Crash memory on denoise photos

I am writing this report as a long-time paying Adobe customer (over five years) because this issue has reached a point where it is seriously impacting my professional work.

Today was the third time I lost 100% of my AI Denoise progress because Camera Raw exhausted all available memory and crashed.

This is no longer an isolated incident. It has become part of my workflow, and I am now spending more time repeating work than actually editing photographs.

My system:

• MacBook Air M4
• 16 GB Unified Memory
• 512 GB SSD
• Latest version of macOS
• Latest version of Photoshop 2026
• Camera Raw 18.4.1

I primarily work with Canon EOS RP (.CR3) files.

The crashes happened so frequently with CR3 files that I completely changed my workflow and started converting every image to DNG before editing, hoping to avoid the issue.

Unfortunately, that only delays the problem.

Today’s session contained 347 photographs.

I had already processed almost every image with AI Denoise when macOS displayed a warning that system memory had been exhausted. The operating system started pausing Photoshop/Camera Raw, and Camera Raw displayed:

“Could not complete the operation.”

Seconds later, everything was lost.

Hours of processing simply disappeared.

What makes this even more frustrating is that I had intentionally closed every single application on my Mac before starting this work. Finder and Photoshop were essentially the only applications running because I already knew Camera Raw tends to consume excessive memory.

Even after dedicating the entire computer to Camera Raw, it still consumed over 21 GB of memory before becoming unusable.

This should not happen on a modern Apple Silicon machine for a workflow that Adobe itself promotes.

What concerns me even more is that Camera Raw’s behavior appears to have changed.

In previous versions, AI Denoise generated a new DNG file for each processed image, writing the result directly to disk as each photo finished processing.

That approach was reliable because if a crash occurred, previously completed images were already saved.

Now, it appears that Camera Raw keeps the denoise state attached to the current editing session instead of committing each completed result to disk immediately.

If this is indeed how the current implementation works, it explains why memory usage continuously grows until the operating system intervenes.

More importantly, it means one crash destroys an entire day’s work.

This has now happened three times.

I have effectively lost an entire working day simply because I had to repeat exactly the same AI Denoise process over and over again.

As a professional photographer, this is unacceptable.

Adobe software is part of my daily business, and I have been paying for Creative Cloud for years because I trust these tools in professional environments.

Right now, I cannot trust Camera Raw to finish processing a large shoot without risking the loss of everything.

I strongly believe Camera Raw should:

• Save AI Denoise results to disk immediately after each image is processed.
• Never keep hundreds of completed RAW edits only in memory.
• Recover completed work after unexpected crashes.
• Manage memory far more efficiently instead of continuously consuming RAM until macOS is forced to intervene.

I sincerely hope the engineering team investigates this issue.

This is no longer a minor inconvenience or an occasional crash.

It has become a serious reliability problem that is causing professional users to lose hours of work and productivity.