Computer Requirements
What is the best computer for running Photoshop? One can get by with modestly priced computers and enjoy Photoshop CC’s marvelous performance enhancements. However, if your computer has a 64-bit operating system, Photoshop may well benefit tremendously. I say “may” because the benefit this allows is Photoshop’s active use of more than 2GB of RAM.
One of the goals of 64-bit architectures is the use of more RAM, or memory. Do not confuse these bits with the bit depth of images. In mainstream desktop computers where 32 bits is common, only 4GB of RAM can be accessed. (Did I just write “only 4GB”? Wow) 64-bit computers can handle over 16 million times that. Not that any of us can afford that much RAM, but the ceiling has been raised so that we can dedicate as many resources as we can afford to improve the speed and stability of applications like Photoshop. And with high-end graphics processors designed to accelerate Photoshop (and Adobe’s video applications), anyone can enjoy lightning-fast performance. Of course, this comes with a price tag.
Nonetheless, I usually use modestly configured computers to run Photoshop. The greatest aid to a smooth and responsive performance is adding additional RAM (again, the more, the merrier). In my Seattle training lab, I’m using 4GB of RAM in iMacs (running either Windows or the Mac OS) with decent results. I prefer my Mac Pro’s 32GB of RAM and FirePro D700 graphics cards, of course, but Photoshop’s code has been carefully crafted to run efficiently on a wide range of hardware.
Buy a good monitor. The monitor is the interface between you and the image inside the computer. Inferior monitors make it very difficult to edit images: you simply can’t see the details. You don’t need to buy the best monitor on the market (they can cost much more than the rest of the system), but avoid the cheapest ones. I suggest buying the second tier of any product line. Lastly, if you want to do color correction, you need to calibrate and profile your monitor. This can be done with a hardware device made for that purpose. Calibrate your monitor as soon as is practical.
The graphics processor (GPU) has seen its role growing as well. Some Photoshop CC features, like the new Blur functions, can be accelerated with hardware rather than depending on software. If your GPU is supported for this acceleration, it will be on automatically. To see if your graphics card is supported, go to .
Work Environment
Light
Work with subdued and consistent lighting. Overly bright lights make the monitor appear dim and reflect light off the monitor. Dim lights can make the monitor appear overly bright and lead to eye fatigue as you glance from the monitor to adjacent objects. Variations in room lighting will also change the appearance of images on your monitor. You can keep reflected light off your monitor by buying or making a monitor hood. You will need a good, bright light for viewing your prints. It is worthwhile to consider daylight balanced lights for that purpose, as monitors often are aglow with that same color of light.
Colors
Use boring, gray colors for your computer desktop. You should set the colors of the computer screen to be mostly neutral (grays, black, and white); vibrant colors on the monitor surrounding your images make it difficult for you to accurately perceive colors in your images.
Finally, keep overly vibrant and distracting colors away from your direct field of view. Your walls don’t need to be flat gray, but avoid hot pink. Some professionals do use medium to light gray walls in their windowless rooms, have only daylight-balanced lighting, and wear dark, neutral colors that won’t reflect noticeably in their display. Who says we don’t use darkrooms anymore?
Application Preferences & Settings
In the software we use, we can specify the general behavior, performance, and appearance of these applications. What follows is an overview of settings you may wish to consider. If some of the choices seem mysterious now, you may wish to trust the recommendations below, but then promise yourself that you’ll return to these choices when their topics are more familiar to you.
Some of these settings benefit from being applied early in one’s use of the software. So give this section a read, even if you’re beginning to get tired of these preliminaries.
Photoshop
One begins a journey through the “prefs” by choosing (on the Mac) or on Windows. More efficiently, one can use a keyboard shortcut ⌘+K/Ctrl+K.
General
While learning Photoshop, some users find it useful to have the application take notes of what they do. If this seems handy, enable the History Log. It’s up to you whether it records your actions into a standalone text file or into the document itself (accessible by using and choosing History). You may be tempted to choose Detailed History, but be warned that it is deeply detailed.
It is also here that Warning Dialogs can be reset. When an annoying message keeps appearing, you may notice a checkbox in its dialog that says Don’t show again. Later, if you need that dialog, or wish to see it again to evaluate whether it’s really unnecessary, use this preference to show all those messages again.
Interface
An option introduced in Photoshop CS6 is Color Theme.
From very dark to the light look of past versions, we get to choose the color theme that best suits our eyes and tastes. I use the lightest choice. It seems to provide me with the best contrast, so it’s easy to find the various small buttons and icons I need. My aging eyes also enjoy the larger UI (User Interface) Font Size choices.
I have come to appreciate the preference to Open Documents as Tabs in a single window. This saves much-needed screen real estate.
Sync Settings
Use this to synchronize your preferences and other settings between your computers.
File Handling
Some Photoshop luminaries dismiss the Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility preference as a drive space-waster. However, I know it allows other applications like Bridge, InDesign, and my operating system to show me what my image actually looks like. It does this by embedding a preview of the image in the document for the benefit of those applications that can’t parse (read) a Photoshop Document.
Some cameras have a tendency to put a “tag” into their images that claims the image is in sRGB, whether that’s true or not. For that reason, I choose to Ignore EXIF Profile Tag.
TIFF files are close to PSDs in the data they can record. Luckily, the recipients of my TIFF files all have Photoshop and can handle that data richness, so I don’t need Photoshop to warn me whenever I save a layered TIFF file.
Camera Raw Preferences
Accessible from either Bridge or Photoshop Preferences, since either may host Adobe Camera Raw, there are only a couple of things I change here. Since several adjustments I make in Camera Raw are corrections for either a quirk of a particular camera (e.g., the chromatic aberration of one lens) or the ISO setting (color noise), I can have the defaults for these corrections refer to the specific camera or setting. A better choice, however, is to use presets (more later).
I also like DNG files to show an up-to-date preview. When I edit them, I have Camera Raw automatically update their previews.
Performance
When fine-tuning the performance of Photoshop, you will discover many variables. Here, you will be able to choose and examine the parameters, like RAM or the Graphics Processor, that affect performance most.
Among the issues to consider are which graphics card is installed in your computer and whether it supports (and how well) technologies like OpenGL or OpenCL. Click on Advanced Settings… to see if your GPU supports those features. You can check Adobe’s website to see which ones do if yours does not and you want to shop for another.
Cursors
Not much to change here other than perhaps having a crosshair in the center of your brushes to give more precision when using tools that employ painting. Investigate what Precise cursors look like. Even when the preferences are not set to show them, they will display if your Caps Lock is on.
Transparency & Gamut
When Photoshop is trying to show you a hole in your image, or if you’ve hidden part of it, a gray and white grid will appear. However, you may choose whatever colors you like for this grid.
Units & Rulers
Centimeters or inches, picas or percent, you choose the ruler units you need. When you choose to preview on screen what the Print Size of an image is, , Photoshop will likely not know what resolution your monitor is. You may not know either. To find out, check your system’s display settings (System Preferences, Display on the Mac, or the Settings tab of your Display Properties on Windows) and note the pixel width of your display (the one I’m using is 2560 pixels wide). Measure the physical width of the live part of your screen (be careful not to scratch it). My screen is 23 1/2" (59.7cm) wide.
Divide the pixel width by physical width, and enter that value into the Screen Resolution field:
Pixel Width ÷ Physical Width = Screen Resolution
Example: 2560 ÷ 23.5 = 108.93 (for my monitor)
Color Settings
As you process the image files from your camera, their color data has to be in sync with where they are in the workflow. That is, your camera captures a very wide range of color. This must be translated into Photoshop’s range of color (its Working Space profile, most likely ProPhoto RGB if you follow my advice); then later, that range of color must get squeezed and finessed to fit your printer’s color capabilities, as described by its own color profile. To help ensure that this happens as expected, you should configure your Color Settings () as follows:
- Start with the settings called North America Prepress 2.
- For consistency with (and between) Lightroom and Camera Raw, choose ProPhoto RGB as your Working RGB space.
- Save these settings with a named Settings file so you can share it with your other computers and friends (you can even supply an explanatory note).
I chose PhotogHandbook for the name of mine.
Bridge
One begins a journey through the “prefs” by choosing (on the Mac) or on Windows. More efficiently, one can use the keyboard shortcut ⌘+K/Ctrl+K.
General
At the top of the dialog box, you’ll be able to pick a color theme like you can in Photoshop. I chose one to match my choice in Photoshop.
In the Behavior section, you may wish to have Adobe Photo Downloader launch whenever Bridge detects that you’ve connected a card reader and memory card or your camera to your computer. I do this on computers that do not use Lightroom as the primary downloading application. I know many photographers who prefer the software from their camera’s manufacturer, but I do not.
If you find that you use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) frequently and that you use Photoshop only once in a while, you might choose to change what a simple double-click does. By default, this will launch Photoshop as the host of Camera Raw with the expectation that the image will then be passed along to Photoshop for further editing. Checking Double-Click Edits Camera Raw Settings in Bridge will cause Bridge to be Camera Raw’s host without the need to wait for Photoshop.
Thumbnails
One of Bridge’s primary functions is to view thumbnail previews of images in your computer. Often, it is useful to see a little extra information with each image. For example, I use color labels (see below) to indicate what treatment an image requires. I also like to know the image’s file size and what application will launch when I open that image.
You should experiment to see what metadata you prefer.
Playback
Bridge offers clever ways of grouping images for efficient viewing. One of these will stack the thumbnails so only one (presumably a definitive one for the group) is visible. But if you hover your cursor above that thumbnail, a Play button appears. When clicked, you’re shown all the images in the stack as if each were a frame in a small video. The rate at which they’re shown is set on this Preferences page.
Metadata
There is much data about our images, some of which we rarely, if ever, need to see. When you learn what metadata (data about your data) you require, choose it here. Better, hide the metadata you don’t need.
Keywords
I’ll spend more time later describing how and why we keyword our images. Primarily, keywords give us another way to find images whose names we may have forgotten. Many photographers use geographic locations as keywords. For example, I might have keywords like United Kingdom, England, London, and Blackfriars Pub. You’ll note that these are hierarchical: that is, they get more specific as they progress. I might have other London locations that I wish to use as keywords that should be associated with the more general keywords (United Kingdom and England).
When inputting keywords, we can choose, via this preference panel, to use some delimiter (like a forward slash) when typing that will inform Bridge that those keywords are hierarchical.
Labels
My labeling system lets me know at a glance what each image in my view requires. If I see the word “Master” and a blue label, I know that the image is the result of some work and is ready to publish.
If you customize your labels according to my scheme or one like it, be very sure that you do so on each computer you use. In fact, if you also use Lightroom, be certain that you set its labels identically, too. If you do not, the thumbnails will show a white label, though the label text will be preserved.
Cache
To speed things up, Bridge uses a cache, a bit of memory to record the thumbnails and previews of your images. When you first look at the contents of a folder, it will take a few seconds (if there aren’t too many images) or longer (if there are many) to generate thumbnail images. Be patient. If you don’t let Bridge finish, you may corrupt the cache, necessitating its being purged. As you can see, purging can be done from this Åin Preferences.
Advanced
Choose whether or not you’d like Bridge to launch automatically at startup so it’s handy when you need it.
Output
Upon output, sometimes we need the color profile of an image file to change so it is correct for the recipient. Here, you’ll find a checkbox to keep this from happening. In the last chapter, we’ll examine whether this box should be checked more often than not.
Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) Workflow Options
We will examine the processing of raw images carefully later. For now, we’ll configure one of the few truly “sticky” settings in the Adobe Camera Raw dialog box: Workflow Options.
To get to this dialog, you may be using Bridge to look at any folder of images. Select one image by single clicking on it. Then Right-click on the image to see a context menu. Choose the option and at the bottom of the dialog box that appears next, you’ll see underlined text in blue. Those are Camera Raw’s Workflow Options. Click on that text (it’s supposed to look like a hyperlink) to get the dialog illustrated here.
As discussed in the previous chapter’s Working Color Spaces section, we should set the Space option to ProPhoto RGB. If Photoshop is configured to use ProPhoto RGB, all the color information will be respected when you open this image in Photoshop. If we choose the robust and widely used AdobeRGB in Photoshop instead, I would still choose ProPhoto here in ACR; the colors will be converted to AdobeRGB when passed to Photoshop.
Set the Depth option to 16 bits/channel. 8 bits could be fine if you know you won’t do any moderate to major adjustments later, but why take the chance? Many photographers leave this option set to 16 bits just to be safe. The only cost is increased file size and a slight restriction on features that can be used in Photoshop. Hard drive prices are low enough to ease angst about the former, and there are ways around the latter.
Resolution should be set to the default resolution for your typical print output: 300 pixels/inch for most print devices, or 240 or 360 pixels/inch for Epson inkjet printers. If someone else prints your images, consult them for the appropriate value.
Camera Raw sets the Size option to match the default pixel count for the digital camera used. Other size options are available with many options: by dimension, number of megapixels, and more.
Lightroom
Lightroom is packed with many preferences and settings. As you work with the application, you will no doubt need to refine these to your way of working. But the suggestions that follow are chosen with some care, so I suggest you start with them until you have a reason to choose other settings.
One begins a journey through the preferences by choosing (on the Mac) or on Windows. More efficiently, one can use a keyboard shortcut ⌘+, (comma)/Ctrl+, (comma).
General
Most Lightroom users have one all-encompassing catalog (Lightroom database) with which they manage their images. Some, however, may have several: for example, one for personal work and another for professional or portfolio work. If you suspect you will have two or more catalogs to choose from, I suggest that you have Lightroom prompt you to choose each time you launch so it’s easy to get started.
I really enjoy Lightroom’s ability to automatically show the Import dialog when I insert a memory card into my card reader. Just be sure that no other software (iPhoto comes to mind) thinks it’s supposed to do the same.
If your camera always shoots Raw+JPEG, and you don’t want the redundant JPEGs, you will not want to treat them as separate photos.
Presets
Some issues we address when developing our images are the result of a particular setting (like increased noise when we use a high ISO) or a specific camera. You may choose customized defaults to be specific to these factors.
Also, as any one Lightroom catalog may find its way from one hard drive to another (from studio machine to laptop, for example), I like the presets I create to be stored with the catalog for easy access to them because they may sometimes need to be moved manually (by you). This choice is best made early in one’s use of Lightroom.
If you do not anticipate moving Lightroom catalogs to other computers but expect to have more than one catalog (personal versus professional, new ones created annually, etc.), then you should leave this setting disabled. All catalogs would then share settings.
Note: If you choose to store presets with the catalog after you’ve been using Lightroom for some time, you should first use the Show Lightroom Presets Folder… to access the presets you may have created. In this way, you’ll be able to move them to the new location when Lightroom looks there for the presets “with catalog.”
Finally, if you want to reset any of the many types of presets to their installed defaults, this is the place to do so.
External Editing
The preferences for External Editing, Edit in Adobe Photoshop CC 2014, should probably be set as illustrated here. This is especially true if you have configured your color settings as suggested in chapter 1 (this would also make Lightroom consistent with my suggestions for using Adobe Camera Raw).
When you choose to edit a raw image in Photoshop, Lightroom generates a file format that Photoshop can edit directly. It cannot edit raw files. So a TIFF is generated with a name you can configure as illustrated here. You may also set options for other image editing programs that you have on your computer.
To open a Lightroom-edited image in Photoshop, select it in the Library Grid, then use either ⌘+E/Ctrl+E or Right-click on the thumbnail and choose . Before the document opens in Photoshop, you will see a dialog box. I recommend that you edit a copy of your original with Lightroom edits (your global adjustments and light cleanup, for example). This creates a TIFF file. Edit this new image in Photoshop if it needs more work later, but choose “Original” for those later edits, as that is how Lightroom will now address it.
File Handling
I like it to be easy to use hierarchical keywords. For example:
Textures
Inorganic
Rust
Peeling Paint
Organic
Moss
Bark
When typing these keywords in a keyword field, the default way to specify this is “Textures|Inorganic|Rust.” But a forward slash would be so much easier to type than the “pipe” (|) character, so I allow it to be a “keyword separator.”
Lightroom 4 introduced “Fast Load Data,” which increases a raw file’s size slightly, but allows an image to load far more quickly. I think it’s worth it.
Interface
Lightroom’s interface is nicely customizable. Here, you can experiment freely and frequently to find what you like.
Lightroom Mobile
This preference simply holds your Adobe ID data needed to sign into Creative Cloud. Then, you may easily sync a set of images between your iPad (more devices to come) and a Lightroom Collection.
Library View Options
With you’ll have the opportunity to establish what data gets displayed with your image thumbnails. Of course, I have suggestions.
Most important to me is showing if an image has Unsaved Metadata. See “Metadata” in the following Catalog Settings section. For those new to Lightroom, I suggest unchecking “show clickable items on mouse over only.” It’s hard to learn what’s there if you can’t see it! These include the rotation arrows and flags (to “pick” or “reject” images). Not included, strangely, is the small circle one clicks to add an image to the Quick Collection or another targeted one.
Since there are two kinds of cells in Grid view (compact and expanded), you can configure the view for each. You can see how I’ve chosen to do so in the illustration.
Color Labels
Choose to configure a labelling system to mark images for future work. First you build the set, then save it by using the menu at the top of the dialog box, choosing .
Note: Be sure to set your Label text identically to Bridge’s so they can be viewed successfully in both. By “identically,” I mean right down to capitalization and punctuation. Also, be sure to do this on each computer you use.
Catalog Settings
Access your Catalog Settings by going to (Mac), (Windows), or the keyboard shortcut:
⌘+option+, (comma)/Ctrl+Alt+, (comma).
General
I like to have a backup of my catalog(s) made each day that I use them. Note that this is not a backup of your images, but only of Lightroom’s catalog file in case it should become corrupt.
If it’s behaving poorly (slow to respond), you can also go to to see if Lightroom can heal itself. I find this is also good to do after any particularly long and complex work session.
File Handling
Having Lightroom discard its full size previews (1:1 Previews) after a week is a good policy so that your Previews file doesn’t grow to an unwieldy size. I also choose a Standard Preview size that is a good fit to my monitor size. Lastly, I monitor Smart Preview size here.
Metadata
Everything that Lightroom does is kept in metadata, and until that metadata is written to the file itself, it is in Lightroom’s catalog only. This is why I suggest that after working on a set of images, you select those images and press ⌘+S/Ctrl+S (or choose ).
Why do I recommend that you manually save your metadata to your image files rather than use the preference available here that allows you to “Automatically write changes to XMP”? The answer is performance. As you work, making one subtle adjustment or another, that preference will try to write the adjustment to both the catalog file and the image file, causing a performance loss that I and many users find unacceptable. So we rely instead on the same keyboard shortcut we use in any other application to save our work: ⌘+S/Ctrl+S.
Some applications outside of Adobe’s family of products may not be able to handle reading the more complex development metadata in JPEGs or TIFFs. So if you use those file formats, or if you expect to send those file formats to recipients with limited software choices, then be sure to Export copies in those formats and not use the original JPEGs you’ve edited in Lightroom.
If you travel, you may forget to change the time in your camera to the time zone of your destination, causing your images to be marked with the wrong date or time. An option in Lightroom allows date or time data to be written directly into proprietary Raw files as well as DNGs.
Try to set the time in your camera correctly, especially if you consider geocoding your images. Most cameras do not embed Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) data in images. However, there are affordable cameras now from many manufacturers that do. Unfortunately, my main cameras do not. But if I carry a GPS receiver, it will mark the time when I am in various places, creating a “tracklog.” Lightroom can import this tracklog, match up the times, and automatically geocode my images.