Faster setup for Photoshop with SSDs?

[Cole Slow]

Hi,

I've been working on poster size digital paintings such as 18x24 and 20x30. It makes Photoshop extremley slow, and the file size becomes as big as 1 gig especially in CMYK mode. So, just bought just another SSD to improve the working process. It does seem to have improved the speed of Photoshop when I transfered the working file to a new SSD drive. The below is the current setup.

C : OS (Window 10 Pro 64bit) and Photoshop CS6 and other Adobe CS6 Suite programs installed.

D : Scratch Disk only

E: Working files only.

  *All three drives are SSDs ( Samsung EVO 850 and 860)

Now I'm thinking to move the installation drive for Photoshop to E drive. Would this make Photoshop even faster?


[ D: Changed to "D :" by moderator as per next comment] 

[Cole Slow]

D drive became emoticon because of D and colon. I'd like to fix it but I can't find the edit function.

[Glenn 8675309]

No.  Sometimes it really is that simple. 

[D Fosse]

No, don't do that. Applications work most efficiently when they are on the system drive.

Also, you don't necessarily need huge files just because they're printed large. Think pixels. If your files are much more than, say, 12000-15000 pixels long side, stop. You don't need it. The bigger it is, the farther away it will be seen from.

You should also think twice about CMYK. That is for sending directly to offset print, nothing else. Inkjet printers work with RGB data. Your master files should always be RGB.

[Cole Slow]

Thanks a lot. What image size and resolution would you recommend for 18x24 (3 by 4 ratio) and 20 x 30 (2 by 3 ratio)? 

[Glenn 8675309]

multiply those numbers by 300.  20 x 30 = 6000 x 9000 printed at 300 dpi.  18 x 24 = 5400 x 7200 printed at 300 dpi.   Take into consideratioon the distance from the image to the viewer.... if it' hanging up a room and wil lbe view from , say 6 feet, you could still print it up at 72 dpi and it will look fine.

[D Fosse]

I was mostly mentioning this because there is a very persistent myth that you always need 300 ppi regardless of print size, with the result that people come in here with files of 100 000 pixels and more. Which is crazy. We see it all the time.

20 x 30 inches at 300 ppi is just 6000 x 9000 pixels, so that's perfectly fine. That's not a particularly big file. If you have performance problems with that, there's something else going on. But if you still get file sizes around 1GB, you must have a very tall layer stack, and so you get a lot of data to move around anyway.

The primary concern is to have enough fast scratch disk space. You may need as much as 500 GB - 1 TB. The Samsung 800 series is SATA SSDs, right? That's still pretty slow compared to the PCIe M.2 900 series (aka NVMe). But if you don't have M.2 ports on your motherboard that's moot.

If Save and Open times are a problem, disable PSD compression in preferences. That can cut two minutes down to 10 seconds. Compression takes a long time, especially for layered files.

If it's general operational speed, we need more details. That could even be GPU-related.

[davescm]

Hi

Some comments:

1. Putting your scratch disk on a fast drive definitely makes a difference. Here I have it on an very fast M2 NVMe drive

2. Whilst using SSD for storage does improve load and save times (I use SSD drives for storage here) one of the biggest differences is to go into Preferences >File Handling  and check "Disable Compression of PSD and PSB files".  This results in larger files but much faster opening and saving.

3. As stated by others above, as you print larger the resolution requirement in ppi drops. The resolution required is dictated by the viewing distance and a good guide is :

ppi required = 6878/Viewing distance in inches 

Dave

Edit : D.Fosse covered most of that while I was typing 🙂

[Derek Cross]

To add to what the others are saying, why have you converted to CMYK color mode, this won't help the quality of the printing – do you still have the original RGB images?

[Cole Slow]

I still have an original file in RGB mode. How can I process colorproof for printing in this case? 

This is what I've learned and been doing it for the printing purposes, but based on the comments here, I've been doing it all wrong. 

1. work in RGB mode - I could also start working in CMYK

2. Convert to CMYK in order to colorproof for printing, and then fix colors if the colors are far off when they were in RGB.

3. Send the image files such as PDF in CMYK to the printers. 

[D Fosse]

Have they specified which CMYK profile to use?

There is no such thing as "CMYK". There is only a series of CMYK profiles that correspond to specific press conditions - a press calibrated to a certain standard, printing on certain paper stock, using a certain ink standard.

If you go to Image > Mode > CMYK, you get the Photoshop default, which just happens to be US Web Coated (SWOP) v2, because there has to be some default. But chances are it's not the right one, and if you're outside the Americas it's certainly not the right one.

[Cole Slow]

I'm from Canada and I don't think there's much difference in that case. 2 main color profiles I've been using are, sRGB IEC61966-2.1 for RGB and US Web Coated (SWOP) v2 for CMYK. I didn't have a problem with these when I printed images created with Photoshop and Illustrator. 

Let me throw in some more information. I'll try to make it short. First, I didn't have a problem with photoshop being slow down a lot. I did experience some slowness in larger size files, but It was bearable. However, lately, I couldn't even move objects with move tools - which was solved by moving a .psd file to a new SSD drive. I also didn't have a significant problem with colors when print, but ever since I started using Clip Studio Paint, I started having some problems in Photoshop too. I start working with Clip Studio Paint, and finish 90% of work with it. I then convert the file to .psd and finish the work in Photoshop. At this stage, the size of the file becomes very big, also Photoshop becomes very slow. The reason why I finish the work with Photoshop is when I printed some images directly exported from Clip Studio Paint, the colors were quiet off from what I've seen and painted. Worst of all, some of the colors looked like there's some kind filter on top of them. Of course, I didn't add any filters.  For more technical specs, RAM is 32gb and I allocated ram usage 14GB on both Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint. CPU is  i7 4790 and video card is GeForce GTX Ti. Windows 10 Pro version 1809 - I didn't update the windows since the computer is 4 years old. I also use Cintiq 22HD. Please let me know anything catches your attention.

[Derek Cross]

And to add to D Fosse's excellent advice, short-run posters are often printed on inkjet printers which are CMYK plus so to make use of the wider gamut, the artwork needs to use the printer's software to convert it from RGB to CMYK+.

[Cole Slow]

So from now on, I should submit image files in RGB and let the printers convert them to CMYK+?

[davescm]

If it's not a printing press then the print driver for inkjets converts the RGB image file internally to CMYK plus and that plus could be a further 6 to 8 inks. 

Dave.

[Conrad C]

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@Cole Slow wrote:

This is what I've learned and been doing it for the printing purposes…work in RGB mode…Convert to CMYK in order to colorproof for printing

…I still have an original file in RGB mode. How can I process colorproof for printing in this case? 

---

From a strict technical point of view you could do it the way you’re doing it, but the thing is…it’s the long way around, so it hasn’t commonly been done that way for the last 20 years or so. If you learned it from an old-timer who got started in the 1980s/1990s it’s understandable that they taught that way, but starting with Photoshop 6 (released in 2000), soft-proofing became the much, much easier way to proof on screen for printing.

Instead of having to convert an RGB document to CMYK just to check the colors, with soft-proofing you leave the document in RGB but preview it through a CMYK simulation that you can edit in. That way, you preserve the full range of original RGB colors to keep all of them available, and as long as the simulation is on you can see how your color edits look in CMYK. The following article is an overview of the Photoshop soft-proofing workflow; although the article is 21 years old it is still pretty much how soft-proofing works in Photoshop today.

https://creativepro.com/out-of-gamut-soft-proofing-in-photoshop-6-0/

Whether you soft-proof your RGB document or convert it to CMYK just for proofing, either way the points made by D Fosse and Derek Cross are extremely important: Your proof is valid only if you did it using a profile that accurately represents the specific printing conditions (ink + paper/substrate + printer type). If you do a simple CMYK conversion using the defaults (e.g. U.S. Web Coated SWOP), but the actual job will be under printer conditions that are nothing like the default, then the proof is invalid and your time is wasted.

For example, to proof an RGB document for my inkjet printer I must choose a profile representing the specific paper+ink combination I’ve set up for that printer. I cannot do a generic CMYK conversion, because that would be wrong: My printer is not CMYK, it includes additional inks to widen the gamut and tonal range so its inks are more like CcMmYKk — proofing through a generic CMYK profile would provide the wrong feedback for editing. But proofing through the right profile will save me time, ink, and paper.

So, try soft-proofing instead of what you do now, and make sure you use the appropriate profile.

[Cole Slow]

Thanks, and sorry, it leads to another question, what is the better way to export images and documents from InDesign and Illustrator for printing? When I use InDesign and Illustrator, I usually export finished work to PDF for printing especially when they are in a document format, should I use High Quality Print in Adobe PDF Preset from now on? It shows that there's no color conversion to CMYK which I never knew about it until now. lol

[Derek Cross]

If you want to learn more you can read Conrad’s wonderful book “Photoshop 2021 Classroom in a Book”.

https://www.peachpit.com/store/adobe-photoshop-classroom-in-a-book-2021-release-9780136904731