This technical note presents a new, simple and effective, four-parameters proportional–integral–derivative (PID) optimization method. The set of adjustable parameters is defined by the proportional gain $k$, integral gain $k_{\rm i}$, damping ratio of the controller zeros (DRCZ), and desired value of the sensitivity to measurement noise $M_{\rm n}$. Given $M_{\rm n}$ and desired value of the maximum sensitivity $M_{\rm s}$, for both maximization of $k$ and maximization of $k_{\rm i}$, only three nonlinear algebraic equations need to be solved for a few values of DRCZ. Contrary to the method based on maximization of $k_{\rm i}$, in the method based on maximization of $k$ the improvement of performance is obtained by decreasing DRCZ from 1 to the value corresponding to the minimum of the integrated absolute error (IAE). Moreover, this is achieved without deteriorating robustness to the model uncertainties, for a large class of stable processes. Compared to the recently proposed PID optimization methods, for the same $M_{\rm s}$ and $M_{\rm n}$, lower values of IAE and $M_{\rm p}$ are obtained by using the method presented here.