Camera Raw 14.0 on MacOS Big Sur slow

Report · Oct 29, 2021

Everytime Adobe does a major update, it takes about 2 months for them to unravel these very familiar problems. First, let me get this out of the way, I work on:

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020)

3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7

80 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT 8 GB (supports full acceleration)

Camera raw, Canon R5

CR preferences: ProPhoto RGB, 8 bit, 300 dpi, cache 50 GB

AdobeCC 2022

80% of my business is product photography. I just got the update to Photoshop CC 2022 yesterday 10/28. Today I am trying to edit photos I took for Rolex, and using the adjustment brush (as it's own mask or an add-on to "select subject" mask1 ) is like watching paint dry. A fast adjustment brush is critical for true sRGB white backgrounds in my product photog workflow considering I average 200 deliverables per week. Another problem is that cropping went back to a slow glide motion where the photo is moved around, rather than the much quicker crop lines being what moves. These 2 issues alone easily double the amount of time I have to spend editing each week.

*The adjustment brush works just fine in Lightroom, but I have my reasons for using Camera Raw instead.

What's the deal Adobe?

Report · Mar 29, 2022

I was able to cure ACR Healing Brush laging on my own system.

I had originally noticed the lag in use of the healing brush with my update to ACR 14.2. Previously it had worked fine on my base spec 2015 27" iMac. Reverting to ACR 13.1 cured the problem but gave up some advantages of the later ACR version. Turning off the Graphics Processer mostly eliminated this issue but caused some issues of it's own.

When I upgraded to a base spec M1 Studio I had hoped the issue would be resolved, but performence in this area was unchanged.

After much internet searching I found a very short mention on one of the Adobe forums from a poster who had solved his issue by changing to an Apple brand mouse. I wish I could credit the person originating the idea but have been unable to relocate the original post.

As I had been using a Razer 12 button gaming mouse for a number of years, and without trouble on earlier ACR version, it had never occured to me to look for a problem involving the mouse. I had an old wired Apple mouse in a drawer and found that the problem disappeared when using this cheap mouse.

As Razer had long ago abandoned suppport for Mac computer I had been using the excellent Stearmouse to program the buttons. I opened Steermouse and expeimented with the sliders which controled the mouse speed, accelleration and precision. As best I could tell it did nothing other than make the mouse run like crap.

I replaced the Razer 12 button with a Corasir 12 button and the same problem occured. However, the Corsair iCUE software used to probgram the Corsair mouse was much easier to use and I used the slider adjusting the precision to it's lowest setting. The problem no longer occurs. I also notice no difference in performance as a result of the reduction in mouse precision, but I'm not a gamer so perhaps something might be lost in that application.

While I have no idea if this would be of any benifite in your specific situation, if you are using a high quality/high precision mouse or some sort of gaming mouse I would suggest replacing it with some sort of crappy cheap mouse as an experiment to see if it offers any assistance.

Report · Apr 18, 2022

Fixed – I upgraded to Raw 14.3 last week.

Dramatically better performance for me on both my 2018 and M1 Macs for the adjustment brush too.

I really pushed it too – I turned on maxium feather and auto mask and scrubed the brush fast. The brush was nearly immediate – very tiny lag. I could hardly believe it.