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Inspiring
January 21, 2025
Question

Lens blur refinement tools slow down to a crawl

  • January 21, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 340 views

Several updates ago, the Lens Blur refinement tools began to become massive resource hogs. Whenever I attempt to use them, the first pass or two to refine blur and focus aren't too bad, but as I continue, the latency in the brushstrokes gets worse and worse, and freezes up PS until they can slowwwwly finish. After a certain point, they no longer work - they just freeze PS and then finally give me back the program after two or three minutes. 

 

I'm on a three year old iMac - current OS, and fully updated on PS. I also use a Wacom tablet (I know, their drivers are crap, but this happens even when I just attempt to use the mouse). I used to use Lens Blur all the time, but now I've had to stop - it's just not worth it. Any way I could possibly make this work correctly again? Or have current updates to PS just decided they'll only work with the most recent hardware and terabytes of RAM. What info can I provide to further this conversation?

2 replies

Participant
February 25, 2025

I have a mid level M4 MacBook Pro with 48GB of RAM and running the lens blur filter now takes at least 5 times as long as did my old Intel Mac with 16GB of RAM. This should not be the case.

Chapps-LAAuthor
Inspiring
February 28, 2025

Yeah, this is a Photoshop issue, not a hardware issue. It used to work fine until one of the updates, then this issue became unworkable. The fact that I have a brand new M4 Mac mini, loaded with RAM and disk space, and it still happens - this is Adobe's issue (and I've tested now on three computers - all the same thing). In addition, leaving PS open for too long drives the memory usage up to insane levels (60 GB of application memory last night before quitting and restarting). Adobe puts all of its resources into releasing new features and unfortunately does the whole 'fix forward' way of addressing issues ... and yet the terrible memory leaks remain and get worse with every year. Code bloat, perhaps - who knows. 

creative explorer
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 28, 2025

@Chapps-LA this is going to sound really stupid but by any chance did you try resetting your Photoshop preferences. I hd some performance issues with my Mac, to the point, that I was going to bite the bullet and buy a new MacBook M4; the staff at the Apple store suggested two things:

1. Besides resetting the Preferences but to also remove the Preferences from the Library as well. I was quite hestitant, so I did copy them to flash thumb drive just in case, I had to copy them. Actually, they even said to select everything in the Preferences folder and give it a deep clean. 

2. On my computer, it was my Hard Drive - Library - Preferences


It was a little scary to be honest, but, I wished I knew sooner; overall, my computer is running so much faster through many of the Applications and even Chrome! 

m
Chapps-LAAuthor
Inspiring
February 5, 2025

Tried that, did nothing. And today I have a brand new M4 Mac mini, with 64 GB of RAM, and a 2 TB drive ... and refining lens blur slows PS down to a crawl, to the point where I just go do something else for two brushstrokes. This is a clean install, no settings transferred over from my other computer. I'm ready to scream.