Photoshop CS6—many problems. Slow.

[ladri-bici]

I'm hoping someone at Adobe can address the numberous bugs and general slowness in Photoshop CS6.

Before installing (MacBok Pro 2010 Intel i7, 8GB Ram) I whiped my drive and installed OS Lion. So CS6 went on clean.

What I'm finding:

1. General slugishness all around.

Layered PSD files I was using just fine in CS5 are now extremely slow. An examle is a small (20mb) web design file. So it has many layers (maybe 200, not 2,000) mostly comprised of typographic elements—not many layered effects to speak of. Not many image layers, either. Layer folders are slow to move, folders can't be moved using the shift + arrow key consecutive times, making it difficult to move a range of folders xxx pixels to the left, for example.

Things that were pretty snappy before, are now slow. This is very similar to the problems I and many others saw with the initial relase of CS5—in the next version (12.0.1 I think?) Adobe fixed the issue.

2. Problems with type, example keybaord arrow keys stop working many times when toye is selected. Frustrating.

More of a general rant here, but insted of (at least in addition to) a lot of other 'features' like video in PS extended (why not use Premiere?), 3d, etc., it would be really smart for Adobe to make core elements work better: A big complaint among interactive desigers is that type renders so poorly compared to CSS html. Maybe this could be addressed, as photoshop is used for the design of most all websites.

[paul campagna]

I gave up on PS6 until the next update. I have work to do and CS4 doesn't haev issues like cs5.5 and now 6 does. CS5.5 was worse, but not by much. CS6 since going to 64 bit is the problem. It uses too much of the memory and it can't handle it.

My suggestion is to wait for an update and use cs4 if you stil have it. I don't really see the need for the new stuff at this point. I dont have time to experiment when i'm fighting the program from slowing down and locking up the machine anyways, so I pray a update will be the answer.

I know that's asking a lot, but i'm tired of being the ginney pig for adobe's issues.

My suggestion for Adobe is to stop trying to cram as much as possible into photoshop and make it work liek previous version. Who needs 3-d (which is horrible compared to all other programs) and now video? If people are going to make changes in video, there are much easier ways through the dedicated programs and incorporating photoshop through them. Besides it uses too much memory anyways. Talk about the machine booging down. It's useless.

I've seriously given up on cs6 and anytime it starts to open as default, i kill it and use cs4. I can actually get wok done that way.... CS6 should not have been released until the bugs were worked out. If other people are not having issues, then good for them, but there are many with issues and I'm guessing a lot aren't posting about them.

[Guest]

Exactly, Paul.

I agree, I think the 32/64 bit  "bit" may be the issue. 

[Noel Carboni]

paul campagna wrote:

Talk about the machine booging down. It's useless.

I don't think some people would consider it faster than its predecessors, while others would say it's so slow as to be "useless" unless there are very specific problems some have that others don't.

I understand that you might not have the time to get to the bottom of them.  Unfortunately, given that the problems are not being seen by everyone, it seems likely you'll have to put yourself in the role of system integrator.

I do sense, by forum activity, that Photoshop CS6 may be worse for more Mac users than PC users though.  I'm not sure what's up with that.  Maybe it's no more than a case of many of the existing Mac display drivers being insufficient for Photoshop's needs, and driver updates are not so easily applied as on PC.

-Noel

[vikki_w]

I've wasted a lot of time and energy on trying to be the "system

integrator" and mollycoddle CS6 to play nice even though CS4 played nice

without any intervention at all. As of today, I have moved back to CS4 from

CS6. EPIC FAIL, ADOBE. I'm terribly disappointed in this whole release, and

I guess I just got trounced by the hype.

[Noel Carboni]

Out of curiosity, vikki_w, Mac or PC?

-Noel

[vikki_w]

I'm on a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. 8GB Ram. The specs are way up in

this thread somewhere.

[JJMack]

Noel

Have you visited Adobe Photoshop Problem report site http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/problems/recent and seen how many CS6 problem report have been filed many are not bugs but I have verified that many are indeed bugs.  Adobe has only acknowledged a few to be bugs and has recently  indicated they are working on three.  The site is for the Photoshop family includes lightroom, elements etc. There have been over 4,000 reports recently filed.  The working on section had some 40+ items for the Photoshop Family some are for old version and I have never seen Adobe make fixes for old versions. CS6 is a mess Mac and PC.....

Message was edited by: JJMack

[Noel Carboni]

JJMack wrote:

CS6 is a mess Mac and PC.....

We'll have to agree to disagree on that. 

Anyone familiar with web forums knows that almost everything reported is a problem.  People don't often go online to exclaim "amazingly, it works as advertised".

Whenever people tell me things that differ greatly from my own experience I look for the reasons.

Photoshop CS6 - for ME on MY PC WORKSTATION - works better than Photoshop CS5, and is as fast or faster than all its predecessors at everything I do with it.  I'm making better images than I ever did before.

Is it without bugs?  No, I've found a few bugs and made it crash a few times, but less than its predecessors and I have never even considered dropping back to a prior version because it's simply BETTER than they were. 

In short, my own experience with Photoshop CS6 has been about as far from the terms "EPIC FAIL" as I can imagine.

Is it because I have a special, magic PC workstation that who knows, maybe happens to be just like the ones used by the Photoshop engineers?  Or is just particularly good?  I have chosen my hardware, software, and settings with an eye toward getting the best possible computing experience, though my system is by no means new.

Am I just lucky in that all the things I do with Photoshop don't happen upon the bugs others are seeing?  My use of Photoshop is fairly sophisticated, though I tend to do more still photo editing than create web designs, videos, etc.  But from what I'm hearing described, the things that some others are seeing go wrong are pretty basic, and aren't going wrong here.

I don't know why there should be such a wide range of experiences being reported.  But I'd like to.

-Noel

[Guest]

It does sound to me that my problem is a lot of people's problem.

I notice that you don't do any large areas of text in your astrospace layers example.  And maybe there is just something changed enough in CS6 that the Mac display drivers can't choke down all the time.

I will just say I have spent a lot of time at work (time I don't have, honestly!)  going through preferences, going through options, trying this, trying that - yet I STILL have my icons for DW and PS for CS5 available and have had to close down the CS6 apps all the way and pull things into the older versions so I can actually get my work done on time and get the heck out of Dodge at the end of the day in a timely manner, which...  lol -- isn't that what most of us just want at the end of the day?  Just go home?   I'm not futzing around with this at home playing w/ the program (and not saying anyone here is, not that there's anything wrong with that, I certainly have done that many years) -- I'm at a corporation and pumping out product that must be finished at X time. 

This messes with my ability to do that, get out at a respectable hour to get home to my family and enjoy my life -- and above all, keep my cool while I'm here.  Another very important aspect.  Not wanting to punch everything and everybody and swear like sailors at work.  Important.

I have made a few suggested changes and will be immersing myself in high and lo res multi layered images with lots of text today as every day -- I will report if things seem to be smoother.  From my fingertips to God's ears.   : )

[Adam Jerugim]

We are aware of a couple of performance issues specific to moving elements around the document window.  If you are seeing something else that's slow, please let us know.

I do believe there is a problem specific to application focus on Mac (that's causing the app to "hang" until you switch out and back).  We still have yet to find a way to reproduce the issue in-house, but now that I'm back from vacation I can start focusing on getting this one figured out and hopefully resolved. 

I'm going to email those that volunteered earlier to have me visit their systems in-person, and I'll ask again - if anyone is located anywhere west of the rockies and would like to volunteer to help, I can fly out and try to debug this on your system (California bay area is ideal, but I'm flexible).

You have my word that we're working on this and would like to get it resolved ASAP.

Thanks,

Adam

[Karen Robbins]

I am so frustrated, I am a Graphic Design Teacher at a Vocational School and I have installed CS6 on all of the Macs in the room, ready for the Fall Semester. I am trying to work on my lessons before school starts, and Photoshop CS6 keeps freezing on my imac at home, the famous wheel  going round forever. It quits so often I can't get anything done. I really want to teach CS6, but I may have to go to CS5. Help! This is a real drag because I want to teach the most up to date software and we purchased a site license for our school.

Karen

[Noel Carboni]

Karen, have you tried deconfiguring the various GPU options in the Photoshop - Preferences - Performance dialog?  Ideally you might find one of the lesser Advanced Modes might circumvent the problems you're seeing, but you could go so far as to disable the [  ] Use Graphics Processor option entirely.  Make sure to fully Quit Photoshop after making a configuration change and before testing.

I suggest you take it on a system by system basis - don't assume what fails on your home iMac will fail necessarily on the systems at the school.

-Noel

[Karen Robbins]

Thank you, I will try that and let you know. I have not tried it at school, I hope it will be okay.

[Karen Robbins]

It is at the point that I can't even open Photoshop CS6, I get the color wheel going on and on. So I can't get to the Photoshop Pref. Any suggestions?

Thanks, Karen

[Noel Carboni]

This shows how to reset preferences via manipulation of files...

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4209421

-Noel

[Noel Carboni]

Also, it kind of goes without saying, but try a reboot.

-Noel

[Karen Robbins]

Where do I find the library? I can't believe I forgot.

[Karen Robbins]

I found the library in the hard drive, but I don't see users.

[Noel Carboni]

Please re-read the instructions at the link I gave you more carefully.  The information is all there.

-Noel

[JJMack]

PLEASE NOTE: On MacOS 10.7 and later, Apple has hidden your Library folder, so you may need to make it visible - but the location is the same for all MacOS X versions. Instructions for accessing hidden user library files

http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/access-hidden-user-library-files.html

[zebra]

re: 72 @erickbrian

"Selecting a new brush or opening the brush panel sometimes locks up the software, and I have to switch back and forth from one program to another and come back to Adobe.

This is hte reason I am scanning these forums - this is the problem I am experiencing. Usually just after starting up photoshop this freeze occurs - and my resource manager tells me photoshop is using 100%+ CPU. I finally learned switching out of Photoshop and back to photoshop cleared this up. But the lock-ups are very frustrating.

I have a 2x2.8 Ghz Quadcore Intel Xeon Mac wiht 14GB of memory and a NVIVIA GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB video card running Lion 10.7.4 and set up with Adobe via Creative Cloud - so it is the current version of Adobe software. Those are my specs.

I am working on average with 800MB to 1GB + f16 bit files but only up to 6 layers as these are for large prints and near the end of production. I watch as my memory resources slowly get consumed often with anywhere from 2 to 4 GB of inactive memory which I can free and reclaim as "free ram" but I have always suspected this mac as having memory issues... I watch it consume memory most when I have open Photoshop and Bridge. Bridge is a ridiculously heavy software constantly caching it seems and building thumbnails... granted I keep them high rez for comparisons and descision making - I rely on that visual so I accept whatever is happening. I have watched my RAM be completely consumed especially when NIK color efex pro 4 is used on 16bit images at 30x20 inches 300dpi with 3-4 stacked effects....I realize this is intensive. I have seen teh effect renderring take as long as 8 minutes and th ememory be completely consumed going to any one of four swap discs - but also witnessing that dredded "inactive memory blocks" which I use memory freer to free up after the computations are complete.

The freeze up on brush selection in particular (and it only happens once per PS launch it seems...) is very curious. I was wonderring if anyone else was experiencing this and if they found a solution yet?

Sure - a fine solution is to buy one of the last Mac Pros that Apple will produce and stack it full of 32 or 64GB ram and have a 1GB vid card etc.... but damn - I am saving up for new cameras..... the money drain has to stop somewhere... doesn't it?

Anyone have the lock-up syndrome and or found a solution that is practical?

Jeff

[benwa02]

I was having long delays moving objects.

Just unchecked "Print Layer" within the Layer options.

Now I can move objects in real-time!

[Karen Robbins]

Thank you, I could not even open it. I uninstalled and reinstalled now at least I can open it. I have been working in 5.

[benwa02]

Nm... I mistaken this thread for InDesign (since that is what I googled on this problem).

My tweak is relevant for InDesign... don't know if there is a similar setting for Print Layer in PS.

[Guest]

Well I want to add my couple of dimes into this discussion.

MacBookPro 2011: MacOSX 10.7.4, 2GHz Intel i7, 8Gb DDR3, AMD Radeon HD 6490M 256 MB

Yes, Photoshop CS6 seemed to work much slower than CS5.

Even in the beginning of work with a particular document - dragging multiple layers was a pain. What we call here a "TBS" mod. Dragging layers from one document into another seemed to be a nearly impossible operation. Thus, in a short time it starts to affect other operations. In 10-15 minutes Photoshop consumes all available memory, freezes, and sometimes - crashes.

I don't have any antiviruses or any special software running in the background.

Purging history and cache didn't help. I have similar performance settings for my CS5.1 and CS6 applications. (~70% of ram available, thin&tall cache level options, disabled GP).

However, after turning off thumbnail preview in layers palette things seem to become normal.

Maybe these details will help somehow to understand the problem. As a UX VD I just love new features of CS6, (especially video driver bug workarounds for macs ), but I had to postpone the upgrade purchase to make sure I won't run into those types of problems.