P: brush cursors not working on 2011 Mac/MacBook Air (OS X 10.7.x Lion)

[TheRemnant]

I'm running CS5 version 12.0.4 on a 2011 MacBook Air and the brushes do not work when resized between approx 300 - 650 in size. I don't know if this is a bug but the issue occurs in Lightroom as well. Please advise when an update will be issued to fix this. The software is pretty much useless to me with this issue affecting it.

[Lee_Jay]

What does "do not work" mean specifically?

[TheRemnant]

When you increase the brush size to 300 to 650, the brush itself disappears. It turns back into regular mouse icon that does not even align with the strokes that you make on the screen.

[nickname321]

same here- with both, LR3 and PS CS5 on a MBA 2011 (11"). Is it Lion or anything MBA specific?? No clue. I un-/ re-istalled various apps, activated/ deactivated preferences related to display resolution, trackpad, mouse, pointer etc. without any success of changing the brush behaviour back to normal.
Without having the chance to reinstall the whole OS- I wait for the USB-stick version of Lion- I feel stuck...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

So it's just not displaying the cursor correctly? Ok, that's a bug in the video card driver, and Apple will have to fix the driver. Hopefully that's specific to the MacBook Air.

[TheRemnant]

Exactly Chris. The brush cursor just disappears at different sizes. I hope they hurry because it isn't usable as is.

[nickname321]

I too suspected the video card driver but the brush in Illustrator works fine. In LR and PS, the ouline of the brush tip stays the same for a range of sizes, resulting in an diagonal offset of the painted stroke to the outline.

[TheRemnant]

Is Apple quick about fixing this sort of thing? I just got the new Air and I love it other than this issue but it will really hinder my design work not being able to use brushes.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Photoshop and Lightroom use the Cocoa APIs, but not exactly the same code for cursors. Yeah, this is a video driver bug. There's no way both programs would have the same bug.

Apple is sometimes quick, and sometimes not. The more customers tell Apple about the problem and ask for a fix, the higher priority they'll put on it.

[TheRemnant]

Now I'm a bit confused. I took it into the Apple Store today and reported the issue with them at the Genius Bar. They seem to think it is an issue with compatibility with Lion rather than their hardware drivers. Could this actually be the case? I'd consider this good news because I have no problem wiping this thing out and downgrading to Snow Leopard. I'm not going to do it if it will be a waste of time though. What do you think?

[TheRemnant]

Well scratch that idea. Apparently the new Macbook Air's require Lion to support the hardware. This is really frustrating! If it is truly an OS compatibility issue, can't a software update fix it?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Yes, Apple can fix it with a software update. But the bug is somewhere inside their video drivers, and we can't fix it from the application side.

[nickname321]

the 'genius people' are useless- last time when I was investigating whether it would be possible to 'downgrade' back to SL (in my opinion rather an upgrade, experiencing the mess in Lion) with my new MBA 2011, they had no clue that there might be issues of missing drivers for thunderbolt etc..., so yes, scratch this idea- we are stuck with beautiful Lion!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Ligthroom 3.4, MacBook Air 13" 2011, Mac OS X Lion

The brush tool (shortcut k) does not work. Symptoms:
- the cursor changes to the zoom in cursor, instead of the brush cursor. The erase brush cursor is the zoom out cursor.
- the brush does not paint where the cursor is display, but further down and further right.
- the cursor jumps all over the place making the feature unusable.
- the issue still exist when using a mouse instead of the trackpad.
- works well on an iMac using a trackpad

[nickname321]

Ok, the OS update today (10.7.1) didn't take care of that yet...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

similar problem in the liquify filter...wonder if apple did any test with Adobe CS before major system "upgrade". The problem is just too obvious that you can't avoid seeing it.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

I think it's fairly unlikely that Apple do any serious testing with third party software. And Adobe's options are fairly limited, even with access to beta OS builds, as things often change between Apple's betas and final releases.

Hopefully Apple will take care of their bug soon, but it may be worth making some noise on Apple's own forums in the meantime.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

With respect you all have it around the wrong way. Adobe should be making sure Photoshop works with Lion. If it does't it's likely that Adobe has done some funky things in the programming and Apple is just forcing Adobe to comply.

BTW I have the same cursor issue and really need it resolved.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Well, I'm pretty sure you've never written software before.

Adobe made sure that Lightroom and Photoshop worked with the available versions of the OS when their software shipped. Adobe made sure that they worked with the APIs published by Apple. Adobe did everything by the book. Adobe couldn't guess that somewhere years later that Apple would break the video driver code. That's like buying a new car and guessing exactly when and how you'll get a flat tire 2 years later.

Apple made a mistake in Lion for some video cards/GPUs. And it turns out that Apple has a lot of mistakes in their GPU driver code -- different mistakes on several different GPUs. Adobe can't easily work around those. Apple has to fix the mistake in their code.

Now, Adobe did test Photoshop and Lightroom with Lion. But could Adobe guess that Apple would have different bugs on all sorts of different hardware configurations? Probably not. And there are too many possible combinations to test them all completely. Adobe reported a lot of bugs to Apple during the Lion beta test phase, and Apple fixed many of those before shipping Lion. But Apple doesn't write perfect software. Apple does have bugs in their OS, and Apple needs to fix those bugs so that all software will work correctly.

We're documenting the cursor issue (and several other graphics driver bugs) so Apple can fix it. It's obvious enough that Apple probably already has a couple of similar reports and might already be working on a fix.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hello Chris- Your first comment is gratuitous and easy to ignore. You make some good points in the rest of the message. However, my main point was simply to say that the "blame" for this problem can't be just one-sided. Do you really think Apple is writes the video drivers when the hardware comes from third-party vendors like AMD/ATI and Intel?

It cannot be good for Adobe to have a flagship program like Photoshop not work properly on the Mac platform so the company should be highly motivated to get it right, which they have not. Lion has been seeded for a long while and there aren't actually many types of video hardware Apple uses in their current line-up (check their web site). How hard can this be for two big companies to solve?

I don't care who is to blame. I just want a fix for this problem as soon as possible. If this doesn't happen I will be looking for alternative image editing software that works with Lion.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

The first comment is important. You really don't know programming, how OS vendors establish and support APIs, how OS vendors make mistakes, how OS vendors must fix their mistakes, etc. You seem to have some mistaken impression that application authors have to change their code every time the OS coders make mistakes. That would be like expecting Toyota to change the design of their cars for every new pothole in the road.

AMD/NVidia/Intel give Apple some video driver code, which Apple further modifies and integrates. Apple is also responsible for the APIs that call into the driver code and can cause issues like this one. Even if the bug was in the GPU makers code, it ships with the OS, and Apple is responsible for that.

As far as everyone can tell, Adobe got the code right. But Apple made a (more than one) mistake in Lion and needs to fix it. I don't know how hard this is for Apple to fix, because I don't have their code to find the cause of the bug. But I do know that it would take Adobe a huge amount of work to bypass the OS driven cursor.

We are trying to work with Apple to get this, and many other, Lion bugs fixed as soon as possible. But we cannot set Apple's priorities, and we cannot fix Apple's code for them. If you want bugs in MacOS fixed sooner, please let Apple know that you want them to fix the bugs sooner.

[David Dobish]

I have reported this issue to Apple. If/When I hear anything from Apple that I can share I will update this list.

[nickname321]

Guys! Today I just added a second external display to my setup (via USB) and the brushes/ eraser etc work again in both PS and LR!! I can see that at the critical values the ghost ouline of the brush jitters a little bit but keeps centred and keeps the right size!! Maybe the second external display slows down the update/ refresh rate or something similar... I hope that helps in fixing what was the reason in first place for that misbehaving brush outline...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I purchased a new MacBook Air (with Lion) two weeks ago. I transferred all my Applications (including PSCS5) from my iMac to the Air, using Migration Assistant.

I’ve encountered a nasty problem with CS5’s brush. The usual circle cursor abruptly switches to an Apple Arrow cursor and the pixels affected by the brush action are not at the arrow’s tip, but off to the right and down.

I’ve failed to find a cure.

I un-installed the Wacom Tablet Driver, ran Disk Utility to repair disk permissions. Then un-installed CS5, then re-installed. Cursor adamantly switches from circle to arrow.
Am I doomed ?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Exactly the same problem, very tedious... try switching to the smaller brush size somehow bring back the circle.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I am also having this problem. In my case, it happens in CS5 (photoshop especially) and also in Apple's Aperture—although it's the smaller brush cursors that cause a problem. All my brushes smaller than 82 pixels (81 pixels and below) have this problem. The cursor is offset from where it applies the effect and it does not show it's bounding circle. Driving me nuts!

Happens on my 13" i7 Macbook Air. It does not happen on my 2010 Macbook Pro.