Mouse/Cursor captures off-canvas clicks (occasional/not-reproducible/restart necessary)
- January 15, 2023
- 5 replies
- 2101 views
- Photoshop CC version: 24.1.0 (but has been happening off-and-on for the past couple years or so)
- Platform: Windows 10 Pro, build 19045.2486
- Wacom tablet software version: 6.4.1-2 (but issue happens with the mouse or tablet, it doesn't seem to matter.)
DISCLAIMER: I keep trying to figure out how to reproduce this problem, and so far I just can't seem to figure out what causes it. It's been happening sporatically for the past couple years and restarting Photoshop seems to be the only way to fix it. Today I finally had the extra time to record a video of the problem happening so I can report it as a bug here.
Every once in a while (maybe once a week or so???) my Photoshop will start behaving funny with my mouse movements. It will behave eratically when I put it on the canvas and start drawing. It drives me crazy because I can't work with it like this and I'm forced to save my progress and restart the app...which is SUPER frustrating because I work with REALLY large files that I normally merge layers before saving. But instead of the normal 200MB file size I'd normally have, I have to save a 2-4GB file because I'm not done with it.
I'm attaching a video I made that demonstrates the problem with some annotations from me.
Essentially, it looks like Photoshop is capturing mouse clicks (and mouse movement while clicking, i.e. drawing/panning/scrolling/etc) when you click anywhere that is not the current canvas. This can be UI elements in Photoshop (toolbar buttons, layers, menus, navigator, etc) or clicks in a different application (I demonstrate this using MS Paint in my video). When you return to your PS canvas and click with your mouse (or put your pen down on your tablet) all of those cached mouse movements are applied to your canvas prior to the stroke you're applying. As long as you are clicking in your canvas or moving your mouse outside the app without clicking your mouse, you're fine. It's the strangest thing and is 100% maddening!
I demonstrate in the video that the problem does not exist in MS Paint, which suggests to me that it's not a system issue because the caching only seems to happen within Photoshop.
I wish I had steps I could give to cause this to happen deliberately, but it seems really random and sporatic. Here's a quick summary of what I can confirm is happening when this occurs:
- I have only noticed the problem happening in Photoshop itself
- Restarting the application solves the problem
- Clicking and dragging/drawing (mouse movement while the left mouse button is pressed) with the canvas active are not cached.
- Mouse movement that does not involve a mouse button press are not cached.
- Clicking and dragging/drawing anywhere other than the canvas--including other applications--will be cached.
- When the cache is rendered on your canvas, dragging/drawing are treated as actual strokes on your canvas, while mouse clicks with no movement are treated as if you are performing the click with the SHIFT key pressed, causing both click points to be connected in a straight line.
- When this happens, every tool in Photoshop behaves this way including Healing, Cloning, Blur, etc.
I'm happy to help Adobe devs with any additional information needed to figure out what's going on with this.
Thank you for looking into it!
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