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Susan-G
Susan-G
Participant
April 2, 2020
Question

Photoshop 2020 Slow performance on macOS Catalina

  • April 2, 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 10095 views

Trying to work in Photoshop has become a nightmare, editing time has trippled, work lost, not to mention my emotional state of frutstration.

Photoshop would bomb out without any warning, or it's so slow, or it would freeze and only way out is switching the computor off.

After having my new iMac (6months) checked twice and software upgrade from Mojave to Catalina, the problem persists. It happened in Mojave and in Catalina as well. 

 

Please help.

Susan

 

    4 replies

    B
    Boyd_DuPree
    Participant
    June 18, 2020

    Our design business has been using Photoshop since it launched in 1990 and we have moved through every system upgrade, on practically every Mac out there. I finally upgraded to Catalina (10.15.5 on my MacPro) and downloaded Photoshop 2020. I expect little bugs here and there; work arounds, etc.  

     

    But this is the first time Photoshop has failed to meet basic performance standards. Like, when I drag a brush across my screen (2300 X 1800px, 300dpi), I literally only see my brush stroke and a super pixelated area of the papery layer underneath. Everything else is just blank (white) because it won't render the entire page. Wait, what?! 

     

    I've been such a fan, such an advocate for Adobe over the span of my entire career. I still want to be. But why should we all have to find ourselves here searching for answers on how to make photoshop 2020 useable? Why should we even be thinking we have to bail on 2020 and go backwards? Shoudn't there be some basic expectation met right out of the box? 

     

    I didn't trash CC 2018 (skipped 2019 because I feared losing plugins) version but now I can't even 'save for web' with it now. Why should I have to google my way out of these problems? I'm still a fan but I'm just not getting why some of these huge issues weren't discovered and addressed in testing before it was launched. I mean, Catalina launched Oct. 2019, some 8 months ago. 

     

    Please help me not have to bail on the app that has literally helped defined my productivity, my creativity, my career, my life for 30 years. Note to readers: I don't even know if there's something else out there. I don't want to even look! 🙂 Thank you.  

     

      john saxon photo
      john saxon photo
      Participant
      May 8, 2021

      Yep. I've been using Photoshop forever and have never experienced the kind of laggy performance I'm getting on my new (not M1) Mac Mini 32GB 6 core i7. It's truly ridiculous and nearly unuseable. I'm cropping a little 400px square image and dragging the crop corners is super slow and choppy. Just insanely bad. I halfway expect to hear the old beep boop of a telephone modem starting up. So I buy a brand new fancy Mac, pay Adobe $10/ month for the latest greatest and I get performance from 15 years ago. Thanks, Adobe. 

      R
      rszatko
      Participant
      May 4, 2020

      I am having these issues as well. I just bought a new imac last week and am using the latest version of Catalina and Photoshop (21.1.2). When I run Photoshop my whole computer slows down, not just when I'm working in the app. I hope this is fixed soon b/c it is driving me nuts as I work in photshop everyday for most of my work day.

        adamt18510785
        adamt18510785
        Inspiring
        May 4, 2020

        Welcome to party, so far the best options are going back to 2018/2019 or getting affinity photo that's 50% off now. 

         

        Adobe hasn't even acknowledged this

        adamt18510785
        adamt18510785
        Inspiring
        April 3, 2020

        Welcome to the club, there are several threads about how PS 2020 is unusable on all types of systems and adobe performance fixes don't work. The only solution we found was to buy other software until they fix the issues.
        You can read all the problems people are having in this thread. 

        https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/photoshop-2020-running-slow/td-p/10719152?page=1

          Sahil.Chawla
          Adobe Employee
          Sahil.Chawla
          Adobe Employee
          April 2, 2020

          Hi Susan,

          Sorry to hear that Photoshop is performing slow on macOS Catalina, would you mind telling us the exact version of Photoshop you're working on? You can verify the version by going to Help > System Info

          Also, you may try optimizing the performance of Photoshop and let us know how it goes: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html

           

          Regards,
          Sahil

            O
            OHKO_53
            Known Participant
            April 3, 2020

            Hi, I have the same Problems.

            I run Photoshp 2020 on OS Catalina Macbook Pro End 2019 30 GB RAM. It takes 2-3 Minutes for Photoshop to even start up. The older Photoshop Version runs much faster. PS 2020 also crashes every day. Optimizing the preferences does not change anything. Other Problem solving solutions available?

             

            Kind regards,

            Katja

             

              D
              Community Expert
              DaveJCummingsCommunity Expert
              Community Expert
              April 3, 2020

              Which version of Photoshop 2020 are you using? Certain versions have been reported to work better. I do illustrations in PS and 21.0.3 seems to work more smoothly than 21.1.1. But it's an issue they are aware about and are addressing 

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