P: CS6 Slow compared to CS5.1 with large files

Please post a new topic about ACR slowdowns - that isn't related to the rest of Photoshop, and needs to be investigated by the ACR team.

Hi. I have a latest gen iMac with the following specs;

27" 3.4GHz Intel Core i7
RAM 20GB 1333MHz DDR 3
AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MB
MAC OS X Lion 10.7.4
64 bit CS6 installed on SSD. Same SSD is selected as scratch disk.

Files are 36MP Nikon D800 RAW files. Use full screen in ACR.

Upgraded from CS 5.1 to CS 6 and see degraded performance when working in ACR. It quickly becomes very slow at painting in effects and panning / zooming is lagging to the point where it becomes intolerable.

Unsure if performance settings in photoshop affects ACR from Bridge, but settings are Cache Levels 5 and Cache Tile Size 1024K. Use Graphics Processor is checked.

Any help is appreciated.

Geir

On disk, the file is compressed.
In memory, the document is not compressed.
The file size and document size in memory are only loosely correlated, and will never match.
Yes, if you have a lot of layers (especially layers with very little on them) - then that could be correct.

That document would only cause a slowdown if you didn't have enough RAM to hold it, but it sounds like you have plenty of RAM for it.

A lot of custom patterns would use up available RAM, take a long time to load, and would get paged out to scratch when you tried to load a document.

Try saving the patterns, then resetting to just the default patterns.
Relaunch Photoshop and see if things go a bit quicker.

And do you mean CS3? Perhaps the Pattern Maker filter (which has been removed from Photoshop, because marketing couldn't explain it to users).

Another piece of information: when I look at the file size in my Mac finder window, it says the file size is 1.97 GB, yet when I open the file, and look at the file size in the PS info panel on the bottom left of the window, it says the file size is 9.84GB. Why is there this difference? Would this cause the slowdown?

Including the text layers, this file has 370 layers.

Thank you, Chris, for getting back to me. As soon as I have another large file open later today, I'll follow your suggestions and let you know.

In the meantime, I wanted to let you know, that with the work we do, back when PS 3 had the pattern tool, we created 134 custom patterns. Although it takes a long time to load the patterns when PS is booting up, am I right is assuming it should have no effect on the above issue?

Is there a pattern tool available for CS6?

So you may have a problem other than what's mentioned here already.
Do make sure you used the 2 workarounds listed at the top to rule out those problems.

It sounds like something on your system might be causing Photoshop to lose events, or is just causing a lot of time to get wasted.

Let Photoshop idle for a minute, then check the CPU load for Photoshop (in Activity Monitor) and see what it's at.
If it's high, then something is consuming time - that could be a third party plugin, a haxie/utility, corrupt fonts or OS font cache, or some other system bug. Taking a sample of the process in Activity monitor might give us some clues where the time is going.
If it's not using a lot of CPU, then something is interfering with events or redraw. That could be a third party plugin, a driver, a haxie or utility, another process, or something we just haven't seen yet. That'll be harder to track down, but sampling Photoshop while trying to switch layers might give us some ideas.

I also upgraded to CS6 and have been experienceing hesitation and slowness beyond belief. I have a brand new, 12 core MacPro running Lion, 64 GB RAM, and an Nvidia Quadro 4000 graphics card.

CS6 app is loaded onto a SSD, while the scratch disks are the drives that come with the computer. Yet when I work on very large files (12-15 GB), with multiple layers (over 100 if I count each 1-6 word text layer), I experience 8-10+ second delays switching from layer to layer. Switching tools can take up to 20 seconds, and the tool will keep snapping back to the previous one while I try several times to pick the tool I want -- until it finally let's me choose the tool I want. Waiting for layers and tools to switch costs me an enormous amount of time every day, which in turn is costing thousands of dollars.

I have read through articles about optimizing CS6 and have followed all those directions, but have experienced no improvement. I spent thousands on my new computer thinking that it would make working with CS6 easier, but no.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd sure appreciate them.

(I posted this above not realizing I should do it here)

I also upgraded to CS6 and have been experienceing hesitation and slowness beyond belief. I have a brand new, 12 core MacPro running Lion, 64 GB RAM, and an Nvidia Quadro 4000 graphics card.

CS6 app is loaded onto a SSD, while the scratch disks are the drives that come with the computer. Yet when I work on very large files (12-15 GB), with multiple layers (over 100 if I count each 1-6 word text layer), I experience 8-10+ second delays switching from layer to layer. Switching tools can take up to 20 seconds, and the tool will keep snapping back to the previous one while I try several times to pick the tool I want -- until it finally let's me choose the tool I want. Waiting for layers and tools to switch costs me an enormous amount of time every day, which in turn is costing thousands of dollars.

I have read through articles about optimizing CS6 and have followed all those directions, but have experienced no improvement. I spent thousands on my new computer thinking that it would make working with CS6 easier, but no.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd sure appreciate them.

I previously had problems with Photoshop CS6 under OSX Lion - especially with large files with multiple layers (and especially with shape layers).

Essentially moving multiple items became very slow when any size thumbnail was turned on in the Layers palette. I know this is a widely reported problem.

Well this was solved for me by buying a new Mac with a much better graphics card!

Now I've updated to Mountain Lion and the slowness has returned - moving single items around is jerky. Moving multiple items around is extremely slow.

Once again the problems disappear if I turn off thumbnails in the Layers palette.

Sigh.