Allocating RAM to Photoshop

I'm running Vista Home Premium with 3gigs of RAM. When I go into my Photoshop CS4 preferences, it says that I have 1641mb of RAM available for CS4. I have been trying to use the new Auto Blend layers of CS4 to extend my DOF but I keep getting an error message saying that there isn't enough RAM available to Auto Blend the layers.

The only way I have been able to get this feature to work is to reduce my file size from 4221 pixels to 1000 pixes. Any advice?

Is this what you are looking for?

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEff...E9A2B996E.html

Troy

Nope. That is for After Effects. I don't have after effects, just Photoshop CS4 Extended. Thanks for trying.

Go to your preferences. One of the sub-menus should be titled ' Memory and Image Cache ' ,or some such ( I still work in CS2). In that menu, you will find a box that allows you to allocate free memory to Photoshop, as a percentage. The default used to be 70%. I wouldn't advise going over 80%, because PS will start stealing memory that your system needs.

You can also use preferences to reduce the number of history states. Default used to be 20. How many times have you ever needed to go back 20 steps? Every one you can do without will free up memory.

Become familiar with the "Purge" command.

There's also a couple of dozen little things you can do to gain bits of memory, such as turning off the thumbnails in the Layers palette. But the three above will gain you the most memory.

Again, all this is from the perspective of CS2, though I know most were retained in CS3. Wether or not they've been changed in CS4, I couldn't say.

- Joe U.

Vista is normally good at assigning memory. Have you checks to see if something already has the memory in use? Use the task manager to list your process (Not applications) by memory use. Then close down any memory hogs that are running.

Thanks for the advice!

Joe, I did play with the preferences in PS and boosted the RAM all the way to 100% and still got the same message.

I started a new thread last night about some other issues I'm having with CS4 that I didn't have at all in CS3. I have heard nothing but rave reviews for CS4 and how it's a great upgrade. So far, I have found the main feature that I wanted this version for to be useless, and other simple functions that I use daily to only work when they feel like it. It's kind of frustrating...