Is Photosop slowing/crashing on my box a workflow issue or a computer issue?

Question

It's been about 3-4 months that I jumped into professional photography/photo-editing. And I love it this new skill I'm acquiring. The only issue is I am strongly frustrated by my photo-editing workflow, and no one seem to have a real answer on how to fix it. Like every photographer (I guess), I use both Lightroom and Photoshop for photo-editing and here is my workflow. 1. Import .CR2 file into Lightroom. 2. Create virtual copy. 3. Exposure and colour correction adjustment. So far everything is fine. Then when I: 4. Right-click on a file virtual copy and Edit in Photoshop. The world stops. The file is imported into Photoshop and the size increases by 5 to 10 MB, which makes the document end up around 30 to 40 MB in size. And the more I retouch the picture, the more the file size increases drastically. And when I'm done with retouching, The document can end up at 600 MB easily, with the scratch disk marking 3 to 4 GB. And as you can imagine it sometimes makes my computer slow down, freeze, or shutdown once or twice during the whole edit. I can literally feel the heaviness of the work. I have 16 GB RAM, an Intel i7, and an NVIDIA 820M dedicated graphics card. And I only meet this issue when I'm using DaVinci Resolve, and that I can understand. But Photoshop? Is this behaviour normal? Am I doing something wrong in my workflow? Is there a better way?

Answer 1

Try and adding more gigabyte space or using the drives as source for scratch disk to you scratch disk in the preferences folder. By doing this you should be able to do your work normally with enough scratch disk space to do high def pictures. You probably need a better graphics gpu to do your work since the work being done requires alsot of space and performance tech.

Answer 2

16 GB of RAM is OK, not great. Consider that when you are making changes, PhotoShop is making the changes while saving the way the image used to be in ordr for you to be able to revert back. Try saving the file occasionally giving PhotoShop some relief. You may have to solve this problem through a process of elimiting potential issues. Start with this one. Good Luck!