Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

Well, add me to the list. I followed forum, bought ATI radeon hd 4850 graphics card. It was on adobe's tested list. Man was I excited! thought it was running great until I tried to paint on a levels layers mask. I was trying to darken a selected area. It was unusable at a 300 zoom F%#K I am so disappointed. I would paint a single click, nothing would appear until I clicked it again somewhere else then the previous spot would appear wtf! I am sorry just pissed I can't get anything done. I switched off gpu it worked a little better but come on then all the features are gone. I spent an hour updating driver. I am not a computer expert just a wedding photographer. What do I do now. If anybody at adobe wants to know the rest of my brand new system I bought to exclusively run CS4. Let me know.
I could call if u want. I really need to know what to do next. I spent over $1,500.00 For everything and now I am back to using CS2 on my old system I need advice.

thanks
-mark

i The latter seem to regard the former as whining morons who are obviously doing all sorts of things wrong.

Not all of us! :-)

Just to let you know I am one of the lurkers here and I have no problem with CS4 speed but it crashes a lot.

I am retired and only process a few images a day,
but when it crashes I lose my work. Yes, I save a lot, but if I decide that I don't want that image, I have several copies on my drive.

The speed (for me) is not an issue. I have a 4 core vista 32 system with 3 gig of memory and nvidia 8600GT 512 memory card with the latest drivers and GPU set to off.

Thanks to this thread I have made some improvements in speed.

I grew suspect reading all those perfect, I just love it, PS CS4 reviews. Plus when you read those reviews not one of them (least the ones I found) list their computer system specs. My copy of CS4 extended runs ok but has minor issues already talked about on here. I just lerk and read now: Waiting for Adobe to sort it out with who ever.

Until two weeks ago I had a three year old 3.6ghz P4 (with 4gig of RAM). It ran CS3 very nicely. After anxiously waiting for CS4 to arrive, I was absolutely stunned at how awful the user experience was. I've been a programmer since 1968, and I've seen a lot. It's perfectly normal for a product to require more horsepower from one version to the next. But not like this.

I was rather dismayed reading the first couple of hundred posts in this thread. I saw basically two camps. People with severe problems (as I had), and people with new enough hardware to run CS4 ok. The latter seem to regard the former as whining morons who are obviously doing all sorts of things wrong.

I decided my blood pressure wasn't going to cope with getting into this fight, so I just threw a bunch of money at the problem. Now I'm running Vista 64 with 12GB of ram, a Core i7 920, and a GeForce 9800 GTX+. CS4 runs great, at least as much as I've had time to try after spending so much time and money upgrading, installing a new OS, and reinstalling everything.

I didn't have any where near the patience to try upgrading one piece at a time to figure out just how much is strictly necessary for CS4 to run right. As a programmer, it's my personal opinion that Adobe really screwed up. Turning off all the GPU options, for example, was not enough to get even minimally acceptable performance from my previous processor. All of Adobe's developers (and all of the authors of the glowing magazine reviews) must have the latest and greatest systems. Adobe's QA department, at least, should have tried CS4 on a more "normal" PC before they threw CS4 out the door.

Having seen both sides now, I can say that with the latest/greatest hardware, CS4 is really slick. Some of the new visual features are downright silly (spin your image around like a top??), but some of the new stuff really is nice. I can also say that if you don't have new enough hardware, CS4 is truly awful. The fellow who started off this thread 550+ messages ago put it very well.

Jason is right. There are many (like myself) who have one or more of these many problems and don't post because we have no solution.

It is impossible to know how widespread the difficulties are. Only those with a problem tend to post, but not everyone with a problem posts.

What bothers me (apart from two days of time wasted combing this forum and other sources without any solution for the slow operation and corrupt displays) is that there is no simple way to turn off the "features" that are causing the trouble.

I bet many will simply give up and keep using CS3. GIMP is even starting to look attractive, despite being 2 generations behind PS.

Arthur

Well, I just wanted to echo the sentiment that there are many others lurking here, but not posting about their problems. We ran the trial at work, and every machine we tried it on had lag issues with the brush and clone tool. Additionally, the pen tool response was so slow as to be unusable. We have tried many of the potential "fixes" listed in this massive thread, and I even e-mailed about the request for help for a possible solution. We have, as yet not seen anything that has helped. We are not the only local shop with this issue, and I would expect that it may be more common then some realize.

A lot of people won't post on a forum if they don't have a productive solution. We haven't found one, and neither have any of our colleagues, so none of us have said anything, but if this is what it takes then add my voice too.

OK, I yanked out the Radeon 2400 which is on the Adobe approved card list and re enabled the old on-board graphics card. Result: CS4 still lags by the same amount. Of course, OpenGL is not available now. Great: my cheap Dell laptop circa 2006 plays CS4 just fine altho without OpenGL but my Dell desktop circa 2004 doesnt even when OpenGL is not an option and is grayed out.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron B130 with Celeron{R}M 1.5GHz, XP SP2, one-half GB RAM. My desktop has XP SP3: I wonder if SP3 is screwing with CS4?

At any rate, editing my 80MB images with only 2 gigs of RAM is a joke so I am going to buy a new PC. I will install only CS4 and of course the crapware that comes with it and see what happens. The PC will come with a Radeon 3650 and I have seen posts elsewhere on the net that the 3650 doesnt have problems with those who have posted. Google: Radeon 3650 CS4.

Desktop is using a Pentiun4 2.4GHz. Maybe thats a problem.

My photoshop cs4 wont let me use any 3d options

I am reading through this forum and, while there is a lot of information and it is very difficult to cover it all, I can tell that many people are having problems with their mouse in CS4. Please allow me to join your ranks!! I have a brand new PC running Vista and I installed CS4 Premium on it the day I set the computer up. The rest of Creative Suite runs fine -- I'm very happy with it. But Photoshop seems to be a complete wreck. There are features of the new Photoshop that I'm not happy with -- for instance running actions that create a new file (copy then create new file then paste, for example) always assigns the file a name from the most recent previously named file instead of allowing for consecutive naming like Untitled-2, Untitled-3, etc... Then there's the whole windows default to a tab arrangement thing, which is solvable I know, but annoying none-the-less.

The REAL problem I'm running into is with the mouse, though. It seems to have a mind of its own... When I use the Marquee tool, it creates a box on the first click that has my cursor as one of its corners the remainder of the size and location of the box is completely random. Click again, same thing happens with the box having different dimensions and location. Only maybe one in three clicks am I actually able to drag the marquee tool to select exactly what I want. It is almost impossible to do a lot of cut-and-paste type stuff, and for me that makes Photoshop CS4 unusable. I'm trying to stick it out and find a solution, but I'm getting very frustrated and occasionally have to return to my old machine running CS2 to get work done.

I've tried reinstalling my mouse drivers... I've checked to make sure I have the most recent versions of .net and DirectX... I turned of OpenGL in Photoshop... I've replaced my mouse and made sure the trackpad on my laptop is turned off... I just don't know what to do now!!!

Will someone pleeeeeease help me make Photoshop CS4 a functioning program? I hate to be accused of whining, but need the application to work properly -- so even it's user error that's making is suck so bad, lay it on me, let me know, so I can fix it!