Photoshop Cartographers: Want Shorter Draw Times? Try Bigger Tiles.

The Bigger Tiles Photoshop CS2 plugin increases default tile size.

From tipster Ross Chrystall at Hema Maps in Australia (a few of whose estimable product we have in our own personal collection) we find out about a way that those, with memory available, can take advantage of that memory to shorten total draw times, optimizing performance for those larger-capacity machines.

Included in Photoshop CS2 is the “Bigger Tiles” plugin, set to off (by the inclusion of a tilde in the plugin’s name) by default. All files in processed Photoshop are divided into tiles for drawing purposes, and the maximum size of each is 132KB of storage (the dimension in tiles can be found by mousing over the document size part of the bottom window margin, holding down the CMD key (Mac) or ALT key (Wintel) and left-clicking). This is a default. On systems that have up to 1GB RAM, however, activating Bigger Tiles and assigning from 261MB to 1GB to the Memory and Image Cache preference, max tile size goes to 260KB. If one assigns more than 1GB, that tile size will go to 1MB.

The end result: Though the individual tile will take longer to draw (being in and of itself bigger) the file itself will actually take less total time to draw, since there are fewer tiles.

The Bigger Tiles plugin comes, as said, with Photoshop CS2. To turn it on, do the following:

1. Quit Photoshop.
2. Locate the ~Bigger Tiles plug-in file:
   • Mac OS: Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Plug-Ins/Adobe
Photoshop Only/Extensions/Bigger Tiles
   • Windows: Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop
CS2/Plug-Ins/Adobe Photoshop Only/Extensions/Bigger Tiles
3. Rename the file, removing the tilde (~) from the file name.
4. Start Photoshop.

In the Readme file also found in that folder, Adobe advises us that while the plugin does improve file draw times on machines with 1GB RAM and more, there may be a performance hit in other unspecified situations. Additional informatin can also be found in Adobe Knowledge Base document 331372.

Thanks for the tip, Ross!