Replying to myself. For people who just have random computer crashes in Photoshop like I. I've been working with Apple for 13 months now and a simple thing to try is giving photoshop permission to "control your computer" under accessibilty in system preferences. I tried this step about 6 days ago and I've not crashed yet. Weird, longest run to date since initial install. Maybe I will crash again in a few minutes, I keep waiting for it. PTSD I guess. Would be curious to see if anyone else does this process and stops the random crashing.
This issue almost destroyed me so I'm going around to the threads that I encountered while desperate for a solution to hopefully spare someone else this pain.
Big Sur is a nightmare with fonts for some reason. Either the text preview or the font cache in Photoshop (or both?) are the problem. I'm not sure which because I did the following steps at the same time and went from Photoshop crashing every minute to an actual usable application:
Disable type preview by going to Type > Font Preview Size and selecting None.
Also, one important thing I learned after hours of futile troubleshooting and scouring the internet for a solve:
When Photoshop crashes, if you get the dialogue box to send a crash report to Adobe, they're actually useful if you check the second box that says "Allow Adobe to suggest a solution or workaround". I never thought they would actually help because I've never gotten any additional info from sending Apple crash reports, but if there's a known issue, Adobe will actually provide a link to a help document right there - you don't even have to submit your email. That's how I got to the Font Troubleshooting link.
Just a little something I wish I'd known before I wasted hours and hours on this and blew a design presentation >_<
My poor old baby was struggling with the Big Sur update.
MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016)
2.9 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
16 GB Ram
Are you having issues outside of Photoshop? For general performance issues, you can try resetting PRAM/NVRAM & SMC and also check your Spotlight settings under System Preferences > Spotlight - the less you're searching, the better. Doing those things sped my system up considerably, but I've still been getting more pinwheels than usual since the update.
I also started a completely new admin user account which was a bit of a nuclear solution, but it got Photoshop working before the crash report docs helped me pinpoint the font issue.
hundreds of times. HUNDREDS!!!! I use photoshop 60+ hours a week.
Be Safe!
Sincerely,
Sandy
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I have a fairly fresh install of Big Sur on a new iMac with a fresh install of Photoshop 2021. I get unexpected crash as well. I have Adobe Creative Suite as well as Microsoft Office on my Mac. Nothing else.
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