P: Healing and Spot Healing Brush Lag

[Stephen Newport]

In most recent 2018 update, healing and spot healing brush have become much less responsive, sometimes taking multiple seconds after completion of stroke to affect the image.

Late 2016 Macbook, up to date OS and Software

I've done the regular things like turning off OpenCL and changing other performance options... no change.
GIF framerate is sped up 2x 

 RackMultipart2017101816638abxo-e6dcc86c-5f0a-49df-839e-84a8dc0a1a54-349345759.gif

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Why am I paying for this when it doesn't even work?? Why are we the testers? Don't you guys have a bunch of software developers and testers you pay to do this work? Essentially, the users who pay a monthly fee are testing your broken software. I don't see how this model does anyone any good. Lose-lose.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Not sure what I've done but I've managed to get it working. Turned off the smoothing, and also the laser line thingy in the brush tool. Reset workspace (annoying, lost all my keyboard shortcuts I'd created), but for now it's fine. I am finding ACR to be behaving weirdly and it's quite slow. hopefully there'll be a fix soon, although I'll wait for the rest of you to test those. ;D

[PixSolu]

Weirdly I'm in the same boat, after much changing of settings yesterday, and multiple restarts........... I've started it up today and the healing brush is working fine now. I'm not sure what fixed it in the end.
After many years working in Photoshop (since P.S 2) I have never experienced this level of 'rush to market untested' approach that we are currently getting with the CC updates. Adobe, you've got a lot of bugs to fix.

[P Moloney]

My 2c is that it doesn't happen immediately - with me it happens after a few minutes of retouching!
Keeping an eye on the smoothing box though
Peter

[dave131]

The fix Hannah illustrated doesn't seem possible. I can turn smoothing off, but the spot healing brush (and standard healing brush, which is also brutally slow) have nothing to do with smoothing.

Step 2 says, 

1. When spot healing tool is active, drag smoothing to 0% (Image 2).

This is physically impossible, as the Options panel doesn't display smoothing when the spot healing tool is active! In the photo Hannah shows, she is clearly on the standard brush, not the spot healing brush.

Am I missing something??

[dave131]

I should mention that in general I think this is a very good update. Path colors are a great, if long overdue, addition. And large brushes work much faster on large files. Copy-and-paste layers is helpful. I'd prefer not to downgrade...

[Stephen Newport]

Dave, 
It's ok, I think you're just misunderstanding the temporary solve. The bug seems to be caused by smoothing on the *brush tool.* So click on the brush tool, turn smoothing down to 0% in the tool bar and "off" in the brush panel, and healing should resume normal operation, or it will not screw up if you do that first when you first open photoshop.

[dave131]

I understand that (although how smoothing on the brush tool affects performance on the spot healing tool I don't quite get).

What I don't understand is in Hannah's order of operations, it tells the user to drag smoothing to 0% when spot healing tool is active. This is a seemingly impossible task.

I've tried this fix by just turning smoothing off on the brush tool and unfortunately I seem to be one of the ones who will need to wait for them to update PS.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

As a professional photographer who needs to have Photoshop as a business critial tool, I am totally sad about the latest healing brush lags. I have 5 MACs from 2011 to 2016 and all are having this bug. Also the update to MAC OS High Sierra did not bring any improvement. 
Please stop implementing unnecassary gimmicks as video help and concentrate to stability and reliability -please!
I went back to CC 2017 which works better on all machines.

Regards Marco 
https://www.glamourpixel.de/

[Stephen Newport]

I think she might have misspoke, turn smoothing off on the brush before you use the brush in a session, that should do it

[StephenJHutchinson]

"Disable the smoothing feature in your Brush Settings (Image 1)."

Great... easily done.

"When spot healing tool is active, drag smoothing to 0% (Image 2)."

How on earth do you do this? If the brush properties are open, you are using the BRUSH, and NOT the SPOT HEALING TOOL. If you then tap on the Spot Healing tool, the brush settings are disabled and there is NO SMOOTHING SLIDER in the spot healing brush to "drag to zero" as shown in "Image 2".

Can you please give alternative instructions which do work? Thanks in advance. 

[P Moloney]

I too seemed to sort out the smoothing and the healing brush now working (so far)
Also had really slow responses using ACR so after an online chat to adobe was able to revert to ACR 9.12.1 much happier now!
<https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/revert-to-earlier-version-of-acr>
Peter

[StephenJHutchinson]

Can you outline exactly how you sorted out the healing brush issue? The instructions given by the Adobe rep on these and other forums made no sense. Thanks in advance.

[Stephen Newport]

turn smoothing to 0% (top toolbar)
turn smoothing off in brush panel (I didn't have to do this part but some do apparently)

[P Moloney]

Hi Stephen,
I'll copy / paste what Stephen Newport says below...

The bug seems to be caused by smoothing on the *brush tool.* So click on the brush tool, turn smoothing down to 0% in the tool bar and "off" in the brush panel, and healing should resume normal operation, or it will not screw up if you do that first when you first open photoshop.

So forget about "healing" for the moment and go to the Brush tool - and set smoothing to 0% and in the brush presets, uncheck the smoothing box.

Hope this helps... really frustrated with this update - it is not fit for purpose, and I can't use Bridge because Web Galleries are gone!

I really can't but repeat that Adobe don't seem to relate to real professional photographers and retouchers - those who live off their work!
Peter

[StephenJHutchinson]

Thanks so much, although I had done that before, it seems that a restart was in order. Seems smooth as butter now and no more Program error messages yet...

[PixSolu]

Hi all, I'm still not entirely sure what change I made to get the Healing brush back to some form of usability, but from memory one of the things I tried was reverting to legacy brush presets... (along with the other things mentioned by others here). Just thought I'd mention it incase it has anything to do with the problem.
Although PS is a tad more usable now, it still has a bunch of other issues, and I'm finding the clone tool can sometimes hang, and it takes about 5-10 secs before I can continue.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Easy way to fix the issue - setting the smoothing to 0 must be followed by a restart of photoshop, at least on our systems: https://youtu.be/3_zSm3hlRhE

[armin_staudt]

great thanks!

[BoomeArt]

No guys, smoothing set to 0 and restarting Photoshop or whole computer does not help. After 3-5-7 minutes working in Photoshop Spot healing brush or Lasso Tool start freezing again.
So until this issue solved I've deleted CC2018 and come back to CC2017.

[bellevue scott]

me too. Healing brush is just completely broken, rendering 2018 useless. 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

That's bad news. Here the work around works perfectly and we're retouching images all day, every day, without issues. Anyway - let's hope Adobe gets this patched soon.

[basaski]

yes please fix this asap - very disruptive... thx

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Got a new update to PS today. Does this solve the healing brush problem, shall we go and install it? Anyone tried it already?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Problem solved with Nov 14, 2017 update