Increase the RAM for applications in Classic

Question

I am running Photoshop 5.0 in Classic environment. While it works fine for most tasks I am finding a few things won't work. An error occurs and the application requests more RAM, e.g when I try to perform some intensive filtering.
In the system preferences I see that Classic has assigned 12MB to the Photoshop application. I would like to increase this to the recommended 32MB.
Can someone advise how to do this ? - so far I have not found where/how to do this.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi, Macdady. You do it the same way you would if you were booting into OS 9: Clecik once on the icon of the closed Photoshop application (not an alias) to select it, then choose Get Info from the File menu, clcik the Memory arrow in the Get Info window to expand that portion of the window (if it isn't expanded already) and increase the Preferred memory allocation. There's no need to change the other two figures.
Classic versions of Photoshop are happiest if you assign them at least three times as much RAM as the file size of the largest images you ordinarily work with. If you regularly handle images that are 10GB when they're open in Photoshop (they may be much smaller as compressed .jpg files when they aren't open), then a Preferred RAM allocation of 32MB is suitable. If you regularly handle images whose size (as displayed at the bottom of the Photoshop window) is much larger than 10GB, you'll want to allocate more than 32MB of RAM to the application.
I believe OS X is able to manage the memory needs of Classic applications a little better than OS 9 did, but perhaps not very much better. OS X versions's memory requirements are, of course, managed far better by OS X.