Adjusting Cache Levels in Photoshop for Sharper Image Previews

Hi everyone it's Anna, and today I wanted to talk to you guys really quickly about a problem that some of you have been reporting. Particularly with Creative Cloud and also with Creative Suite. About how, when you open your images in Photoshop you're finding that they look grainy, or noisy, or blurry and it doesn't have anything to do with the ISO. Like, even if you shot at a low ISO it looks noisy.

And I wasn't having this problem until just a few days ago. The same thing started happening to me so I did a little bit of research and I found a way that I was able to fix this on my computer. So, hopefully this will help you guys some, but just to give you an example of what I'm talking about, when I have an image open in Photoshop, when I zoom out and then zoom back in it just looks really grainy and blurry, and image just ... It shouldn't look that way. Once I get in closer it's fine, but as I move out ... Even when it's taking up a large portion of my screen it looks just really grainy, and it just shouldn't look like that.

So, what I found through my research is that my cache levels were set way too low in Photoshop. So, maybe that's the problem that some of you guys are having. So, to change your cache levels you would want to go to edit, and then preferences, and then select performance. Now, under performance I found that my cache levels were set all the way down to two for some reason. I don't know how or why that happened, because I don't think there would be any reason that I would have set my cache levels that low, and I know that Photoshop defaults to either four or six for the cache levels.

So, what I did was increase my cache levels to eight, because you can actually go all the way up to eight here. And the reason that I have them set now to eight is because I use very high resolution images, and they don't have a lot of layers to them. So, if you were working with like a low resolution image, you would want a small cache level, but if you're working with very large image files, you want your cache level to be higher.

Now, keep in mind that this is going to use more disk space and more ram on your computer, but if you're doing a lot of editing with high resolution files you'll want your cache level to be higher. So, I'm going to press okay and now I need to close out of Photoshop for the changes to take place. So, after you set your cache levels close this out, and then I'm going to open up Photoshop again.

Okay, and now I'm going to open up the image on my desktop. And I'll show you that the image now looks exactly like it should when I zoom in and out. So, zooming in and out, it's not grainy and fuzzy like it was in the other image. So again, this is something that it worked for me, because my cache levels were really low so you may want to go into your cache levels and check yours to see where they should be, or that they are where they should be.