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.

[Trevor.Dennis]

JJMack wrote:

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?

I'll add an AOL me too tp that sentiment.  I'm getting too old to learn new applications, and I doubt I'll ever learn the other Adobe apps I have installed here, as well as I know Photoshop.

[Herbert2001]

Trevor Dennis wrote:

JJMack wrote:

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?

I'll add an AOL me too tp that sentiment.  I'm getting too old to learn new applications, and I doubt I'll ever learn the other Adobe apps I have installed here, as well as I know Photoshop.

Didn't the developer for Contact Sheet II just say his goodbyes to Adobe and the community because of licensing and installation issues just a week or two ago?

Those things are signs on the wall that something is amiss. Maybe.

[JJMack]

Yes Adobe forums have lost  Paul and Ross.  Ross states he will still support Contact Sheet and Image Processor Pro for some time.  Photoshop in on a downward path for sure and Adobe is pulling their own enployee like Russell Brown away from Photoshop.

[Herbert2001]

@jjmack: True, Photoshop is still the "generalist's" best tool, and arguably for Photographers as well. The trouble is that in the current market(s) there are specialist tools that, frankly, have outrun Photoshop, and are still gaining momentum.

The 3d tools in Photoshop are quite weak - against applications like Mari, 3dCoat, Substance Designer, MudBox (all 3d painting tools) Photoshop looks very outdated and sluggish in comparison.

For web work a number of specialist tools are currently making strides that (will) surpass Photoshop in many areas - and Adobe is probably going to be a straggler to lag and limp after them. Web workflow has changes quite a lot over the last couple of years.

For video work Photoshop is okay, but again specialist tools outpace it.

Digital painting: at some point Photoshop was doing really well - and suddenly other tools (even open source ones) offer a more advanced tool set in that area as well.

Instead of focusing on the strenghts of Photoshop Adobe management seemst to be bent on fragmenting the app more and more - and in the meantime the core workflow could see so many improvements, and debugging.

You yourself are always mentioning the numerous bugs still present after having them pointed out after many years.

And then there is the CC subscription only model - many loyal users just will not buy into that model (including myself).

There's too much fragmentation, and Photoshop always seems to lag behind what's going on in areas like web and 3d. A generalist applicaiton like Photoshop just cannot compete with more specialist tools. In spite of all the work the dev team has done in regards to the 3d tools, it still cannot compare with dedicated tools at all. Well, perhaps that's not their goal. Just give graphic designers a simple 3d tools to work with.

I say, focus on your core, and do not try to be everything to everyone. Ah well, for me it's not that important anymore: I switched to other (better) tools. Well, in one area Photoshop remains the kind for now: pure unadulterated image editing - though even that depends on how far you want to go.

We'll see how it pans out.

[ntsakris]

I dont know if you solved but i have the exact same one. In my cs6 works just fine, but in CC there is terrible lag. Even the liquify tool behave with lag. And both CS6 and CC works on the same machine.

[Herbert2001]

I'll take your bet, and up the ante

I guess Photoline has a "slightly" better layer implementation, then. I made a file with 10000 100px*100px layers (layer groups 10x10x10x10) that took less than 20 seconds to do (slight lag at 10000 layers), and the file size when saved (with one layer I tested a brush - quite slow, but still responsive!): 780kb.

A white 100px box in 10000 layers at 16bpc: 670kb.

Just for kicks I went up to 50000 layers at 16bpc - at that point Photoline starts to crawl, and it takes up to a minute or so for things to respond. File size: 3.96mb

At that point I could not be bothered anymore. I suppose I could have gone up to twice that many, or perhaps even a million layers, but I am not as dedicated as you are in leaving the machine running for hours on end

Conclusion: Photoline has no limits in terms of numbers of layers - or at least is only limited by the machines cpu and memory.

Who's got bragging rights now, he?

To be fair, Photoshop seems to have no real trouble adding up to 8000 layers, as long as you work in group. But I tried painting in one of the 8000 layers, and it would not show up - probably a limitation of opengl.

JJMack wrote:

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]

UPDATE: Wacom says this is a known issue, and Adobe is working on a fix!  In short, it's an issue caused by how Mavericks handles things, and how well (or not) Photoshop works with that.

Here's an email I just received from Wacom after sending them a link to the video I posted:

There were quite a few changes when Apple released the 10.9 update, and one of them affects how it handles the priority of various active applications and the handling of memory/system resources. Unfortunately, Photoshop does appear to have trouble with over consumption of system resources within this version of OS X. This causes other applications, which are considered lower priority, to not have the same access as they should to resources. The affect is what you are seeing, in the delay of input. Any sort of intense brushwork or 3D rendering will really highlight the behavior. We have been told that Adobe is currently working on an update for Photoshop, that should resolve this, but we have not been provided an estimated time for its release. It is possible that you may see some improvement from the tablet side once an updated driver is released for 10.9, which should be any time, but this would likely not affect other input devices on the system.

[Herbert2001]

I just knew this was probably a Mavericks issue. That's why I mentioned it before.

So far Mavericks has proven itself to be the buggiest MacOs in a long time.

[RDComics]

Ezra,

I've been having a similar issue in Photoshop CC 64 Bit on my new Windows 8 Machine. I've posdted it about it here:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/6263701#6263701

Some of my troubleshooting stuff might help.

My problem appears to have gone when I dropped the Cache Tile Size down in Edit > Preferences > Performance from 1024K down to 128K.

Might be worth a go, let me know if it makes any difference.

[Rob A1]

Hi,

Im not sure if you've got to the bottom of this one or not. A couple of years ago, with Vista and OS prior to Snow Leopard I was having issues with the Wacom Intuos.

The first cab off the rank if new driver install wasnt helping was to go into Wacom Tablet Properties / Grip Pen / Mapping and uncheck "Use Windows Ink".

There's even a vid on it these days for the people getting into trouble with Win 8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukJ-2_F2wO8

I'm sure Wacom have worked on fixes but it might still be worth checking your pen settings. As far as I recall, that "dialogue box" was still present on Wacoms' Apple installation, though I cant say if it is still the case.

I had zero issues when I migrated through Win 8.