Lessons

Lesson Info

Scratch Disks and Memory Space

Sometimes you're gonna be working on huge images, and in the process of doing so, you might end up, um, rainy in some problems. One of the problems you can encounter is that photo shop keeps track of what you're doing to a picture by storing some information on your hard drive and it can run out of space on your hard drive. If you ever work on an image into the process of doing so, photoshopped complains and uses words similar to scratch disk is full. I don't have an image big enough to have that happen in my machine because I have a lot of hard drive space open, but if you were on a machine that has a very limited hard drive space, you might run into it, and I want to talk about a few issues you can encounter relating to that. The first thing is, you're not gonna be able to save your picture if your hard drive's full so it it's just cheese and save as and trying to save it is going to probably say hard drive full sorry can't do that. So a couple things. The first thing is, if you get ...

a scratch discus full message, I would start off by emptying your trash and your operating system so on ah. On a mac I can usually just go down here to the trash I think I can right click on it and choose empty trash there are many other methods but empty out your trash to clear out some space in your hard drive a couple other things you khun dio ifyou've ever copied anything to your clipboard it's storing that somewhere in oftentimes it ends up getting pushed off to your hard drive and other things that you've done like just previous states in your image so if I go to the edit menu there's a choice in here called purge in purge is going to offer me many different choices some of which will be great out but let me see if I could get some of them to appear let's say I duplicated this layer I selected an area and I copied it man see now if I go over here to edit and choose purge it compper jj the ability for me to choose undo meaning right now it's remembering not only what the image looked like looks like right now what it looked like one from the time I opened it and so if I purge undo that means the very last thing I did I will not be able to undo it anymore if that took up a lot of memory that might be a good thing I confirmed my clipboard my clipboard is whatever I copied last if I was working on a panorama and that's, a huge image ended up choosing copy, I might want to clear off that clip where tio gain more space history's means not just the last thing you did, but everything you've done since you've opened the image, all it means is the only thing it would remember is this and result, it would not remember how you got there, it means you still have your layers and everything. All it means is you can't choose undo multiple times. If you opened up the history panel, it would be empty, so it's going tio safe space as well, save memory, or if you choose all it's going to purge all of these things, and so I'm going to purge all it says a you can't undo that because one of the things your purge innis, durability, tonto and I click okay that's going to free up some space in your hard drive because it no longer has to remember all the steps he used to get to this point, and those are usually stored in that file on your hard drive, a couple other things we can do if that ends up starting to happen, or at least to prevent it from happening if I go to my preferences, which are found under the photo shop menu on a mac which is on under the edit menu and windows one of the choices I believe is performance here think that's where I'll find this in under performance right here is a choice called scratched discs if you have more than one hard drive attached to your computer with default settings photo shop is only going to use the hard drive that has your operating system installed on it and if that drive is a small one is getting filled up if I had more than one hard right I've attached right here would be a list of further hard drives and I could turn on the checkbox near the other hard drives to say when you fill up this dr start using the second drive as well and that way we get the message less frequently. Also you can click on one of these and used up and down arrow keys to change the order. Put your fastest hard drive at the top and that way when it's starts using space on your hard drive to keep track of what you've done to your image it we'll do it on the fastest drive and it will keep photo shops performance so that's what I want to do now after I change that if I had another drive in there just by turning on the check box next to it I usually need to restart photoshopped in order to get it to start using that other things you can do is look at your image in see if your image is in sixteen bit mode and decide if you really need it to be because sixteen bit mode is going to at least double the size of your file. So if your hard drive's getting full, same scratched disk is full and you can't save your image, bring it down to eight bits unless you really, really needed sixteen that's goingto make your file size go down considerably and is going to make it easier to save it on your drive. Finally, I would go over to bridge and if I'm still having issues, I have this really important image over and it's saying scratches kiss full and I don't have space to save it then the final thing I might do is here in bridge I would go to my preferences in my preferences there's, a choice called cash and there's a but right here called purge my cash, my cash is going to be things like the thumbnail images and preview images it's generated for all the images I've browsed recently, and that can take up a considerable amount of space, so if I purge my cash, then is going to free up a tremendous amount of hard drive space, the only thing is the next time I view any of these folders it's gonna have to generate fresh thumb now so it'll take a while uh that won't take a long time but I'll just take longer than usual and so those are the things I would go through if I end up getting scratched to scares and need thio uh deal with that stuff in general any questions about scratched disk related stuff before I uh get into other things yes jimmy eva wants to know what's the best use of an s s d dr elation ships to scratch disc and ssd drive I believe stands for solid state digital drive that's what's in this computer and I also have a small external that I gave to my wife karen with the image is amusing so she can use it in its and ssd drive as well the main thing is an ssd drive is extremely fast a normal hard drive has a spinning um platter in it in similar to a record album it has a little head that goes across to read the data and if you have some information stored near the middle of the disc and some other on the outside it takes time for the little head to move across that area toe access it so it's much slower and the spinning speed of the drive also determines it so you'll see when you buy a hard drive of its seventy two hundred rpm drive or what's the other five thousand something the higher the rpm's the faster with an ssd drive there's no spinning disc instead of just like the memory that's in your computer the ram and so it's extremely fast and there's no spinning disc so the problem with like dropping her during thing is lessened because there's nothing physical moving in it to break um so sst drives are amazingly great the problem is they're expensive and they have limited capacity so I would usually use an ssd drive for my boot drive many my operating system my programs on there and I might set the scratched disk to use that and then I would use a traditional hard drive to possibly store by images if I could afford it I'd love to have a bunch of ss it drives to store all my images but the cost is just prohibitive you can get some standard hard drives though that have an sst built in is like a little buffer they can speed things up tremendously apple house one called the fusion drive which you can get in there I max which would make a standard hard drive act faster there's a company called buffalo which has external drives that have it built in I don't remember what model of the buffalo or drove bo which is multiple drives set up you can also get him in there and it can speed up a traditional hard drive because it'll write to the sst first and then slowly offload to the slow hard drives so sst drives are great if you're going to buy a new computer, it has the option for having it. If it has a high enough capacity to hold your operating system your programs in similar files, I'd suggest getting one it's what I used for majority its speed things up dramatically cool, yeah, do you know if there's any truth to the rumor that having a clean death top on the macintosh can affect your performance? Uh, my desktops got three things on it um, but I'm mentally I've heard people say things like that, but I can't think of why it would matter, because your desktop should be no different than a folder on your hard drive, but who knows if there's some weird, odd programming that I'm not aware of, that would cause it, but it doesn't make sense to me I should be able to have ten thousand files on my desk top it's no different than having ten thousand files in a folder. Um, so not that I'm aware ofthe thank you could be wrong now there could be some weird all right, so let's see what else we gonna talk about? Well, I was talking about if you're scratched, disk was getting full ous faras things you can do, I did think of a few other things a cz well and that is if you have any part of your image that extends beyond the bounds of your document that stuff is being saved that stuff pushed out beyond the bounds and so you might want to throw away the stuff that's beyond the bounds of your document a quick way of doing that is to just choose select all command a is what I use then go to the image menu and there's a choice called crop and that's going to throw away any big data big data is the stuff that's extending beyond the bounds of your document and so that's also going to cause your file size to go down if you have stuff going beyond the edge just know that after you do that you obviously won't be able to move it back, you know, into the the scene that's there other things that I do if I'm getting that air message is I'll go to the side menu of my layers panel the upper right corner there click and there's a choice in there of delete hidden layers. So if there's any layers that aren't actually contributing to the look of your image by deleting those you can often make your file size go down so um can be useful with the newest versions of photo shop it's saving your image behind the scenes as you work just in case photoshopped bombs that way it can you're not going to lose your work it will have a version of it and it can save things behind the scenes so if you have a complex image you appear and choose safe house to save it instead of having you wait until it's done in the lower left of your image it will often give you a little progress bar that says how close it is to being done saving your image this image isn't very big so I might need to do a few things to get it to become big um but what I've run into is on occasion I end up having a problem with they're trying to save my picture and it could be a big problem if I spent hours and hours on that picture and it gets stuck I doubt I'll be able to get it to be stuck but let me at least be saving it and see if I get to take some time lower left of my image do you see it saying saving and it's got a progress bar down here I've had this go up here and then just suddenly stop where whatever percentages there where it's usually building up just freezes and I let it sit for ten, fifteen minutes is still sitting there frozen if that ever happens to you you really don't want to lose that work so what I would do is if that ever gets frozen you're still gonna be able to work on your picture, you'll be able to turn layers on and off and do things, so what I would do is go to the image menu and just choose duplicate that's going to create a duplicate of your image, so you have two files, then once you've gotten that duplicate, then go to the file menu and choose safe house and save it under different file name, and I found that that saved me multiple times when I have had an issue, I think what happens is I live on a motor home, and my hard drive sometimes can have some electrical issues because either my electricity, it got disconnected outside or something else, and it might just temporarily disconnect the drive for a moment if it happens right when it's trying to save the file it sometimes gets caught up in, so I will go to the image menu in choose, um, duplicate and then save the duplicate in that usually fixes it, then another thing as far as your limits go that can really mess you up is if you use a dhobi camera and you apply your raw adjustments to a tiff or j peg image, you can store those adjustments right inside the file itself, but if you give that j peg, we're tiff file to someone else unless they have photoshopped with the same version, a camera that you have when they open that image, they might not see the changes you made. So michigan example here I have a picture. This is my wife's parents, it's been edited in camera. This image was, uh, cropped, and also many areas were forced to black within it. What I want to do here is opening in a web browser because let's say, wanted to use that was going to just say, that's perfect image would like use for a website. I'm going to send it off to the client that's going to go put it on the site, and I just say, use whatever I send you. So let's, go over here and I'm going to bring up safari, and then I'm going to drag this image to safari right here from bridge should be ableto track it. It looks like the different that's, my wife and his sister, brother, but the changes that I made with in camera can on ly be read by camera, and so therefore, the j pig file itself has not been changed physically. Instead, what happens if you make an adjustment to a raw file or a tiff file? And camera is it's only the metadata on ly the text that's attached to the image that's changed. It just notes that, hey, when you open this image, next time crop it in this way and when you open it next time put black in these particular areas. So if I take this image and I double click on it in bridget will know it was adjusted and cameras it will bring it into raw and what I need to do in order to be able to use this somewhere else for j peg or a tiff is I needed to do what I call fully baking the image bakley adjustment in you do that in the lower left, there's a save image button and just tell it to save it either in a different folder or you want to just make it permanent, save it in the exact same folder as the original. In this case, though, I'll say that to my desktop hit the save bun and it's creating a new j peg file that has those changes integrated in it. So if I go and look at my desktop should be a file sitting there, and if I open that file in my browser, you can see it's actually the end result I was looking for, but that could be a huge got you if you end up. Adjusting a j peg files or a tiff file using camera raw you could do that with any j peg er tiff that doesn't have layers you just select the image go to the file menu choose opening camera you could adjust it but know that the changes you make are not fully baked in your file unless you when you're done hit the save image button and either save over the original with a fresh one or save it somewhere else that has those changes integrated ok any questions or yes sir was that the cadillac that's what old cadillac ranch yes like that cadillac ranch this is cadillac ranch lite painted using sparklers that's so cool each individual one you just went from car to car yeah I did the first one took a full sparkler to light and then when I got to the second one I realize that you couldn't see the entirety of each car so one sparkler I'd only like half the car the house you could see it and I could like maybe two or three after that and this is when I realised the sparklers come in different colors you know until this time but I walked behind each car tow light the sparklers so he wouldn't see me with a lighter tryingto nice you light it and I'm not tall enough to make it across the top so just jumping right there and you see here it's just wide open very cool. Yeah yeah, we do have a few questions so sama would like to know a little bit more can you uh discuss ram? Discuss ramel ram is the memory in your computer and it's pretty much where photoshopped first tries to store your images when you open them okay, so the more ram you have, the less it has to use your hard drive so as it fills up all the ram that it has with your image and then you let's say duplicate a layer that makes it so it now it has taken twice as much memory you have choices much info fills up more ram then you add an adjustment layer that changes your image and it takes up more ram it's just going to keep filling up the memory that you have once you run out then it's gonna have to start storing things in your hard drive and a little invisible file called the scratched disk so the more ram you have, the less it has to rely on your hard drive. Your hard drive is much slower than ram, so the more ram you have, the faster things go it doesn't slow down due to your hard drive it used to be that older versions of photo shop I don't remember which version it might have been c s five or cs four could only access a maximum of four gigabytes of ram then they had to re program photo shop to make it access mohr, and now it can access a ridiculous amount of memory so it in old old versions it wouldn't really help to have more than four gigs of open memory, but now, with the newer versions it does, and if you ever hear about thirty two bit versus sixty four bit when it comes to either your operating system or photo shop, not your pictures, the actual program itself that's the technical thing that they changed to make it be able to address more than four gigs around. So if you hear of somebody running photo shop and thirty two bit mode, it means they can access for gigs around max and the newer versions khun do sixty four bit, which means a lot more, man ram, I don't know the exact amount, but it's a higher number than I can afford to fit in my machine, or that would physically fit in so it's, you know, I don't need to know them the max now, when you say newer versions, maybe, you know, maybe five, five point five if you do a quick google search for photo shop six chief orbit and find out at what point did that happen? I'm assuming it was either, and cs five were right before that that it happened great perfect and that leads to a question by purple j really talking about photos now the reasons why you would need the sixteen bit going for sixteen okay, now sixteen bit just so you know, any time I talk about a picture it's different than the rams stuff we were talking about so when it comes to a picture eight bit means two hundred fifty six brightness levels and your picture uh sixteen bit means thousands and thousands of potential brightness levels in your picture and any time you have a sixteen bed file it's twice as big as an eight bit so it's a matter of when is it worth it to have files are twice as big that contain a lot more information I find for the majority of images that people work on maybe about eighty percent of them you wouldn't notice the difference but there are some where you would notice the difference in it can really be helpful thing to have sixteen bit so here I have an image that is sixteen bit I actually have two versions of it in the same file. This is a panorama uh that I shot in california and this is when there was a fire somewhere in the area so the sun state orange even after it came up above the horizon if I stitch this an eight bit this is what the end result looks like and it's hard to tell, but if I look closely at this image, or if I print the image in this portion of the picture right here, I can see some lines that rather faint, but I'm kind of tracing them right now. I don't know if you can see those or not I'm gonna exaggerate him, make him easier to see, just gonna make it steep right here, just trying to make it easy to see. I'm not saying the image will look at at that point, but can you see these kind of banding where this is a sky that should look smooth? But instead it has the baby? And, well, this is what it looked like when I stitched this image using eight bid images stitching the exact same panorama, but using sixteen bits worth of data produced this and result instead enjoyed the noise because this is what it looks like. You take a really dark image and brighten it up, you're going to see noise, but look for smoothness so that we have that versus that, you see the difference, and I noticed a similar thing happening see smooth versus mega bandy, so I notice it when stitching panorama as that often times, but not always the skies can look smoother if I use sixteen bits where the data the other time that I noticed that is, if I have again, usually a sky, and I try to use the healing brush on it to smooth out something, either to get rid of a cloud or bird were just to smooth out a sky that doesn't look perfect, that I can see where I painted. Similarly to here, where you see that little edge, and if I do it in sixteen bit mode. Instead, I get a perfectly smooth result. It looks great.