Paragraph & Character Styles SO SLOW!

[jumpyone]

When I first heard that Adobe was going to put in paragraph and character styles in CS6 I thought, "Finally! Awesome!"

But, now that I have it and am using it I can't believe they have failed so hard in it. Every time I make a change in the style panel this little spinning dot wheel comes up and spins for at least a minute while think about making the change I made. This performance is unacceptable and needs to be addressed immediately. It even spins when I try to turn off the Preview checkbox.

I am using a Mac running 10.6.x and 8GB of memory. I have a lot of fonts installed, but that should NOT be an issue. It isn't with any other application.

Is there a way to speed things up?

[joep94083698]

I too am running into this problem.  I'm using Photoshop CS6 creative cloud on a windows 7 machine running SP1 on a 1st gen Core i7 with 24 gigs of ram and a 512 gig system drive with plenty of space to spare for a swap file and trying to create a text style locks up my computer and causes it to crash. 

Yes I have a lot of fonts installed in my windows font folder however that has never caused a problem with any previous version of photoshop nor does it cause any issues when I'm creating text styles within Indesign.

Also I too am experiencing general hits in speed and performance as well.  Most are minor but they are seemingling everywhere and those little hangups add up to minutes and eventually hrs.    I'm not sure if it's due to the new interface or the fact that it's connected to the cloud or something else but for professionals time is money and as a rule professionals will always choose the tool that is the fastest and most reliable for their given task.  If a newer tool is unreliable or it takes longer to accomplish the same tasks it effectively nullifies any gains achieved and we're going to reach back to the tools that are more reliable.

I really like the idea of text styles in photoshop but it needs to be as streamlined and as fast as it is in Indesign.

Question for those of you having performance hits... are you using the 32 bit version or the 64 bit version?    I'm currently using the 64 bit version and I'm curious if 32 bit users are experiencing the same problems. 

[chirp88]

Yeah, I wouldn't hold your breath. It doesn't look like Adobe is even concerned with fixing these issues until maybe they release CS7.

[Noel Carboni]

I found something interesting today...  In an attempt to validate that I have no bad fonts, I ran Adobe's Font Test script.

Having run it, lo and behold I found many Paragraph Styles operations got about twice as fast.  Not instantaneous, but much better than before.

One of the options, which I left checked, was to Clear the Font Cache.  I don't know if this is what helped, but I suggest trying the Font Test script and see if it helps your performance:

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-fonts-photoshop-cs5.html#main_Solution_4__Use_the_F..._

-Noel

[Roman_Holba]

I already tried, it was here in the discussion earlier. Unfortunately, it did not help.

[joep94083698]

Yeah this is really frustrating to me. 

While I found a few things that helped (turning off the "use graphics card" option & limiting loaded fonts/clearing font cache) speed things up a little.  I still ran into slow performance that would lock up in the middle of simple tasks such as selecting and typing.

What gets me is that I installed all my software on a brand new freshly formated drive with a fresh updated install of Windows 7.  Usually when I do that things run smokin fast!  and while some things do, there are just too many parts that don't load properly.

To Noel's credit, he is doing everything he can to help us out but there is just a fundamental flaw in the way CS6's code runs.  Point blank we shouldn't have to turn of features within the software to get it to run correctly... It's like the difference between Windows Vista and Windows 7.  Windows 7 just worked flawlessly out of the box for the most part.  Windows Vista was a nightmare and never really worked out all of its bugs.   Adobe needs to refine CS6 like Windows did with their OS so that CS6.5 or whatever there next big update is will be faster and more reliable out of the box... or cloud.

Fortunately with the creative cloud I'll be able to get that upgrade without paying anything extra... but until then I'm going to be shelling out $50 a month for nothing because I'm going to have to roll back my software to CS3 just so I can complete my projects by their deadlines.  I just can't afford to waste time troubleshooting and debugging my Adobe Software when I have year end deadlines hammering me on a daily basis.

And there is nothing I can do about that $50/month because I commited to the cloud for a year... lets just hope they release an update or at least a bug fix soon so that I can use their software again... I would really love the new features in CS6 but it's just not worth it if I can't get my work done in a timely and reliable manner.

=/

[jumpyone]

Actually, TheMerryGambit, there is something you can do. You can call your credit card and say it's been stolen and you need a new card. Then cancel your cloud membership. They will cancel your current credit card and Adobe will not be able to bill you for next month or ever.

[joep94083698]

LOL well as tempting as that might be the sheer annoyance that would cause me would drive me nuts.  That being said there are other programs in the CS6 suite which do function fine for me though I use them a whole lot less than photoshop

[Noel Carboni]

TheMerryGambit, you're talking about rolling back to Photoshop CS3...  It didn't have Paragraph Styles or Character Styles, which is what this thread is about.

Do you have a more general text rendering slowness problem that's unrelated to Paragraph Styles (or Character Styles)?

If so, maybe that would be worth starting a separate thread?  There may be specific things that can be done to fix or work around it on your particular system.  I honestly don't see any slowness with just plain text.

If the problems you're seeing are strictly with the new Paragraph Styles or Character Styles features, I might suggest doing text the way you did it in Photoshop CS3, and avoiding the specific feature that's got the slowdowns.

-Noel

[jumpyone]

CS6 in general is slower than previous versions, for jsut about everything, despite the so-called Mercury Graphics Engine.

Another thing that has not been fixed and is extremely annoying is having to turn off layer thumbnails so that Photoshop doesn't try to redraw them every time I nudge with the arrow keys. One nudge...spinning wheel, Another nudge...spinning wheel. Turn off layer thumbnails, no spinning wheel.

Adobe needs to get these things fixed.

[Noel Carboni]

That seems to depend on the system, jumpyone.  It's not true everywhere.

I have a number of different versions installed on the very same (fairly powerful) workstation, and I've done head to head comparisons with a stopwatch.  To say that Photoshop CS6 is slower at just about everything is simply untrue in my case.  I actually find Photoshop CS6 incrementally faster at most things, a LOT faster at others (e.g., those that have been ported to GPU operation, like Liquify).

As an example, I just timed opening a 1.2 gigabyte 9909 x 6501 x 16 bits/channel x 80+ layers PSD document by dragging it to my desktop Photoshop icons, cold-starting Photoshop in the process:

• Photoshop CS5:  40.6 seconds
• Photoshop CS6:  36.0 seconds

Image Rotation of that same bit document 10 degrees takes:

• Photoshop CS5:  44.8 seconds
• Photoshop CS6:  25.4 seconds

Photoshop CS6 even runs the popular online Photoshop benchmarks consistently faster for me than prior versions.

But I'm on a PC (Windows 7) - as I mentioned above, I sense that Mac users don't seem to be finding things quite as happy.

Out of curiosity, what size is the document you're editing that causes spinning wheel-slowness when nudging?  There was a huge image put up by a forum member over on Photoshop.com with which I could not reproduce the egregious slowdown they were seeing.  I'd like to understand whether this is an architecture-specific issue, or maybe even system-specific.

-Noel

[joep94083698]

Noel,

I'm Running a Windows 7 system and for some reason I'm having quite a few performance issues.  Photoshop is the main culprit but I'm noticing them accross the CS suite.  Some things will load faster such as loading a file and starting up photoshop etc.  But then I'll go to use the marquee tool or the text tool and all of a sudden Photoshop will lock up or pause for a while before responding.   It's not terribly consistent either. 

My GPU acceleration didn't work with photoshop even though I just downloaded the latest graphic drivers from Nvidia.  I have a sneaking suspicion this is because I'm using a video card that doesn't employ the "cuda cores" technology and hence isn't pathed in such a way that meshes well with CS6's graphic acceleration.

I turned off GPU acceleration and things started working faster. 

Now we could blame it on our individual system differences and talk about all the various things we could turn off or customize or drivers we could reinstall in each of our individual systems to try to make CS6 run faster and more reliably but the bottom line is we shouldn't have to do that.  It's making excuses for Adobe when really they should be making this software run as reliably as possible on as many systems/platforms as possible.  We've never had these system compatibility issues in previous releases of CS (at least I havent) so why should it be any different now?

While I might not have liked some of the things that Adobe change in previous iterations I've never had basic performance issues or system incompatibility issues with the software such as I have experienced with this latest release.   While I applaud their drive to include new and innovative technologies and features into their software, their first priority should always be smooth performance and reliability.  No new bell or whistle or performance gain in one area is ever going to outweigh stability of the entire software package.

[Noel Carboni]

Well, I can't argue with the general sentiment that "it should work well out of the box".

That said, there's theory then there's reality.  It's really up to us to create an integrated computer system that runs what we need well.  Just like some tires give you better grip and safety for your car, some parts work better than others.

What video card do you have, specifically?  Is it a desktop system where the card could be changed easily?  Is there a reason you want to keep this card?

I don't mean to spend your money, but if this video card is getting in your way you should know a new video card that will run Photoshop VERY nicely is only about $100 nowadays. 

It seems a bit silly to live with ongoing problems with $700 software if there's not a compelling reason you're keeping your current video card.  Even though they might occasionally have a driver glitch, I much prefer ATI cards myself.  Hudechrome, who posts here, has an ATI Radeon 7750, and says it works very well.  I personally use a little more expensive model, a 7850, which I can say works quite fine with Photoshop with all the Advanced modes turned on.

-Noel

[marquizzo1]

Dear Adobe:

Please look into this issue. I was excited to try out this new feature, but ended up getting frustrated after only five minutes. Changing the font color is the worst, because it has to think for 15 seconds every time I add a number. If I have to type "250" to change my hue, that's 45 seconds of wait time!!!

It's been months since this problem was first brought up, I hope a solution is coming soon.

[joep94083698]

I have a decent video card.  It's an NVidia GeForce 9800 with 1gb of memory on the card but it's still a 2 year old card.  It doesn't have the "cuda core" technology which most newer cards use.  Still if Adobe is banking on us using cuda capable cards then they are short changing a lot of people.

I have a sneaking suspicion that they have indeed coded CS6 to rely a bit on the latest technology because certain tasks run faster in CS6 but others it just seems to lag on... Its like sprinting at full speed then all of a sudden you feel like you're trying to run through molassas.   Unfortunately the lag points occur often enough that it sabotages my workflow and causes too many uneccessary delays.  Obviously the text tool, text styles and paragraph styles are big culprits in this but I even had issues using the marquee tool once... so I think there is just a larger inherent problem underneath.   Maybe it's relying on cutting edge hardware or maybe there is a bunch of inefficent/error generating code in the new elements of the software which are ignored/compensated for by different hardware... either way I feel that the software should be streamlined to run smoothly on a wider variety of machines.

As a web designer I'm constantly having to make every website I create to be compatible with not only the latest browsers/technology but to also have those websites degrade gracefully if viewed by older browsers/computers.  Sometimes this requires me sacrificing certain features or putting in the extra time/effort in order to make the website fully compatible....  If I'm held to that standard then why isn't Adobe? 

I am all for pushing the envelope and developing new and innovative tools for the suite but if those tools rely on specific hardware to run then Adobe needs to A) Be up front and notify us this B) specify clearly which technologies rely on said hardware and C) have controls to turn off those options to gracefully degrade the software's capabilities for older computers.

While my computer is 2 years old I bought top of the line hardware back when I built it.  It's still a core i7 with 24 gigs of ram and while not as fast as the latest tech out there it's by no means over the hill lol.

[Noel Carboni]

TheMerryGambit wrote:

if Adobe is banking on us using cuda capable cards

Photoshop CS6 and the Mercury Graphics Engine does not use any part of Cuda as far as I know.  I certainly don't have Cuda on my ATI card.

You keep making general statements based on YOUR experience as though they're plain and simple fact, and you keep making statements that Adobe hasn't anticipated your particular needs nor working environment.  Yet you've given no indication that you've tried to diagnose the specifics of the problems nor whether you have tried reconfiguring around them.

Your system sounds like a decent one, and you really shouldn't be sensing slowdowns - I agree.  I believe you when you say that you're running into things that seem slow, but if other people aren't then you have specific system problems.  We can talk about them (start a new thread!), and maybe we can even discover things that make them go away, or you can just continue to rant.  Only one of these things chances making life better for you.

-Noel

[jumpyone]

Noel, this thread is full of people saying it's slow. It's mostly the type stuff. I am using CS6 on a 2011 27-inch iMac with an AMD Radeon HD with 512MB card and 8GB memory. These issues I've descibed persist on 5 other iMacs here that are from 2009-2011. I don't mind so much the other little annoyances that have been described, but the type styles are particularly terrible and Adobe needs to address them, as they are a tauted feature of CS6 and one of the main reasons we upgraded here where I work.

[Noel Carboni]

This thread is about Paragraph Styles.

I have verified that the Paragraph Styles feature seems sluggish myself, on my system.  I believe that to be a specific problem, though I have heard (from one person on another forum) from someone who does not see the sluggishness, so I'm not above believing it could be a problem on my specific system and those of others.  We're not seeing a lot of "it's not slow for me" responses, so it may well be a quite general problem.

TheMerryGambit is specifically trying to say other things are slow, having nothing to do with Paragraph Styles, and the functions he's mentioned stalling simply aren't stalling on every system.  Those are worthy of another thread.

You can't generalize that which you do not understand.  With computers and software problems it's all about nailing down the specifics.

-Noel

[joep94083698]

TheMerryGambit is specifically trying to say other things are slow, having nothing to do with Paragraph Styles

Hello Noel,

I agree that to truly debug something properly you do need to stay specific and logically break it a apart.  I was starting to get a little bit general there out of frustration.

However I think that the core of the problem might not necessarily be solely caused by the paragraph/text styles functionality. 

One thing I noticed was that there is a lag anytime I switch to and from the text tool.  Sometimes it's there... sometimes its not.  Hence my previous comment about the marquee tool.   I really have been noticing lag fairly consitently when I switch from editing text to moving it around.  Nothing as bad as the text styles, but that leads me to believe there is a new process Photoshop is using to handle even basic text editing. This makes sense as they probably had to rewrite how they processed fonts in order to be able to handle the additional functionality of paragraph styles, text styles, etc.  I assume this is the case as my previous versions of photoshop had no problems dealing with fonts at all, especially considering the amount of RAM I have available to keep my fonts loaded in memory.

Going back to the text styles specifically, one thing I noticed as I was setting various attributes, was that after I clicked on the font size or any of the other drop down menus, they would stay on screen and flicker as if I was rapidly clicking the mouse.  This behavior would continue for a good while and I can't select anything else while it's having it's little flicker fit.   That is the same kind of behavior you see when a program is sending multiple requests of the same command to itself, over and over, hence why I keep thinking there might be extraneous code that is slowing photoshop down. 

I also noticed a few other things. 

1)  When you create a new text style it scans every single text layer in your document and shoots up a popup window for every single layer asking something along the lines of "This may change your layout, are you sure you want to do this?"  I noticed no change in my document after telling it to continue but then it proceeded to throw up this warning for every single text layer in my document... This is horribly redundant and still took a long time to go through even after I checked of the "same for all" box.  I don't think indesign does this so I'm not sure why they are choosing to do it in photoshop for as far as I can tell it didn't seem to matter.  If they are running checks like this every single time you make a change or set an attribute then that would explain the flickering noted above.

2)  When you try to define a font in the text style window you can't simply type in the name of your font and have it pop up.  Instead when I type I get a loud error beep and it defaults to the top font on the list.  Whereas when I use the main text tool directly, I am able to type in the font I want and have it selected without having to scroll to it.

3) There are no anti aliasing options anywhere in the font attributes.  A little thing but one that seemed out of place considering its a basic necessity for any web developer and the fact that anti-aliasing is one of the default font options that is in the character panel.

These 3 things lead me to believe that there are 2 seperate processes that adobe is  using to handle fonts within photoshop. If that is the case then it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that there are redundancies and conflicts between the two processes and that those redundancies and conflicts both cause errors and fill up memory with redundant processes uneccesarily which in turn effects performance.   People with newer hardware might not be experiencing these issues as badly as the power of their newer equipment is able to mask the performance hit.

Obviously this last bit is just conjecture on my part but all solutions start as theories and you gotta start somewhere lol.

Anyway I hope that helps narrow in on this issue a little more.

[marquizzo1]

I agree with everything The Merry Gambit just said. I also get the feeling that the Type tool behaves slightly different than it did in CS5. I just upgraded from CS5 two days ago, so I've been noticing peculiar changes. For example, the first time I use the type tool after opening PS, there's a lag. Today I even saw a dialog box that reads "Loading Type Tool", which was the first time I've ever seen a tool needing to load individually. After the first use, however, it picks up its normal speed.

That being said, I found a quick workaround to the lag for character styles:
1. Assign character styles to all your text. All headers or captions, for instance.

2. Select a type object with your type tool as usual.

3. Change its attributes as you did before CS6: at the top of the PS window. You'll notice that this character style will get a + after it ("captions+" for example).

4. Click the check mark at the bottom of "Character Styles" panel. This should redefine that character style to match the attributes you just modified.

5. All your captions should now adhere to the new style.

Instead of waiting for multiple delays, this method will only make you wait for one delay.

[joep94083698]

Thanks for the tip Marquizzo... although I don't think that will help in my immediate situation.  I'm currently working on a photoshop file with over 1450 layers... and well over half of those are text layers so I'll probably just suffer through this one or use CS3 if push comes to shove lol.

I Did however test out the text styles on both a new file and the monster file I'm working on.

The same flickering errors and delays do occur in both but the delays are less and lag from switching tools doesn't really happen for the most part in the simple file.

In my large project file they are VERY notciable to the point of being dabilitating and having to walk away or switch tasks.  Again this didn't happen even in the age old cs3 which is where you expect it would happen lol.  So there has to be something different in the way things are being handled in CS6.   CS3 should not be out performing CS6 no matter what the benchmark or hardware setup is.

[joep94083698]

Hey Jumpyone,

I just wanted to give you an update on my performance.  Like you I was running a fairly good video card (an nvidia gt9800 with 1gig of ram)  but as you heard from my posts like you I was having nasty lag issues in CS6

As I said in my above post I ended up getting a new video card + a new hard drive and now CS6 runs very smoothly.

I think the new CS6 line is just much more hardware intensive than previous versions.  This is unfortunate for businesses that aren't able to upgrade their computers to the latest gen hardware but I figured I would pass on my findings so that you at least have a potential solution that you could try.

[Noel Carboni]

Thank you for following-up with what helped you, Gambit.  Indeed as you have seen, Photoshop is pretty intensive with the storage subsystem.  Just opening Photoshop causes temporary files of most of a gigabyte to be created.

I know it's still quite expensive by comparison to spinning HDDs, but anyone wanting to really put Photoshop performance into a new realm should consider upgrading to SSD stroage.  And not just a little of it, but a complete switchover (e.g., via RAID).  I did this early this year, around the time of the release of Photoshop CS6, and a day doesn't go by still that my system doesn't surprise and amaze me with its responsiveness.

-Noel

[chirp88]

That is interesting, but one should not have to upgrade a video card and hard drive on a one year old computer just to get Photoshop to run properly. This is an issue that Adobe needs to fix. No where in the software requirements does it say you need a specific video card to run Photoshop. Only that is should have a minimum of 256MB. Why would anyone upgrade a video card and hard drive just to get software that they paid hundreds of dollars for? Especially when their current computer is well within recommended tech specs to be able to be able to run it?

If it's a video card issue, then Adobe needs to do something to correct that issue. Undoubtedly, based on earlier bugs in other versions of Photoshop and other Adobe programs, we will probably have to wait until CS7 comes out for any bug fixes like this.

[Noel Carboni]

Chirp, I think you may be responding in context to something different than what TheMerryGambit is talking about. There appears to be a very specific problem with the slowness of the Paragraph Styles functionality, which I agree is a problem. However, comments about the general speed of Photoshop CS6 and those specific to Paragraph Styles need to be qualified.

Regarding TheMerryGambit replacing his hard drive, that was to correct a specific failure, as far as I can see.

TheMerryGambit found that an older (4 years) video card is falling out of date for use with the state of the art graphics editing software.  A 9800GT isn't bad, but a 560 Ti is literally over 3 times faster.

I don't mean to be a pain, but let me take a bit of a devils-advocate position here, regarding Photoshop CS6 being more GPU-intensive in general than its predecessors...

Other than a new version of graphics-intensive software running too slowly or sub-optimally, what would YOU think would signal the need to buy a better, more modern video card?  Would you think twice about buying a new video card to support the latest shoot-em-up game that wasn't giving the FPS performance you felt you needed?

We're not talking break the bank prices, either.  A right nice powerful new video card costs less than the least expensive Photoshop (Perpetual License) upgrade.

-Noel

[joep94083698]

@ Chirp88,

I am in full agreement with you.  I believe that companies should always strive to make their software as compatible and as efficient as possible.  CS6 SHOULD work straight out of the box on any system that's 4 - 5 years old or newer in my opinion. 

Unfortunately it seems that some of the new features of CS6, such as the paragraph/character styles aren't as compatible as they should be, or aren't coded as efficiently as the could be and as a result seem to require newer hardware to function properly.   As I stated in one of my previous posts it seems like photoshop is making multiple repeated calls to your computers fonts directory every time you open an attribute menu with the character styles.  This to me is a sign of inefficient code as when you manually set text attributes via the text tool you can tell it functions using a different set of processes as you can type in the name of your font within the font drop down menu and it will jump to that font as well as not making the repeat calls that cause the menu to flicker.   In the character styles attribute menus you can't type in the name of your font and nearly every drop down menu flickers for a couple of seconds before allowing you to select an option (at least that's how it was on my system before upgrading).  Hence there is definitely a different set of processes being utilized in the styles panels.  I think it's inefficient because the same styling functionality in inDesign works flawlessly.  So I think that someone dropped the ball here when implementing the same functionality into photoshop.

I just wanted to post my results so that if someone was experiencing the same slow performance and was looking for an excuse to upgrade that I was able to get a significant performance boost by upgrading my hardware.  Once I added the higher end video card GPU all of the menu flickering disappeared within the character & paragraph styles menu.  My thought process on this is that the GPU and/or my newer hard drive is able to process those multiple character style attribute requests fast enough so as to not negatively effect performance.

I know its not an ideal solution but at least it's a POTENTIAL solution and hey... its christmas time.  What better time of year to get a good deal on new hardware and get a tax write off to boot right?