Maximize Compability – Photoshop Tips – The Worst Feature in Photoshop
A short blog this. But wanted to pass on something I found out – it’s simply the worst aspect of Photoshop I have found. In all the years of using it.
There is a button called ‘Maximize Compatibility’ that appears when you save an image. Glory Be! It makes sure you can see the file properly on previous versions of Photoshop. It generates previews of the image on other software like Lightroom. How convenient, how useful.
Ah – that little button… so innocuous, so much disk used!
And it doubles, or triples, your file size…
Yes, you read that right.
Doubles at best – triples at worst!
The problem was, I was blissfully unaware, and it did manifest itself until I upgraded to the Canon R5 – up to 50Mb RAW size. Per image…. I have a few. I added a few layers, next thing I know, my PSD file is up to 1Gb, a few more layers and it was over the 2Gb Photoshop file size limit. So, I then had to save as a PSB ‘large file’ which seemed to make things worse size-wise.
A little investigation, trial and error, had me recently doing a ‘save as’ and changing the filetype to PSD from PSB, and suddenly 2.5Gb files were hitting the 800Mb mark. That’s a lot of disk space saved, but also a lot of time waiting over the months for the Save Bar of Death to morph along.
Don’t wait! – Turn it off now!
Ok head into Edit > Preferences
Then > File Handling
Change the “Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility” from the default of “Ask” to “Never.” Photoshop will stop asking you every time you save a new file.
There, I hope this has saved you a few Gb on your hard drive, mine looks a lot better now. Wish I knew earlier.
Andrew Barnes
The Berowra Photographer
