Photoshop CC brushes extremely laggy with Wacom Intuos Pro!

[EzraEkman]

I've been messing around with digital painting on an iPad for a while, and just bought a Wacom Intuos Pro (medium) so I could do so on my Macs.  I immediately noticed input lag from the Intuos, so started to do some testing.  It doesn't appear to be the tablet.  The same lag exists in Photoshop when using the Mac's trackpad, but the problem disappears entirely when I move into Corel Painter, trackpad or Intuos.  Some lag exists in Illustrator, but not nearly as bad as Photoshop - Photoshop CC really seems to be the culprit.

I've uploaded a video (from my iPad; sorry for the quality) of this behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwR76V-hmLU

Any thoughts?  Calling Adobe first resulted in finger-pointing to Wacom (quickly squelched when I pointed out the same problem existed when using the trackpad), and then sending me a link to a 5-year-old Adobe Forum post that's for Photoshop CS4 and Wacom Intuos 4 tablets - that's 3 versions back for Photoshop and 2 versions back for the tablet.  (Of course, the solutions present in that post no longer apply.)  Here's the link, for anyone interested: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3709366

Any thoughts?  Painter seems nice, but I'd really like to be able to do digital painting in Photoshop as well.  This issue makes that quite a bit more difficult.

[Herbert2001]

Yes, I agree - for me "normal" with opencl seems to give me the best performance,

But then again, I work on a windows machine and an AMD7970 3GB with 48GB ram.

The solid state drive raid on a pci card also helps

[EzraEkman]

Okay... responses to suggestions in order:

Frank Heller: Unfortunately, I'm not seeing a significant difference when changing the Tip Double Click Distance.

Herbert2001: Turning off acceleration does not appear to make a difference with the Intuos.  I have tried all three Drawing Modes: Basic, Normal, and Advanced.  I've tried disabling Use Graphics Processor to Accelerate Computation.

Interestingly, further testing indicates that this delay is reduced DRAMATICALLY when I draw lightly, as opposed to applying heavy pressure.  It is much more responsive with a light touch.

[Herbert2001]

Your hardware suggests you should be able to draw smoothly at the resolution you posted earlier - does that effect appear in Painter too (applying heavy pressure)?

You might want to try Clip Studio's trial to get a "third opinion", merely as a test for comparison purposes. http://www.clipstudio.net/en/

[EzraEkman]

Trevor: My lines are actually pretty smooth; it's the amount of time Photoshop takes to display them on the screen that's the problem.  (Upwards of 3.5 seconds.)

Herbert: I'll download Clip Studio and give it a shot.

[Frank Heller]

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing a significant difference when changing the Tip Double Click Distance.

Sorry that didn't help much. Did for me on PSCS6. I'm using an Intuos5 Medium with Driver v633-3 on 10.6.8 though. There seem to be a number of issues out there depending on PS version, Intuos model & driver and Mac OS. What exactly are your specs? That info might be helpful.

[EzraEkman]

Frank: No worries.  I'm using Photoshop Creative Cloud (14.2.1 x64) under Mac OS X 10.9.2 (Mavericks).  The Wacom driver is v6.3.7-3.  The hardwars is an Intuos Pro (medium) on a Late 2013 2.6GHz Intel Core i7 MacBook Pro 15" with 16GB RAM, a 1TB solid state drive, and the NVIDEIA GeForce GT 750M 2GB graphics chip.

[Herbert2001]

In Photoshop, in the performance tab.

Unfortunately, you will lose the option to rotate the canvas.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Herbert2001 wrote:

Unfortunately, you will lose the option to rotate the canvas.

This came up in another thread recently, where Dag was talking about banding with ProPhoto RGB with GPU Acceleration in Advanced mode.  It was mentioned that putting it in Basic mode would disable canvas rotation, but it doesn't.  But unchecking GPU acceleration completely no doubt does.

So it might be that the drawing benefita you spoke also work in Basic mode, or it might not.  Personally I couldn't manage without canvas rotation now, so I would put up with stylus jitter.  Plus I use Lazy Nezumi constantly, which for $20 gives you silky smooth lines and curves, plus all sorts of other tricks.

[Herbert2001]

Trevor Dennis wrote:

So it might be that the drawing benefita you spoke also work in Basic mode, or it might not.  Personally I couldn't manage without canvas rotation now, so I would put up with stylus jitter.  Plus I use Lazy Nezumi constantly, which for $20 gives you silky smooth lines and curves, plus all sorts of other tricks.

Yes, Lazy Nezumi is nice - seeing that type of functionality is built into most other drawing apps (Krita, Photoline beta, Gimp, Clip Studio/Manga Studio) I would have expected the Photoshop team to come forward with a similar option by now.

Drawing on a larger canvas with a small brush when zoomed out gives results in some pretty ugly looking wobbly strokes in Photoshop, which does not happen in the other apps I mentioned. Unless Lazy Nezumi is active. So this type of feature is sort-of essential.

[EzraEkman]

Alas!  Lazy Nezumi appears to be Windows-only.  I'll have to see if there's another solution.

[Herbert2001]

EzraEkman wrote:

Alas!  Lazy Nezumi appears to be Windows-only.  I'll have to see if there's another solution.

When you test Clip Studio Paint, turn on the "stabilizer" one your left in the tool properties - that's more or less similar to Lazy Nezumi.

That's a real shame it is unavailable for mac, btw.

[JJMack]

EzraEkman wrote:

The files in question are 3840x2400 pixels (at 144 dpi due to that being the MacBook Pro's native resolution).  I went with that size simply because it was the highest resolution of which the MacBook Pro is capable, and I wanted to create something that, when displayed full-screen, was at 100%.  (For sake of ease and performance.)  This is on a Late 2013 2.6GHz Intel Core i7 MacBook Pro 15" with 16GB RAM, a 1TB solid state drive, and the NVIDEIA GeForce GT 750M 2GB graphics chip.

You MacBook Pro 15" Retina display does not have as many pixels as your using.  It I believe the MacBoop Pro 15" retina display has 2560x1500 pixels a 16:10 aspect ratio and something like 4Mpixels

You using 9MP if you retina display could display that many pixels its 15" size would make its resolution 301 DPI of PPI  which ever term suits you.  Your Wacom tablet has a much higher resolution of 5080 LPI.  You brush stroke was quite long and fast,  I do not know are what data rate the wacom tablet  transmits date through the device driver or if the usb and wireless connections have the same data dates.  If you zoom out on you image so the 9MP canvas is rendered on screen. Photoshop is working on twice an many pixels then can be displayed on your retina display and scaling the result in real time.  Photoshop  does not seem to work on the scaled down image being displayed  and do the scaling to the full size canvas  as a background task.  If you editing in 16Bit color mode that means 6 bytes of data per pixel. so Photoshop is dealing with 54Mbytes of data for your image's composite rendering which is then scaled down for display on your 4MP display.

[EzraEkman]

JJMack:

I'm aware that the normally-stated resolution of the MBP is lower.  However, the resolution I gave is that of a screenshot I took precisely to determine what resolution I should be using.  (I've selected a higher resolution in the Displays System Preference, so perhaps this is why it is higher than expected.)  Also, I'm editing in 8-bit color, so that kind of increase isn't present/relevant.

All of that said, this problem also occurs on my Late 2013 quad-core 3.5 GHz i7 27" iMac with 32 GB of RAM, but using files only 2500x1600 pixels @ 72 dpi.  Again, this doesn't occur in Painter with an identially-sized file, and this is an even smaller file on an even faster machine.  It doesn't seem to me like the filesize is the problem - it really does seem to be something specific to Photoshop.

[Herbert2001]

Silly thought, but I have read some people experiencing severe lag in Photoshop due to Safari open in the background. Might be useless, but can you close Safari (if it is open) and restart Photoshop, and try again?

[EzraEkman]

Not silly at all - browsers can experience all kinds of memory leaks due to poorly-written code or Flash.  I use Chrome rather than Safari, but the same issue may be present.  I'll do further testing and report back.  Thanks again for the suggestions.

[Herbert2001]

Also, remove the current Wacom driver, and delete all driver files.

- Before updating your driver, you must completely purge the old one.

- To do this, use the Wacom Tablet Utility app found in your Applications folder to uninstall the driver.

- Sometimes this does not remove ALL the files, and just to be sure go through the following directories and delete all the files as listed in the image below:

- Move the listed files (if any are found) manually to the trash bin, delete them then restart your computer.

- Install the newest driver.

- Restart, just in case.

[JJMack]

The implantation of how Photoshop handle thing and the implantation of how painter handle thing is  clearly different.  For your running your test on the same hardware OS version  and using the same  latest version of Wacom tablet drivers. 

Adobe Photoshop is a huge mature complex application. I would not expect Adobe to re-implement Photoshop basic operation they are having difficulties even adding new features without breaking old features as it is.  So I would not expect Adobe Photoshop performance to dynamically improve any time soon.  Adobe is making more things in Photoshop multi threaded to improve performance.  However some process can not be broken down and done in parallel to take advantage of multi cores and processors.  And some thing are not implemented well.

Try using a large wet mixer brush!!!

I made a test one time to test what the layer limit is. I created a small canvas document 100px by 100px duped the back ground the both then 4 then 5 the 10 nine time the 10 nine  time the a 100 nine times then a 1000 then 2000 then 4000 to reach the 8000 layer limit.  As the number of layers being duped increased Photoshop performance exponentially decreases Photoshop was in a none responsive mode state would not even take window focus. When the 2000 layers were being duped I took my wife out to dinners.  Hours later when I returned Photoshop was still none responsive CPU utilization was  4% only one thread was running on one logical processor.  23 were idle.   Once I had the 8,000 layers the new layer icon did gray out I could not add a layer but I could switch from 8bit mode to 16bit mode and back in less then a minuet and when  I saved the PSD the file size was 16MBytes.  That surprised me since all pixels are pure white I expect the file size to be less the 16MB.

[EzraEkman]

JJMack:

I get that Photoshop can lag when you're doing something huge and complex.  My point is that, so far as I can see, I'm not.  We're talking one layer here.  I'm not sure how your post applies to my situation.

[JJMack]

EzraEkman wrote:

JJMack:

We're talking one layer here.

Yes one layer  3840x2400 pixels  equales (3840*2400*24) = 221,184,000 bits which is 27,648,000 bytes of data. Your brush stroke has a length,  paths, pressure shape and size components that need to be materialized according to the brush settings and the controlling icons for brush opacity and size dynamics. As well as the drivers data rate. So how many data points are involved in your quick complex stroke? The stroke need to be blended into the canvas's 27,648,000 data bytes and the result scaled for the current zoom percent.  The lag depend how well Photoshop brush engine was coded.  Photshop brush engine is quite complex. Just look at the brush setting UI over a dozen setting involved.  The process is not trivial and the wet mixer brushes are even more complex.

[EzraEkman]

JJMack:

It's not a wet brush.  It's not 8,000 layers.  It's not a huge 300+ dpi image.  It's literally just a file based on the specs of a screenshot.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.  I've seen Photoshop perform better than this - I've been using it since version 2.0.1.  Intuos says this shouldn't happen.  Adobe says this shouldn't happen.  Each company has pointed the finger at the other.  You yourself said you were't experiencing this on your own machine.  I'm not sure why you're making this so complicated.

I'm looking for a solution.  If you don't have one, that's fine.  But I don't want to argue about technical details, and I'm sorry if I gave you any impression other than that - I just want to solve the issue.  Do you have any suggestions?

[Herbert2001]

Ezra, did you install the trial of Clip Studio to compare the performance? (So we can completely rule out general issues with the Wacom drivers) You told us that the lagging does not occur in Painter. Painter does not make use of OpenGL (GPU) acceleration, so it might be a OpenGL driver issue - not sure.

Did you remove and reinstall the Wacom drivers?

The thing is, with your mac setup Photoshop should be doing just great - I mean, my Win7 machine is running a five~six year old i7 920@3.6ghz, and I can work on an A4@600ppi in 16bpc (which is far more data than your file) rather smoothly with a bit of lagging in Photoshop. In Clip Studio understandably it works even smoother. Even Krita, which still has some performance issues, shows a good performance on my (aged) system.

However, with a more complex brush in Krita the same issue pops up as you have demonstrated in your video - it can take a couple of seconds for the brush to draw the stroke.

The newest version of Photohops CC has an improved brush engine (not really advertized anywhere, I believe) - do you experience the same issues in CS6?

And, did you turn off all the eye candy and multiscreen wizardry in MacOs? At this point you want to deactivate anything that might get in the way of Photoshop.

[Herbert2001]

Also, when you set the performance to "Basic", you did restart Photoshop? Otherwise these settings are not applied.

And try this for good measure:

Launch PS in non-retina mode. Quit Photoshop, go to the app in Finder, right-click, get info. Check "Open in non-retina mode". Start Photoshop. Test.

And delete the preferences of Photoshop.

[JJMack]

EzraEkman wrote:

JJMack:

It's literally just a file based on the specs of a screenshot.  It doesn't get much simpler than that

Photoshop is not a file editor and only uses dpi to calculate the number of pixel required. Photoshop is basically a pixel image editor with some vector graphic, text, paint, and now 3d and web features added. Process that require long path length cause latency lag.  Photoshop also was not designed as a Paint program.

If you have a version of Photoshop the work better for you use it.  Adobe will continue to make changes to Photoshop.  Perhas some future version will perform better then your older Photoshop version.  Adobe has replaced Photoshop brush engine in the past perhaps the will do it again in the future. 

If you like how painter is implemented use painter it was designed as a paint program use it.  Photoshop was designed to edit images not paint application.  Many though do use Photoshop for artwork.  Use what works best for you. I believe its those technical details you don't want to discuss that is causing the latency you also don't want.  To me if you want to use Photoshop for your artwork you need to adapt how you create your art so it works well the way Photoshop is implemented.  I would not expect Adobe to change their current vision of Photoshop as a web development tool direction to Photoshop the painters choice.

[Herbert2001]

JJMack wrote:

I would not expect Adobe to change their current vision of Photoshop as a web development tool direction to Photoshop the painters choice.

Photoshop a web dev tool?

Ha!

Then Adobe has a long and hard road before them, because at this point it's kinda rubbish: no multiple page support, svg is severly lacking, the png export is dreadful, no symbols like in Fireworks, no page templates, no real vectors, no option to have realtime updateable smart objects, the save for web dialog has not been updated in forever, no responsive design options, ridiculous obscure method (generator) to control web output for layers, no proper downsampling algorithm for sharp graphics, no proper html/css export for prototyping (the current slicinng is horridly outdated), no webp export, no simple wireframing options, no built-in web preview like Fireworks or something similar, no simple interactivity support, no...

The list goes on, and on, and on.

End of rant!

As for Ezra's performance issues, it still does not make sense, because his(?) machine should be more than up to the task. The file is relatively low resolution, merely 8bpc, and a small brush like the one used in the demo should NOT lag like that. My machine is worse and older than that, and I have no issues whatsoever painting in any application, including Photoshop at much higher resolutions and higher bit depths.

What I am trying to say here is that a technical discussion on the finer points of how data is processed in Photoshop and the like is a bit useless at this point in the discussion, and I think Ezra feels the same: he is not an inexperienced Photoshop user (he has been using it since version 2!!!)

I feel it might be a Mavericks issue - I have heard nothing but bad news in terms of glitches, bugs , performance problems, and so on. Some people say it's the buggiest release since before the advent of Intel Macs.

Ezra, have you tried Photoshop CC on a Mountain Lion machine?

[JJMack]

I don't know about that when Apple was using their own OS. OS 7  was quite bad.   When Steve got back to Apple IBM would not produce an power PC chip that would not drain a battery fast so Apple had no laptop.  Steve knew  the virtues of Unix he used it at Next.  So he killed two birds with one shot.  Droped Apple OS and IBM power PC and went with an Apple shell on Unix for the Intel processor and got his laptop..

My workstation is not the greatest but is not all that bad I run Windows 7.  My workstation has two slow six core xeon processors 40GB of ECC RAM, an SSD, a hard disk and a Nivida Quadro 4000 video card. If I zoom out on a large canvas it easy to produce a demo like his.

Have some of my own views and opinion about Adobe.   With all its faults Photoshop is still a very powerful image editor.  Hope Adobe does not change this by braking image editing adding new web stuff and continuing its removal of image stuff like picture package, web photo galleries. They tried to remove contact sheet and PDF Presentation what next?