Macworld has an article on improving photoshop's performance without resorting to buying more hardware. It's mainly focused on optimising RAM usage and freeing up more; let me know if you do any of these and how they work for you, or if you have any of your own.
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/creative.../index.php
Hmmm... reading MacWorld? Is there
something you're trying to tell us?
I've changed around the preferences as the article suggests, and in the next day or two I'll probably partition my built-in hard drive to give Photoshop its own 100GB scratch disk. I'll let you know if I notice any difference, but I may not -- I'm hardly a power user.
Hahaha... waiting for leopard to come out before I take the plunge
Let us know how you go with the new settings!
Well, Leopard's out, but I've heard there are some problems with it and Lightroom. But the rest of it sounds good:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars
I still haven't partitioned my hard drive to create a photoshop scratch disk. I need to format the drive to partition it, which is something that 10.5 doesn't require. I'm still not sure if I'll upgrade.
While I am also still using my PC (....) I seem to have set everything to just about what is said on Macworld. RAM at around 65+ percent, scratch disks on external HD with lots of space (hmmm, reconsider, it's rapidly getting less...), history states around 20.....
These things should be the same for Mac and PC, shouldn't they.
As for some of the panel settings, I don't use styles for example, so I don't have problem with that.
I wish my PS was faster when transforming images or when flattening, I think those are the two steps I spend most waiting time on.
As for transforming I try to do it either first, before I apply any changes that PS has to calculate into the transformation, or as the final step after flattening and converting the edited picture into 8bit. Doing it last takes a little longer though.
Uli