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.

[Noel Carboni]

Yes, that's my theory.  The GPU in an AMD Radeon HD 6630M isn't knock-your-socks-off blazing fast, but it's no slouch.

I'm not that familiar with Macs...  Is yours a desktop or laptop?  If the former, what are your options for upgrading to a more powerful GPU?

-Noel

[julienlanoo]

whell it might be the driver, cause if i turn of the " use graphic Processor" tab in prefs, it works faster, ( aprox CS5.5 ) .. 

[julienlanoo]

mhm i gave the poor thing a chance the last few hours...

When "use graphic Processor" is clicked off, then it works ok;.. Not that supper duppa faster than CS5.5 but the same... That's ok for me for now, as it's much more pleasant to work in CS6 than in the 5.5,... W8ing for update from apple..

[Noel Carboni]

Something you could try...

• Turn [  ] Use Graphics Processor back on.
• Go into the [Advanced] button, and set the Mode to Basic.
• Quit and restart Photoshop, and see if the same slowness you saw before is there.

-Noel

[julienlanoo]

it is , i did that before turning off

[JJMack]

That is one being work on http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop_cs6_slow_compared_to_cs5_1_with_larg... It not confined to only Mac and may be more then one problem.  Turning off feature using less GPU then you want may help.  But who does not want thumbnails in the layers palette or only use basic GPU features or have work in tabs.  CS6 is a mess.

[Noel Carboni]

Yet I work with big images on occasion - for example astroimage mosaics - and I'm not seeing slowdowns.  Why?

My PC system happens to be of similar power to the one described at that link.  I also have 16 GB and SSD storage.

I just opened a 9909 x 6501 pixel astroimage I happen to have on hand with over 40 layers.  It's a mosaic of Hubble images.

• Display update when I move a curve on an adjustment layer is immediate, while I'm moving the point on the curve, whether a global adjustment layer or one clipped to a layer below.

• Panning works smoothly.  Even the flick panning nicely slows down and settles pleasingly when I let up the mouse button.

• I can move layers and groups around perfectly interactively.

I just duplicated almost all the layers, so now I have 81 layers.

• No difference in performance.  Still perfectly interactive. 
• I saved the file with the extra layers and it's a 5 GB PSB file.  The save took 21 seconds to complete.

All the while I'm playing an internet radio station and have a bunch of other apps open.

If I had Camtasia installed I'd capture a video for you; as it is you'll have to trust me - you know I tell it like it is when I find a bug.

I ask again:  Where's the mess?

-Noel

[vikki_w]

Noel,

Yes, we get it. For whatever reason, your computer doesn't have issues with

CS6. Have you ever considered that perhaps it's your computer that's the

anomaly?

I have read of people installing CS6 onto a totally new system. The

programs go on clean. CS6 still freezes up. All I can say is that CS4 isn't

like this. Something fundamentally changed under the hood of CS6 that

screws a lot of people's working lives up. End of story. There's too many

anecdotes here from frustrated folks who upgraded to ignore the fact that

for more than just a few biazrre-o machines, something's not jiving. Things

worked before, they don't now. That leads us to ask the classic

troubleshooting question of "what changed?" and the only obvious answer is

"I upgraded to CS6".

I think we can all agree on that....

[Noel Carboni]

Note that my response was specific to JJMack's pointing out a particular "bug" he claims is on PCs as well.

I'm willing to accept that my system, which I run as a tight ship and have well tuned, is the reason things work well for me, but it's not really anything special.  The Dell Precision T5400 was a new design in 2007 - which is an eternity by computing standards. 

Things may be more screwed up in general for Mac users.  I don't know; I have no Mac here, so I can't compare results.

But my point is this:  If on just one system it can be shown to work well, then that proves that it CAN work well.  Why not try to find the specific reasons why it's NOT working well on other systems?

-Noel

[paul campagna]

Noel Carboni wrote:

Things may be more screwed up in general for Mac users.  I don't know; I have no Mac here, so I can't compare results.

But my point is this:  If on just one system it can be shown to work well, then that proves that it CAN work well.  Why not try to find the specific reasons why it's NOT working well on other systems?

-Noel

It looks like Macs are the issue from what i'm reading, but i have not read all, nor checked which kinds of machines people are having trouble with for each post.

that narrows it down. I've had the problem with only photoshop running in CS6

Move to CS4 no problem.

It sucks all the memory from my computer to the point I have to reboot.

I use CS4 fine

Seems to occur on both large and small files

no problems with these files on CS4

If it's a graphics cards problem that forces me to use another computer, or buy a graphics card, just tell me a fix, or somethign... ugh, if only they did make a program to run and see what you have on your machine, then tell us what "might" be the problem, instead of randomly telling us to check fonts, or memory, or graphics card, or mac vs pc, or.....etc.

very frustrating when I don't have problems with any other program,as I do with Adobe's Photoshop (last two version have sucked)

I guess i'll use that other photo editing software... oh yeah....

[JJMack]

Noel Carboni wrote:

Note that my response was specific to JJMack's pointing out a particular "bug" he claims is on PCs as well.

Noel

I pointed you to that bug report where both MAC and PC user have performance problems and Adobe states they are working on the problem. I have pointed you to the Adobe's Problem report site for the Photoshop Family where there are thousands of posted problem reports many are about Photoshop CS6 many are not bugs however I have verified that many are real Photoshop CS6 bugs. A major one make editing  not in tab unusable if you wish to use automation Adobe Own Scripts Load Files into Stack and Save layers to file fail if you do not open document in tabs many user Action and scripts fail as well.  Some new features added to Photoshop were not done well and broke things like Scripting,  Bugs reported in the Action player in CS5 were not fixed and Adobe introduced additional Action player bugs in CS6, Also a bug was introduced into the Action Recorder.  A new feature that can record tool operations like brush strokes was not done well and is even disabled when Adobe Scriptlistener plugin is installed,  Bugs are still being discovered.  Yes some casual CS6 users have not seen any problems some casual CS6 may have seen a problem and not realize it was a problem maybe they though it was just a change in behavior.  I would love to use ACR 7 and there are some other nice changes that were made to CS6. The basic video editing added to Standard CS6 is nice and easy to use. Yes Device drivers and support hardware make using more complex and a chalange to configure.  But the one reason why advance use stop using Photoshop CS6 is there are just too many BUGS.  CS6 is a mess.

[Noel Carboni]

JJMack wrote:

I pointed you to that bug report where both MAC and PC user have performance problems and Adobe states they are working on the problem.

I read that thread thorougly, downloaded a couple of gigabytes of files with which people claim to have problems, and did my own testing.  I've even posted some responses there, for which I've already gotten criticism.

Reading carefully, we see that Mac users are having the lion's share of problems where Photoshop CS6 is worse than CS5.  I could find no evidence that PC users are seeing worse performance from Photoshop CS6 than CS5, and in fact I couldn't reproduce a significant slowdown between CS6 and either of its predecessor versions.  In several cases I found Photoshop CS6 to actually be faster (e.g., in opening large files).

As with anything, once you look closely you find that an attempt to oversimplify something and batch a bunch of different things into one bucket is all but futile.

Sure there are some bugs in Photoshop CS6 - but no more IMO on the PC side than in any other version of Photoshop.  There seems to be a MAJOR problem (or problems) with Macs though.  I mentioned that in a thread on the subject a few days ago and got shot down, but I'm growing ever more sure of it.

And don't look now, but I'm as advanced a Photoshop user as anyone.  Again you seem to be trying to overgeneralize.  I'm sorry that several things that are broken seem to be those you'd like to have work properly, but know that it's not like that for all others.

I encourage everyone to list their specific problems, in a separate thread, in detail, and try to work through them.  It's the quickest, surest way to possible workarounds, and to ensure Adobe sees them for what they are.  Just saying "it's a mess" isn't going to get wheels turning.

-Noel

P.S., JJ, could you see it in your heart to press the return key from time to time?  Big blocks of text like what you've written above are a struggle to get through.

[Rikard Jespersen]

I'm on a PC (HP EliteBook with an Intel i7 q740@1,73 GHz with8 GB of ram and a nVidia Quadro FX1800) and I also experienced the sluggishness. The real surprise was when I reformatted my computer and updated all drivers and then just installed CS6 believing I would get a superfast suite of apps but found out that Photoshop was dreadfully slow. Even zooming in and out of a blank, one-layer 600x600px image was slow(!)

But to come to the point, following your lead to turn off the gpu acceleration and quit the program and then restart it made a whole lot of difference. Now zooming even a large file was fast even though not as nice and fluent as would be with the gpu turned on... So, something must clearly be wrong with my GPU or the driver or something. But here's the great, I then turned on the GPU accelleration and restarted Photoshop and all of a sudden it was superfast!

So, It probably won't help everyone but it won't hurt to test for everyone that experiences the slowdown. Please note however that you must restart the program after you switch off, and then again after switching on, otherwise you won't see any difference.

[JOEYOCONNOR19]

I think it's clear PS 6 is slower than PS 5.5.

For reference, system specs

dual XEON 3.33 ghz

Quadro FX 4800

48 GB MEM

SWAP DRIVE REVO DRIVE 240GB SSD PCIe 4x SATA 6gb

MAIN DRIVE SATA 6b PATRIOT 120gb SSD

WIN 7

My machine will run photoshop blazing fast and just about anything you throw at it. AE, 3D MAX, Motion Builder, Z-Brush, anything, blistering fast.

AS for PS 6, it's slower, its buggy.  I use 5.5 when i can't take it anymore.

It's not my system. My swap drive (it's really a sas/ssd raid on a PCIe card) a Revodrive 3x2 is really fast. Faster than thunderbolt, faster then SATA 6gb because of the onboard raid.

I have 48 GB of memory for PS to do with what it pleases. It eats it up and doesn't release it. I notice frequently when i have had one file open and it will use 25gb of memory after hours of it being open. I have it set to 20 undos. That's not a lot.

Transform is slower, liquify is slower, dragging layers between files is slower, dragging layers within files is slower, everything is slower. Maybe appling filters are the same or faster.

My video card has the current drivers. I'm up to date on my system. I built the system, i know what i doing. It's slower.

My take, there's a memory leak in the software.

I really appreciate that it's a state of the art piece of software. That's why I've spent over $10,000 on it over the past 17 years. If I didn't appreciate it I'd use paintshop pro for 40 bucks.

We all appreciate the software, we just want it to work as advertized.

I remember when I would only use version 7 for years because every upgrade was buggy. CS 1 and 2 were terrible.   5.5 came along and was it beautiful, smooth sailing. I thought they'd have it figured out in 6. But they're trying to upgrade every year like clockwork to keep investors happy but they should worry about their users more than their shareholders.

I make a living with this software like most of the people posting here. I know photoshop better than I know anything in life,  that includes everything, my family, my friends, everything.

It's slower, they need to fix it.

[zebra]

Thanks Joey!

Anyone else watching their RAM get consumed? I must also note that when I close Photoshop and Bridge -  my RAM is released (obviously) but it suggests that PS and Bridge are consumers. They will be the only above system programs running (not counting all the resources running behind the scenes with the OS - but they are not consuming resources like the CS6 PS and Bridge - which I can watch as they slowly consume the RAM - I can visually watch it on the pie chart of Activity Monitor and on the Free Ram software. The odd thing is the increase of "Inactive Ram" - a blue patch on my pie charts.... sometimes as much as 8GB of RAM becomes inactive and has to be freed so Photoshop can aquire it. I have lowered my Photoshop Memory use to 70% - I keep 40 memory states for history.... but like others in the group - I did not experience such slowdowns or memory hogging on previous CS releases - I have been a Photoshop user since PS4 - and the last one was CS5 - I skipped CS5.5.

I agreee with so many - I want stability and speed over bells and whistles - I do like CS6 - don't get me wrong... don't need 3D or video editing... isn't that what Premier is for? It is hard to go back to using CS5 since it does not render my Raw files or keep my nested layers the same as the work done in CS6... so I move forward as we all do. I don't think the issues being expressed in frustration on these forums are because we are not all using equipment especially designed for running Photoshop, but it is that we would like to have stable and quick software that works with most machines.

I spend a lot of time troubleshootong. I particularly did not update the Mac OS to Mountain Lion because I read of issues with it and CS6 - I am already having issues with CS6 as stated - I do not need to throw in another variable. Obviously I spend a lot of valuable time on software management, repair, and troubleshooting - it is frustrating to say the least. The truth is, many of us just want to create and make our art...or do our business. if Photoshop wasn't a necessity - and obsoletion wasn't an issue ... (when I bought my 5DmkII Adobe would not release a raw update for it on CS4 - I had to go to CS5 so I could develope my RAW 5D2 files... but it would not run on Tiger or a G5 Mac, so I had to buy a MacPro Intel and CS5 and Leopard - that was not that long ago - three and a half years?). We all are spending money to keep competitive in our businesses - we just want to have the software work with the hardware.... I would like to keep the little money I make, and I would like to not spend time troubleshooting.

I am curious to the memory usage issue (my stats have already been posted in this forum) - will Adobe develop a better memory handling update for CS6 (I like others write on this forum hoping Adobe caringly pays attention to what we are complaining about... calling India for help has most often proven futile). I think we would all like to see our concerns addressed.

Jeff

[Guest]

//I want stability and speed over bells and whistles - I do like CS6 - don't get me wrong... don't need 3D or video editing... isn't that what Premier is for?//

Yes, exactly!!

// remember when I would only use version 7 for years because every upgrade was buggy.//

Exactly.

[Adam Jerugim]

The biggest change we made to the application (wrt Performance) for CS6 is that the default tile size on many systems has changed from 128K to 1024K.  To compare Apples to Apples, change the tile size Photoshop Preferences > Performance in CS6 back to 128K (just like CS5 or 5.5) and see if things are the same.

I'm currently putting together a list of things that people are saying run slower in CS6 so if you have a performance problem that doesn't involve moving elements around the document windows with tons of layers, then please let me know.

Thanks,

Adam

[Guest]

Thanks, Adam.

That's actually was the first thing I did when I noticed that PS6 runs slow and consumes memory - changed my performance settings to those I use on PS5. Yet - select a group of 5-10 layers, nudge'em, and voila. More layers you have, worse you do.

Well, CRCJJ, on our side it would not be correct to think that the company of this size and reputation would release a product without a proper performance QA cycle completed.

However,

https://www.google.com/search?q=ps6+runs+slowly&sugexp=chrome,mod=10&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&...

[Chris Cox]

Please see the previous topics about slowness moving layers.

There are 2 known problems: layer thumbnails (turn them off for now), and the snap to layer setting (turn it off for now).

This is why it helps to be specific in describing what is slow for your on your system:  you don't have an application wide slowdown, but a very specific and already known slowdown that has workarounds.  And this won't affect everyone, and is only visible on documents with a large number of layers.

With every new release, people complain that the new release runs slowly - and most of the "problems" turn out to be machine configuration or something external to Photoshop (anti-virus, other utilities, sometimes third party plugins, scripts by unscrupulous prepress server providers, etc.).

[JJMack]

Chris Cox wrote:

Please see the previous topics about slowness moving layers.

There are 2 known problems: layer thumbnails (turn them off for now), and the snap to layer setting (turn it off for now).

Chris seems to be starting a list of what you should to help one circumvent known problems in CS6 lets expand on his list Chris starts with

There are 2 known problems: layer thumbnails (turn them off for now), and the snap to layer setting (turn it off for now).

add these till the problems are fixed

do not record adding adjustment layer apply to all layers in actions and edit all actions the have been recorded that way if you use newer then CS3

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop_cs4_c5_and_cs6_bug

Change Photoshop interpolation option from Bicubic Automatic to any other method

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop_cs6_32bit_and_64bit_script_bug

Do not record selective color adjustment layers in Absolute mode in actions.

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop_cs6_bug_while_playing_action_with_se...

Do not record Save For Web in actions for jpeg images

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/ps_cs6_actions_recorded_action_exports_html_in...

Do not use the blur tool if you have an ATI video card

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/blur_tool_cause_cs6_to_terminate

Do not use the pen tool it doesn't work correctly

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/pen_tool_in_photoshop_cs6_keeps_reverting_to_e...

Avoid using the text tool if possible

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/text_corruption_in_photoshop_cs6_file

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop_cs6_bugs

Do not import PDF files with images

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop_cs6_pdf_import_adds_artifacts_to_ima...

Do not attempt to record shape attributes in Actions.

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/_copy_shape_attributes_doesnt_get_recorded_whe...

Do not use CS6 from Acrobat

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/offset_raster_objects_in_acrobat_after_editing...

Do not use CS6 on uncompressed PNG files created with libpng

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop_cs6_still_cannot_load_uncompressed_P...

Do not un-check the Photoshop preference "Open Document in Tabs" on PC if you want Actions and Scripts to work.

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/actions_do_not_work_properly_while_open_docume...

Do not try to change a set current layer name step to be interactive

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/actions_ignoring_modal_control_for_layer_renam...

Do not install the Scriplistener plug-in if want to use " Allow Tool Recording"

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/cs6_conflict_problem

[fredaudet_]

Hello Chris,

From being a Photoshop power user since CS2, I can say CS6 as got lots of great performance improvement while saving files and working from a network. For the rest, I've stoped using CS6 and switched back to CS5 for speed issues. It's just impossible to work in CS6 in a situation where you have many layers. CS5 is double of speed if not more. I'm on a quad-core machine that as enough RAM to boost my car in a cold morning. I frankly admire you level of effort to find solutions for people, but at some point you'll have to admit that CS6 is slower in general if you're outside of retouching an images with 10 layers or less.

No, it doesn't chance anything (or not enough to make it enjoyable to play around in CS6) to disable thumbnails in layers, nor to disable most of your fonts.

For those who work with Photoshop for website mockups, I'm afraid you'll have to seperate everything in multiple PSD's or simply use CS5 if you're having speed issues.

All the additional features being implemented in each newer version of Photoshop are always well tough and are VERY useful. Still, they should NEVER be implemented in the detriment of performance.

This is a very generalized issue over people who use PS CS6, I just hope Adobe will learn from this and honnor it's reputation by fixing those issues.

Fred

[julienlanoo]

WTF is a Photoshop Poweruser ?

And that Log file problem i had once before with PS CS5.5, but then it got updated and never happend again.

and thus for now Yes PS CS6 is much slower, and no excuses to find, as it's not only on my machine but even on 12core 64GB Mac Pro's that are 1 week old ( yes we tried it out, )

Don't know why, but for thing that have to be finished fast i still use PS CS5.5

[julienlanoo]

and i can imagine there's a lot of work gone in to performance and so on , but at the moment, it's not yet fully working, it might be soon with an update.

I am not pointing to any one, cause any way we can't use anything else... But it might be said that no one can find on the internet 1 blog with 100s of posts saying: "waaw PS CS6 is fast" , ...  But one can find thousants of Posts saying " damned why is it slow ? " ...

So ok it can be PS CS6 will be much faster but it isn't at this moment not even on a 5500 euro machine ( not mine), ( or what is the " lab-perfect" machine Adobe uses ? to test , i have no problem i'll buy/build exactly the same one ?..  )

greets

ju

[Guest]

lol at power user too.

BUT

//I can say CS6 as got lots of great performance improvement while saving files and working from a network. For the rest, I've stoped using CS6 and switched back to CS5 for speed issues.//

^^ THIS is the crux of the biscuit of this entire thread.  This is what Adobe needs to focus on and figure out WHAT is happening with PS CS6, because This Is The Issue.  Not the graphics card, not the RAM, not the systems. Because generally speaking, these people here can use CS4, CS5 etc. etc. just fine -- but can NOT work in the same manner as CS6.

No more needs to be said. Adobe -- if you are at all interested in your consumers, the people who have spent so much money on your product, who need to use your product every single day,  then FOCUS ON THIS.

FIN

[fredaudet_]

Very sorry for not using the same language you would in this case guys, I see saying poweruser caused some issue here (what is the point?).

I meant : I've used Photoshop for 10 years as a daily job and probably 5hrs per day. I'm not just using it occasionally from home to retouch the photos I took of my dog (not that I never do it too ).

Well said :

keltoid wrote:

No more needs to be said. Adobe -- if you are at all interested in your consumers, the people who have spent so much money on your product, who need to use your product every single day,  then FOCUS ON THIS.

Fred