1. Building a Photoshop System

Adobe Photoshop is about as rich a program as you’ll ever encounter, and much of this book focuses on ways to help you be more efficient as you use it. But no quantity of tips, tricks, and work-arounds can compensate for hardware that’s inadequate for the task or a poorly configured system. This chapter takes a look at building an environment in which Photoshop—and you—can excel.

When buying a computer, consumers tend to fixate on raw processor speed. However, Photoshop also makes heavy demands on random access memory (RAM) and hard drives. Whatever system you choose, it will be most productive with Photoshop when the capabilities of the processor, RAM, and disks are balanced so that none of the three is an unnecessary bottleneck for the other parts.