Photoshop needs LESS Memory
Lately I’ve been running into an issue with Adobe Photoshop giving me an error that it has run out of memory (RAM) and can’t complete the process.
To combat this I made sure that Photoshop was set to use 100% of memory available and it was. Now I started thinking that maybe 3 gigs wasn’t enough memory. Wait, that can’t be right. I started to think something else was wrong, there is no way my process on five 5 MB pictures should eat up 1.5 gigs of memory that PS says it was available to use.
After searching around, I read some suggestions to try reducing the amount of memory you give Photoshop. What? I changed it to 50%, and viola, it worked!
It turns out many of the components of Photoshop, such as Photomerge and Merge to HDR, don’t use the memory that you allocated to Photoshop, but grab their own. This means when you tell Photoshop to take 100%, it takes about 50% of your memory, then between other apps, your OS and other misc. processes you run out of memory for these tools to use.
The lesson of the day is don’t give Photoshop too much memory unless you run into issues. You most likely will be better off giving it less as long as you have a good amount of memory.