Save big Photoshop files up to 20x faster

Time is money, and storage is cheap. If you use large Photoshop docs & don’t mind them becoming much bigger, you may be able to save them much faster.

You’ll want to update CS5 to 12.0.4 (via Help->Updates), then grab this plug-in (Mac)/registry key (Win).  Photoshop PM Jeff Tranberry writes, “Saving the file can be much faster (20x in some cases), if you have a fast hard disk and enough disk space to hold the larger file size,” and performance expert Lloyd Chambers goes into detail on his site.

15 thoughts on “Save big Photoshop files up to 20x faster

  1. i`ve been wrote on your blog in september last year about this. Congratulations Adobe. Here is the same making the registry ON os OFF. Maybe it`s not working on win7.
    Btw, Photoshop 12.1 64 bit have a bug. Opening it and try co copy/paste something is not working (ex. printscreen). 32 bit work fine.
    Can you confirm please this bug! Maybe it`s the case for large psb also.
    Thank you!

  2. seems that it takes twice as long using “save as”.
    is that to be expected?
    I always use save as: Cmd S = save as…

  3. Wonderful!!! Yes, I know well the slow pain of saving large, layered files, and that the cause was the damn layer compression. So I have thoroughly tested possible workarounds, like the TIFF.
    But now my standard test file, which has taken me about 100 seconds to save, only takes 20 seconds! And 12 seconds of that time is spent making the full-res composite layer. So I now wish it was possible to disable that composite layer in the PSB format, but it doesn’t seem to be the case? This can only be done for the PSD format? If so, I hope the next speed tweak is in this area.
    But thanks to all at Adobe who have helped implement this most excellent speedup!

    1. It will help in any situation with 16 and 32 bit documents where the ZIP/Flate compression was taking a lot of time. The biggest benefit comes if you have a fast hard disk and very large documents.

      1. Thanks Chris. I often have a habbit of leaving the original doc and SO container doc tiled side by side, and incremmental Save when needed and close when finished. But often I would see that the original doc would take awhile to ‘save’, and sometimes not even refresh as it should. Hopefully this addition will help.

        1. Okay, that’s odd. The parent and child don’t have any additional compression beyond what is in the base files.
          And I don’t have any bug reports about the parent failing to update when the child document gets saved.

  4. Stuff like this is great Great.
    PS is so awesome, but these type of things actually make using all thats is there usable in production environments (should I use the word Professional).
    short example – using Smart Object layers and filters within those, etc… 16 bit , tend to lead toward much,much bigger files. Either in the actual write or in working memory, scratch, etc space.
    Anything which helps to support using all the goodness is Heaven.
    Take it we have already got the fast raids, fast processors, fast scratch disks, memory, etc.
    Does this conflict with the existing plugin DisableScratchCompress.plugin?
    or any others?
    On a similar note: Do scratch sizes and document size info displayed in bottom left of PS open image reflect accurate values
    using Smart objects with a PS Document, any relation to this new plugin.

    1. No, it doesn’t conflict with anything — scratch compression and ZIP/Flate compression in files are quite separate things.
      The scratch sizes and document size should be correctly reflecting the size of smart objects, and have no relation to this plugin.

  5. Does this work for CS4? I only see mention of CS5.
    [It works only in CS5. Honest to God, though, if you’re using big files you’ll really benefit from upgrading to CS5 (at least on Mac as 64-bit is new there). –J.]

    1. No, it will not work in older versions – it required a code change in the core application. The plugin is just a way of enabling or disabling that change.

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