write speed (one drive is dedicated for Adobe cache), tons of free RAM (128 GB total), GPU VRAM 16GB and plenty left, 16 Core/32 thread CPU at 4.28Ghz on all cores.  CPU use is just extremely low as well as GPU use.  It's just the steps in the action.  Only solution I can find is to run more action variations in parallel on a different username on the same PC.  I could probably run at least 5 instances in parallel but I'm only trying to use 2.  I like the point you made that Adobe probably did not have my use case in mind when writing the license terms, but perhaps I just give it a shot to see what alerts I get.

[jane-e]

@saltwatercolours 

When I was running Windows through parallels on my Mac, Adobe counted it as two activations. I am guessing it will be the same for you, but you will get an alert from Adobe to deactivate if you have more than two activations. 

You are allowed to install Photoshop on as many computers as you wish, but you can only activate on two computers to be used by one person. To me it sounds like you'll be OK, but again Adobe will let you know if it's not.

DFosse has brought up some good points for things that you might run into.

Jane

[Trevor.Dennis]

What does 'Parallels' mean in this situation @jane-e ?  We know that Mac can have multiple instances of Photoshop at the same time, and I would expect to be able to rund background process on one, while working on the other.  However, that is not doeable with Windows, so unless @saltwatercolours  is talking about using two computers, I wonder how he would do this?  With two computers the legal situation becomes a lot more murky, far more likely to breach the T&Cs. 

[jane-e]

Parallels is a virtual desktop, Trevor. I used it to install Windows on my Mac. I see that now they have also gone to subscription.

https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

Jane

[D Fosse]

There's no doubt that this would be using two activations; that part is clear.

But can you run both activations simultaneously? As written, the terms say no - but this is probably not what they had in mind.

My gut feeling is that this wouldn't violate the "spirit" of the license. But don't quote me on it....I'd open chat and pop the question. Type "agent" to bypass the chatbot and get a real person.

[Conrad_C]

One question is:

What is the nature of the actions, what do they do?

The reason I ask is because if they’re simple enough, maybe Photoshop is not the only answer. Especially if some of the actions are purely about conversions, resizing, or exporting.

For example, if I want to export copies of 1000 files, while resizing them to specific dimensions, and converting them to sRGB files at specific JPEG export settings, and conforming their filenames to a standard, there is almost no reason for me to want to do that in Photoshop. A big reason is that Photoshop is going to process every file in series, and Photoshop will be completely tied up and unusable during that process.

So how would I do it instead? I’d use Bridge+Camera Raw or Lightroom Classic. Both have advanced export options that cover all of those requirements, with two critical improvements: Both can process files in parallel (the more cores your processor has, the more files are processed simultaneously), and both support GPU acceleration for export. So if I need to do a bulk process that falls within the feature set of Camera Raw or Lightroom Classic, doing it that way instead of Photoshop means:

• The process completes faster because of parallel processing. 
• The process completes faster because of GPU acceleration. 
• Photoshop is freed up to do something else, like run an action/script that Camera Raw and Lightroom can’t do. 

So talk a little about what the actions do, to see if some or all of them can be done in a more advanced and faster way than in Photoshop.

Adobe Bridge has some bulk processing/conversion features of its own: The Export panel and the Workflow panel. However, they are narrower in scope than what Bridge/Lightroom Classic or Photoshop can do. But again, if some tasks can be run through Bridge, now you have another option for potentially delegating some bulk processes to another app, so that Photoshop isn’t so overburdened.

You can also consider adding some other bulk processing options such as ImageMagick and RetroBatch. These can do a wide range of image processing tasks. Not everything Photoshop can do, but again, they might be other ways to lessen the load on Photoshop so you can focus Photoshop on bulk processing the tasks only it can do.

[saltwatercolours]

Good question, but they are very specific artistic compostitions actions that convert my compositions into watercolour painting, sketches, drawings, graffiti, etc.  There's no alternative for these.  There hundreds of steps in some of the actions.  Seemingly nearly all single threaded.  

[Conrad_C]

OK. In that case my suggestions won’t help much. Yes, what you do need is for Photoshop to be upgraded so that an action can run in the background (not blocking the UI) so you can still use the app to edit something else (such as starting another action), and it sounds like you need actions to be able to run on multiple open documents in parallel.

There is some precedent for this type of improvement. In recent versions Photoshop has been upgraded to take better advantage of the fact that current CPUs have a lot more cores than in the past, so they’ve overhauled some core parts of the app such as with the introduction of Multithreaded Compositing in 2022. What you need is for them to overhaul actions in a similar way.

You could request this in the Ideas section of this community, where a posted feature request can collect user votes and also sometimes get a response from Adobe, and if they start working on it, they may post status updates. You can see other feature requests there that were commented on, collected the most votes, got advanced to development, and were actually released.

And in fact this is a very good time to make such a request, because in the Photoshop public beta we are now seeing tests of an overhauled, modernized Actions panel with new capabilities. I do not know if parallel processing is part of the plan for this new Actions panel, but the important thing is that this is the first time in many years that they’ve worked on the actions code. So right now, while they’re actually tinkering with it, we have a rare opportunity to influence how actions work. For example, you might download the Photoshop public beta, play with the new Actions panel, and use its Beta Feedback feature to get a word in about being able to run multiple actions simultaneously. Because up to now I have not heard anything about parallel actions execution being part of what they are working on in this Actions upgrade.

[saltwatercolours]

That is a great idea.  I never gave it much thought but it is a hinderance that it blocks the UI from doing anything else while actions are running.