Scratch Disks Full Weirdness

Adobe Photoshop

Scratch Disks Full Weirdness

Posted by John Couture on October 4, 2007 at 6:00 pm

Hi,

I’m on a Mac Dual 2GHz Power PC G5 with 4GB DDR SDRAM, Photoshop CS 8.0.

I’m having an issue with not being able to crop photos and getting a “scratch disk is full” error message. After looking this up in PS help, I tried setting my scratch disks to larger internal drives I have that don’t contain other PS files and my max PS memory usage is set to 1066MB, so I figure I should have plenty of space, but nothing seems to help.

I did search on these posts and saw a thread from earlier this year in which Jim Katner asked someone with a similar problem what their image efficiency was, but the poster never answered and I’m not sure if that’s referring to memory usage or what. What am I missing? Can someone clarify this or please give some tips? It blows not being able to crop.

Thanks,

John Couture

Vincent Rosati replied 18 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Vincent Rosati
October 6, 2007 at 9:08 pm

This is certainly debatable, but…
If you have three or more drives…
Drive 1 OS & Apps
Drive 2 Project Files
Drive 3+ Source files

Try setting your scratch discs to discs that are not your project discs. Setting the project disc as a scratch disc is ,sort of, a last choice.

You must close PS after resetting your scratch discs for the change to take effect.

Also, the Edit/Purge option may help, just before the cropping.

Just some thoughts.
Let us know if you get it to work. 🙂
John Couture
October 8, 2007 at 1:27 pm

Vincent,

Thanks so much for responding. I appreciate it.

I don’t have enough drives to do the configuration you mentioned. I keep my application and source media on one drive, then my scratch disk on a separate drive.

I tried the edit/purge you suggested, but it was greyed out, so I couldn’t select it during normal PS operaitons or during a crop.

I did restart PS after I reset the scratch disk, but I still get the errors — on two computers now. And both of them have plenty of scratch space, so I have no idea what’s up. Any more ideas?

Thanks,

John
Vincent Rosati
October 9, 2007 at 2:09 am

Hmmm. If you get a chance, fill out your profile with your system specs; OS, ram, HD config, etc. And Apps with version #s – just like the first line on your original post.

Holy jeez’ 4GBs of RAM! I’m jealous.

You might try closing all other app’s, and system extras if you’re running any. Sometimes a fresh system restart can help.
Is it a layered file? If so, flatten the image before cropping.
I typically work with LZW TIFFs. What image format & size is the file, MB & PX dimensions, ppi, and color mode?
Can you increase your PS memory usage, just for this operation?
As I recall, back in the OS9 days you could save different system extension configurations, to address issues similar to this. You could save a configuration that could, say, devote almost all system resources to a particular app.

This is kinda overboard, but could you crop the image into four quarters, than tile/stitch into a new document?

Is this for a large format print job?

I’m unsure as to why Purge was greyed out. Let us know if you find out why.

If we don’t get any further with this, I’d start a new thread indicating that you’d like help from an OSX specialist. 🙂

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