Remove tool causes memory to max out after a few uses and freezes Photoshop

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
March 29, 2024
11 replies
4131 views

This bug has been reported before, but persists, making editing arduous.

It only became a problem recently, so I feel it is a version issue, say after 25 or so. I have not downgraded as of yet, but may have no choice.

After a few touch ups (nothing major, like skin blemish), the tool will freeze and then memory use will ramp up until entirely maxed out (64 GB). I see it in the Task Manager graph. After about two minutes (if a person was willing to wait), a dialog box pops up saying there is no more memory to complete task. When closed, I can save the image and proceed.

This has happened each and every time I edit an image and I cannot go more than 5 uses before this happens.

I contacted support over the phone and was told to increase memory usage under performance. I does not help and resetting preferences also does not help.

This issue needs to be fixed as I feel the remove tool is one of the core tools users now rely on.

If it would be helpful to downgrade to a previous version, please advise.

Windows

Correct answer Brian_Ackin

UPDATE:

It would seem this issue is version dependent. I downgraded to 25.1 (thought I don't know at what version it starts again) and the remove tool now works without fail. I hope this helps others.

Thanks, Brian

Show previous replies

D Fosse

Community Expert

Photoshop maxing out its memory allocation is perfectly normal. It will always do that pretty quickly. It's how it's supposed to work.

There is no such thing as "enough memory", no matter how much you have. The amount of working data PS needs to move around vastly exceeds RAM. That's why Photoshop uses a scratch disk to be able able to handle all the data. The scratch disk is Photoshop's main memory. RAM is a fast access cache holding current data.

The scratch file holds all history states for all open documents, plus overhead for advanced functions. You should have at least 250 GB or so free space for most "normal" work - for very big files you may need up to a TB or so.

The advice to increase PS memory allocation is bad advice, and it never helps. Quite the opposite, it can choke the rest of the system, causing everything to slow down. Don't go above 70% or so.

The remove tool is extremely memory-intensive. That's the price for magic. There's no free lunch.

M

Miko?aj Rychter

Participant

You probably don't understand the problem. The remove tool simply doesn't work correctly for many people and causes an error. The issue is not that it requires a lot of RAM—everyone understands that, and no one is asking for anything for free, as you wrote. The problem is that this tool doesn't release used memory even after it stops working.

Even worse, at a certain point—for example, on the sixth or seventh click—when you still have 80% of your RAM free, Photoshop freezes, and RAM usage suddenly spikes to 100%, crashing the entire computer. So, this is not a matter of having too little RAM, because this bug always consumes 100% in an instant, regardless of whether you have 16GB, 256GB, 512GB, or even 1024GB of RAM.

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