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Question

Photoshop CS5 Very Slow Liquify

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
May 8, 2010
30 replies
42945 views

I've noticed that in Photoshop CS5, Liquify just works terribly slowly. When I click and drag to distort an image, the image gets distorted sometimes even 10 seconds after I've lifted my hand. Sometimes I have to wait 30-40 seconds for the distortions to happen before I can regain control of Photoshop.

Also, panning is a bit more choppy than in CS4, which annoys me a lot, as it was the case with CS4 compared to CS3, etc... I predict that panning in CS7 will look like a slideshow.

And another thing, when you Flick-Pan, and release the mouse, the canvas flies across the screen, and during that flying animation, in CS4, you could still zoom in and out with the keyboard. In CS5, you have to wait until the canvas has slowed down to a stop to be able to zoom. This is also a strange feature.

Adobe said CS5 will have performance improvements, and I can see filters, adjustments and brushes perform a tiny bit better, but basic things like panning, zooming and liquify got MUCH worse and less responsive, and this is not worth the tradeoff for me, since I use these features very frequently, many times a second.

I use a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet most of the time, and I noticed that Liquify is much faster (although still too slow for me to use it) when I use my trackpad instead of the pen.

I'm using the Photoshop CS5 trial now, and I have Photoshop CS3 and CS4 both installed on the same computer, so I can tell that CS3 ran much faster, CS4 was a bit slower and CS5 is a LOT slower. I'm using a late 2008 15 inch Unibody MacBook Pro with 9600M / 9400M graphics, 4GB RAM and 2.53 GHz CPU, and speed gets a bit better when using the 9600M.

Here are my questions:

Has anyone else had any of these problems, especially Liquify?
Has anyone else used CS5 and noticed that Liquify runs just fine?
Does anyone have any suggestions of what I could try to cure any of these problems?
Is it possible that this is the way Photoshop CS5 should run on my computer, due to my hardware limitations and bloated software?

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A

anssik_

Known Participant

Here's another victim with very slow Liquify behavior in CS5 with Wacom Bamboo.

MacBook Pro 15" 2.2 GHz, 6 GB.

Great Adobe is fixing this but it's been a month. How long should it take to fix this?

C

chazzcron7570391

Participating Frequently

Isn't this about the time someone points their finger at Wacom? Or Apple?

S

samhobson

Participant

My Wacom and Mac worked fine with CS3! Ok CS4 crashed a lot to begin with, but at least the liquify worked. Now I am using CS5 I cannot use liquify with a large brush, which I thought might be solved by using the new puppet warp - Which turns out to be no good if you want to warp any sort of complex shape as it cannot create a suitable mesh, and if it does it makes a complete mess of things. Now I am having further issues with CS5, as it can't handle running with more than a couple of large (2GB+) files open simultaneously. If I have 3 big files open, the whole program pretty much grinds to a halt on both my work and home systems - sometimes it will start working again after half an hour of threatening to crash, thankfully giving me the opportunity to save, before letting me quit, which then generates an unexpected crash report. I would go back to CS4, but since last weeks update, people are experiencing more bugs and crashes than before they updated (maybe adobe are trying to encourage us to upgrade to CS5?), so I've got no solution apart from maybe to throw in the towel and maybe take some time off. What is the point on wasting money on these "updated" gimmicky pieces of junk that have clearly only been tested by amateurs?

C

chazzcron7570391

Participating Frequently

Is it just me or is saving meshes out of liquify now slower by a factor of TEN?

Chris, I want to add that it KILLS me that holding the option key down when invoking the Liquify feature does not bring up the last mesh, unlike almost every filter does. This alone would save me TONS of anguish unnecessarily saving a garbage mesh file just so I can apply it to the numerous layer masks associated with the layer I am liquifying.

Additionally, wouldn't it be more logical to not only remind us that "The transparency for this image cannot be modified. Applied changes may produce undesired results" but actually put a radio check box to disable transparency right there in the dialog box?

That is all.

S

Sean_C_Ross

Participating Frequently

Me too. Imac i7 quad. 8gb RAM. Wacom intuos2.

I think you guys should rewrite the liquify as a normal brush in photoshop rather than as a module. This isn't the first time it lagged. It is nice to save the mesh, though, so it would have to be re-executeable. Also, it was nice when you could hold down the shift key and it would reexecute the last liquify mesh on the image (perhaps this was photoshop 7?) It save me a lot of time applying liquify to all my masks. Perhaps we could have a liquify again command?

H

Hawaii_Bill

Participating Frequently

I'm having a strong feeling that Adobe had a lot of beta testers who weren't qualified for CS-level work.

It seems many existing functions were damaged and experienced graphics folks would have been sensitive to that if nothing else.

S

samhobson

Participant

Am using the trial downloaded from adobe and thankfully have not paid for the upgrade yet. CS5 is running well and seems more stable, but paths are almost invisible and liquify is unusable. Have tried saving a mesh in CS4 and applying it in CS5, but even this is slow. Have had to resort to using puppet warp to do the big stuff as using a small brush is just about managable (apart from the weird fluid animation). Just the same on smaller files - Mac is not an issue, have an 8 core nehalem with 16gb ram. Won't be buying the upgrade until I hear they have addressed this issue, don't think my colleagues will either as liquify and paths both essential tools.

C

chazzcron7570391

Participating Frequently

Yeah, Wacom issues with CS5. I have found that zooming way out eases the issue, of course, that hurts fine tuning. This will give one faster results, especially with large moves. In light of this, it appears to be a video card issue. Try it.

A

Anonymous

I'm having the same issues with extremely slow Liquify preview renderings in CS5. I have an Intuos4 and switching to my trackball seems to work well if the liquify brush size is relatively small. With larger brushes (700-800-900pix +) the trackball is almost just as slow as the Intuos. Seems a little faster, but nowhere near useable or "normal" like in CS4. Filesize doesn't seem to make any difference in rendering speed when using the Intuos, Liquify is super slow on both low- and high-res files.

I'm happy to hear Adobe is aware of the issue, but I use Liquify extensively and have no choice but to return to CS4 until this is fixed.

I'm running MacOS 10.5.8 on a MacPro 2.8GHz Quad-Core Xeon with 14GB RAM.

D

Designified

Participant

I actually have the same problem. It goes really really slow. And it's like a pain in the ass. However it's good to hear that Adobe Employee's are trying to fix this. However I think it should of been fixed before they even launched the product, and test it themselves.

Anyways, I'm not going to complain. The rest of Photoshop CS5 is total awesome!

C

Charles Yeh

Participant

A few things:

-jellysquare is correct. The lag is worse with the Wacom tablet. Still the CS5 Liquify is not as "snappy" as the CS4 Liquify.

-I can also attest to the slow panning. It really gets carried away sometimes and makes me afraid to pan.

J

jellysquare

Inspiring

I have the same problem but ONLY if I use my Wacom tablet (Intuos 3). For now I switch to my mouse to do Liquifications and it seems to respond as quickly as in CS4. Actually, I used to do switch to the mouse for that sometimes anyway since it somehow seems to give me a little better fine control....

B

brian100780

Participant

You could always do the edit > purge all