How to Reclaim Speed After a Photoshop Session

You finish a five-hour Photoshop session, hit Cmd+Q, and notice your Mac is still running like it’s underwater. Browsing feels sluggish. Spotify takes a beat to launch. The fan is still spinning even though the heaviest app is closed. Photoshop is one of those apps that leaves a long shadow — caches don’t auto-clean, scratch disk files linger, and Adobe daemons keep running.

Here’s how to fully recover after a long edit session.

Quit Adobe daemons that didn’t quit with Photoshop

Closing Photoshop doesn’t close everything Adobe started. The Creative Cloud helper, sync agents, and crash reporters continue running.

Open Activity Monitor and search “Adobe”. You’ll likely see:

• Adobe Desktop Service
• CCXProcess
• Core Sync
• Adobe Crash Reporter
• Adobe IPC Broker
• Adobe Notification Service Helper

If you’re not actively using another Adobe app, force-quit all of these. They’ll relaunch next time you open Photoshop.

To stop them launching at all when you don’t need them:

• System Settings > General > Login Items
• Remove Adobe Creative Cloud from Open at Login
• Disable any Adobe entries in Allow in the Background

Free up RAM in one clickSweep frees inactive memory and pauses runaway processes. Get Sweep free →

Clear Photoshop’s scratch disk leftovers

Photoshop uses a “scratch disk” — temporary file space when RAM runs out. By default, it’s your startup disk. After a normal Quit, Photoshop cleans up its own scratch files. After a crash or force-quit, it doesn’t.

Find leftover scratch files:

• /private/var/folders/.../Photoshop Temp* — Photoshop’s working scratch
• /tmp/Photoshop Temp* — fallback location

These can be tens of gigabytes after a heavy session. To clean safely:

1. Make sure no Adobe app is currently open
2. Reboot the Mac (clears /tmp automatically)
3. Or use Sweep, which finds and removes Photoshop temp files without needing a reboot

Clear Camera Raw cache

If you used Camera Raw to process RAW files (or opened them in Photoshop, which routes through Camera Raw), the cache balloons fast. By default, Camera Raw caches up to 10 GB of decoded RAW data.

To clear:

1. Open Photoshop or Bridge
2. Go to Camera Raw Preferences > Performance
3. Click Purge Cache

You can also delete the cache folder directly when no Adobe app is open:

• ~/Library/Caches/Adobe Camera Raw/Cache2/

Clear Media Cache files

If you opened any video or animated content in Photoshop (yes, including animated GIFs and timeline-based work), Adobe writes peak files and conformed audio to:

• ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files/
• ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache/

These are safe to delete — Adobe regenerates them next time you open the same media. The folders frequently grow to 30-50 GB over time.

Free inactive memory

Photoshop allocates large chunks of RAM, and macOS holds onto that memory as “inactive” after Photoshop quits, expecting Photoshop to relaunch soon. If you’re not relaunching, this memory is wasted.

Two ways to recover it:

• Wait — macOS eventually releases inactive memory under pressure
• Force it now: Sweep’s speed boost frees inactive memory in one click

Activity Monitor’s Memory tab will show the recovered RAM as Free instead of Inactive.

Clear the Photoshop preferences cache (if needed)

If you’re seeing weird performance issues that persist after cleanup — Photoshop is fine again on relaunch but the system feels weird — corrupt preferences can be the culprit.

Reset Photoshop preferences:

1. Quit Photoshop
2. Hold Cmd+Option+Shift while launching Photoshop
3. Click Yes when prompted to delete the settings file

This won’t touch your files. It just resets app-level settings (which you may need to recustomize).

Check disk space recovered

After a long session, check how much disk space is now free vs before:

• Apple menu > About This Mac > More Info > Storage Settings

A typical heavy Photoshop session can leave 20-50 GB of cache and scratch files on disk. If your numbers don’t match, run Sweep’s smart scan to find what’s still taking up space.

Restart Spotlight indexing on edited files

If you saved many large PSD files during the session, Spotlight is now reindexing them. This can spike CPU for a while after you finish editing.

If you’d rather skip indexing for the working folder entirely:

1. System Settings > Siri & Spotlight > Spotlight Privacy
2. Add the folder where your PSDs live

You’ll lose the ability to Spotlight-search inside those files, but the system stays responsive.

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Quit any conferencing apps you missed

Mid-session, you probably had a Slack window open and may have joined a Zoom for a quick check-in. Both leave behind helpers. After Photoshop, do a quick sweep:

• Activity Monitor: search for zoom, slack, teams, webex
• Quit anything still running that you don’t actively need

Reboot if you’ve been at it for hours

Sometimes the cleanest fix after a long session is a reboot. Apple Silicon Macs handle long uptimes well, but six hours of intense Photoshop work plus a dozen background apps leaves the system in a state where small slowdowns compound. A 30-second reboot resolves it all.

A post-Photoshop checklist

After a heavy session:

1. Cmd+Q Photoshop properly
2. Force-quit lingering Adobe daemons in Activity Monitor
3. Sweep one-click cleanup (RAM, scratch files, Adobe caches)
4. Empty Trash if you’ve been deleting layers/files
5. Check disk space — confirm scratch was reclaimed
6. Reboot if uptime is long or things still feel sluggish

Photoshop is genuinely demanding. The recovery routine isn’t complicated — it’s just consistent. Five minutes after a session and your Mac is back to ready for whatever’s next.