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Inge5E4D
Participant
April 6, 2021
Question

Photoshop elements 2021 slow

  • April 6, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 1379 views

Hi all. In december I bought a MacBook Air,, very fast one with M1 processor. And I bought photoshop elements 2021.but some things work soooo slow!! For example when I want to use a surface blur filter it takes a whole minute to process. Does anyone recognize this? 
also, when I adjust brightness and contrast it does not show immediately, I have to uncheck the box 'preview' and then check it again. 
Hope someone knows the solution. 

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1 reply

Phil Pickering
Phil Pickering
Legend
April 6, 2021

The Surface Blur filter can be slow, especially if you are working with large 16-bit images.

 

My Windows-based AMD Ryzen 5 4600H (Integrated Radeon Vega 6 Graphics) with 16GB RAM takes about a minute to run the Surface Blur filter on a 137MB 16-bit image.

 

Don't expect miracles with Apple's M1 chip, no matter what their marketing says. Elements does not run natively on the M1 chip, so you're going to have a performance hit with it running via Rosetta 2. Also, if you bought the standard off-the-shelf MacBook Air you'll only have 8GB RAM which is a little bit on the small side if you're dealing with large, multi-layered images.

 

Then again, 10 years ago users would be waiting for an hour or so for the Surface Blur filter to finish processing, so we've moved on a bit since then 🙂

 

Finally, make sure you've updated Elements to version 2021.2. That might sort out your Preview issue. 

    John Waller
    Community Expert
    John WallerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 6, 2021

    >>>Also, if you bought the standard off-the-shelf MacBook Air you'll only have 8GB RAM which is a little bit on the small side if you're dealing with large, multi-layered images.

     

    Agreed, that's the prevailing wisdom. Interestingly, the ground rules on RAM requirements seem to be changing based on the performance of the M1 with 8GB RAM.

    9to5Mac

    Mark Ellis Reviews

     

    Phil Pickering
    Phil Pickering
    Legend
    April 7, 2021

    I can understand how the M1 can more effectively manage the memory requirements for running multiple apps at the same time including browsers with multiple tabs open. In those day-to-day use cases, it might appear that suddenly 8GB of RAM is performing as well as 16GB of RAM used to.

    But I'm not sure how those same memory management methods can help in more specialized situations where you're dealing with large, discrete files that require a big chunk of working memory.

     

    Now Photoshop is running natively on the M1, hopefully they'll be some more articles published that address how the new SoC architecture will benefit Photoshop users 🙂

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