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megregoire
Participant
June 25, 2026

Photoshop stops when i try to change brush size or brush hardness

  • June 25, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 12 views

Photoshop stops working when I try to change brush size or brush hardness. When I right click and change the brush size, the window freezes and doesn’t change the size or hardness. It does that if I right click or if I change the size in the box.


Tried resetting preferences, tried restarting computer, tried restarting photoshop, tried resetting brush tools, tried removing ‘’smoothing’’ option. Nothing works and it’s very inconvenient as I use this feature every 5 minutes.


On Windows 11 with wacom intuos pro, drivers up to date, photoshop up to date, and computer up to date. I tried changing the size with my mouse and it freezes too, so probably not a tablet issue.

    2 replies

    J E L
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    June 25, 2026

    Hi, ​@megregoire, it looks like you’ve tried just about everything! Do you always launch Photoshop from the Creative Cloud desktop app, or do you click on a shortcut or image file to launch it? One other thought is that the brush relies heavily on the GPU. If the GPU driver or Photoshop’s interaction with it is unstable, the interface will freeze. Go to Edit > Preferences > Technology Previews and check “Older GPU mode (pre 2016).” Click OK and restart Photoshop. See any difference? Finally, if this just started happening with the latest version 27.8, try going back to an earlier version where you were stable.

    megregoire
    Participant
    June 26, 2026

    Hello ! Thank you it's working now. I ended up resetting the preferences again and deleting my workspace. It seems like it was corrupted for some reason 

    Community Expert
    June 25, 2026

    Unfortunately you haven't given us any information about your system. Therefore, all proposed solutions are a look into the crystal ball

     

    Please provide a copy of your 'System Info'. This can be get from the Photoshop menu item Help > System Info. There's a copy button in the System Info dialog. Press this button and paste the info into a text file and attach it to your next forum post.

    My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 25H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 9 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI