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.

[CRCJJ]

Correct, and I told him I'm sorry... what's your point?

Notice I said "beta" if you read back far enough, (or do you just skim, looking for people to try to bully?) which was given to us (Gannett/USAtoday) in the latter part of 87 to test w/use with Associated Press. You're right about me not being in the forums... you won't ever see my post count go into the 1000's. I have better things to do, plus, I work for a living.

[Jeff Schewe]

CRCJJ wrote:

Correct, and I told him I'm sorry... what's your point?

My point is that nothing you've posted has been in the least bit useful...do you want help? Or do you simply want to waste bandwidth?

I've got CS6 working on 3 Macs and a Win 7 PC that is working just fine...so, assuming it's not working for you (don't know because, well, you've not bothered to provide any info) what's different? Do you care? Or do you simply want to rant?

BTW, the odds are that what you may have obtained in late 87 was BarneyScan XP because it wasn't actually named "Photoshop" until late 1988/early 89 when the deal went through with Adobe...before then it was called PhotoHut.

[CRCJJ]

last time I looked, i was paying for my bandwidth... and you seem to be "wasting" (is there a quota given out?) just as much by trying to... hell, I don't know what it is you're trying to accomplish... raise you post count? dunno...

Photohut? huh? The original prog our news photogs were using was called "Display" sent by AP for photographs sent over the sat drive, and there wasn't a version # on it that I recall. The first version released under the PS name was 0.07 (01/88) and it wasn't a public release, as you prob know. The "barneyscan" version wasn't what we were sent, and that didn't release until 89 (vers .87)

No, I don't need help (I already talked to tech on phone way back) and I'm mostly ranting now. I'm old. It makes me feel better when I bitch. Get over it.

[Noel Carboni]

CRCJJ wrote:

you won't ever see my post count go into the 1000's. I have better things to do, plus, I work for a living.

For all your experience (I have a bit too) I'm surprised you haven't learned that the only way to bust through the ceiling that defines all the knowledge you could possibly gain on your own is by helping others.

Hope something ends up working out for you.  We're all here for you if you'd like to discuss actually getting things to work.

-Noel

[CRCJJ]

I used to teach advanced PS back in late 90's and I learned much more from my students than I prob taught them...

this CS6 thing has had a lot of good info, etc., but it's kinda beating a dead horse now... going to have to let them sort it out in code. Lot's of good "work arounds," too, just a lot of people can't afford the time/$, etc of reformatting drives buying new hardware, etc. (and they shouldn't have to) just to get software to run like it's SUPPOSED to out of box!

me b*tching is my normal state of mind. At this point, it's about all there is that doesn't cost anything.

[Noel Carboni]

CRCJJ wrote:

it's kinda beating a dead horse

Waxing philosophical for a moment...

I've noticed a thing that happens with people...  A person is generally either "for" or "against" something - they tend to polarize their thinking.  I suppose it has to do with justifying their personal decisions.  Whatever the reason, it's hard to find people who are truly moderate and objective about anything.

I'm generally "against" Windows 8, for example.  Not because it's terrible, but because it just didn't offer me, personally, any compelling reasons to upgrade.  My return on investment analysis (and I did a serious amount of analysis) came up negative.  Not hugely so - but more along the lines of "the benefits don't *quite* outweigh the pain of dealing with the downsides".  So I'm staying on Windows 7 until Microsoft changes the thing enough to warrant another analysis.

By contrast I found the move up to Photoshop CS6 a positive thing, but it sounds like you, CRCJJ, among others have made  the judgement - for YOU, with YOUR needs on YOUR computers and in YOUR environment - not to adopt it because Photoshop CS6 doesn't yield a positive ROI. I respect that.

Once a person has made a decision, either "I'm going for it" or "this is not for me", their view quickly becomes polarized into "I'm for it" or "I'm against it".  The only real trouble is then that those "for" or "against" the thing often begin to use generalized language, assuming and forgetting to state the "for me, my needs, on my computer, in my environment" part of the statement.

I say Photoshop CS6 is good:  It works for me, satisfies my needs for image editing in the several ways I use it, runs fast and reasonably reliably on my (admittedly high-end) computer, and does not seem "worse" than its predecessors, but rather "better" - to me.

CRCJJ, you and some others in this thread say Photoshop CS6 is bad:  No doubt, looking at the things you did, in the way you did, you found it slow, buggy, perhaps the interface changes difficult to get used to - a generally worse experience than using its predecessor.  You state that "they will have to sort it out in the code".  This is not unlike my statement above that Microsoft has to sort out Windows before I'll consider upgrading.

Those on the positive side often believe those on the negative side should put more investment into the new product, since we've seen the good in it.  Those on the negative side, who have made your decision, seem to think we others are wasting our time.  If we're not careful, we become invested in defending our particular polarity and conversations can degenerate.  Names like "troll" and "fanboy" sometimes get thrown around, when the players may just be folks having made different decisions based on slightly different judgements.

It seems to be the nature of the beast.

-Noel

[CRCJJ]

Noel,

That's a very valid point. But... I DO love PS, as it has given me a tool (when there wasn't one) to move my artwork over to digital and allow me to do something that made me extremely happy, and at the same time, allowed me to make a really decent living.

Every time they said "here, we've made your tool better, just give us some more money and it's yours" and I DID, and it was so! This has went on since the beginning, and I've never complained, and have been a loyal user, and spread my joy by getting others to use it... then came 6, and once again, they said "here, again we've made your tool better and give us more money and it is yours" and I didn't even hesitate, but then I found that they'd given me a broken tool and when I asked them why did you do this to such a loyal customer... can you please fix this? They reply with "It's not broken, it must be you or your other things that don't work with it... you need to fix ALL your things, and then it will work." But none of my other tools, even the ones you sent in this package, are broken "yes, but we are right, and you are wrong, and that's the way it is".

I called them before I ever looked up the thread here. Ah, and it's prob recorded and if they ever go back and listen to it, someone will prob lose their job. Internal staff seems to know that it wasn't ready, but the pencil pushers were wanting to get their bonuses. It IS broken and they KNOW that it was before it shipped. And there is NO competition to them, and they knew that, too. I never used Illustrator, because AP used Freehand, and that's what we were required to learn. They bought their competion, then threw it away.

The getting used to the interface is no problem at all... I've had to do it about every other time they upgraded funny that it took them so long to get all the programs to be even similar in the way the interacted with the user. I find it even more amusing that 6 seems to work better on PCs than on the platform it orig was built for! I bet Thomas gets a queazy feeling every time he hears that LMAO

I'm still a loyal customer. Now I'll sit and b*tch to make ME feel better until they fix it... and here I'll wait and see if someone trips on the miracle cure in the meantime.

On another note, Noel, if you believe in karma, be assured that you are one of the few that actually TRY and help people. I truely hope that it comes back around to you.

and my name is "John"

[Noel Carboni]

CRCJJ wrote:

I truely hope that it comes back around to you.

Thank you, John.  It does, every day.

Sometimes "lemons to lemonade" thinking can be helpful in situations like this...  Maybe this is that excuse you've been wanting to build a system to rival God's Own Computer. 

-Noel

[CRCJJ]

that's the thing about macs... you order them like you want them {basicly}. I've used mac since day 1. I have nothing against PC... the whole "mac VS pc - nikon VS canon" is retarded. They are tools, and in the right hands, just as good for the job.

I put jack in my lemonade - happens to be my favorite drink. "lynchburg lemonade"

[Noel Carboni]

Well, Apple is slated to announce Sandy- or Ivy-Bridge-based workstations some time later this year.  So just use "configure and buy" instead of "build" in my sentence above.    Yes, I very well know cutting edge high-end tech ain't cheap.  But you're worth it.

We're not so different in our thinking.  Though I've been a computer engineer since the 1970s I don't build my PC workstations from parts; I choose from sets of options at Dell.

-Noel

[cesar.cintron]

Interesting read Noel,

I'd charecterize my view of PS CS6 as moderate. I use the PS daily and the only aggrivating factor is opening documents with lots of layers and saving said documents. Otherwise I love many of new features particually the align to grid and new vector tools. My system certainly isn't "weak" and this issue doesn't occur with any other software in the CS6 package I have, nore any other software I run, just Photoshop CS6. I would absolutely love to have this resolved, for now I consider opening a document in PS a reason to take a break till it actually opens the file.

The behavior I'm seeing is the document becomes visible in PS but there are no layers and you can not do anything. Esentially PS seems to be frozen. Looking at the Task Manager in Win 8 Pro lists PS as "Not Responding" but anywhere from 5-15 minutes later (depends on how many layers) PS wakes up, all the layers show up and everything works as expected. This behavior also occurs when saving documents and to a lesser degree when using Save For Web. Save For Web doesn't enter this frozen state, but is extremly sluggish to react.

I've tried everything mentioned in the froums other than a format. Primarily, because as a new machine this is already a fresh install of everything. Secondly because of the insane amount of time a full redo intails... OS, Drivers, Updates, Software, and then getting everything adjusted to your liking. If every other Application is working fine including the other CS6 apps then by process of elimination the problem is with something in PS CS6.

I'd be more than happy to help track down the cause of this behavior if I can.

-Sar

Addendum:
Just to further illustrate that its PS CS6, I took a particularly large file a 1.92 GB PSD (even though for web use designer left in crazy high res images as smart objects) and opened it in Illustrator CS6. Illustrator opened the psd, converted layers into objects in seconds, and everything was ready for work pretty much instantly. Saving (even back out to a psd) fast, Save for Web silky smooth, etc.

It takes PS CS6 near 15 minutes to open the same file. (as mentioned above you see the file, but no layers and nothing works)

Reducing the size of all of the smart object images did little to improve the opening/saving speed with PS.

Message was edited by: cesar.cintron

[Noel Carboni]

Cesar, are you up to date with the latest revision of Photoshop (either 13.0.1 or 13.1.2 depending on whether you have a cloud subscription)?

What video card and drivers are you using in Windows 8?  That's still a pretty new system to be expecting flawless performance.

-Noel

[Guest]

Noel,

When I click on this thread at the top I get the notification "additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page".  First time I have ever see that on a thread.  Is it spam or some weird video clip?  Using latest Firefox browser.

Message was edited by: Curt Y  The message only appears when I click on last page.

[WBoswell]

I know your message was directed to Noel, but I thought I'd chime in.  Adobe updated their website and the forums last night so that might be the problem.  I noticed the main website had a lot of the menus changed and the forums were down for maintenance for several hours.

[Noel Carboni]

I haven't seen that message, Curt.  I don't use Firefox, and I haven't thought to force a flush of my IE9 browser cache.  If it's like past updates it's likely that doing so will make things look and act different for me.  Maybe I don't really want to...  Ah what the heck.  I'll post back.

-Noel

[Noel Carboni]

I'm back - no new messages showed up, and everything looks pretty much the same.

Cesar, what kind of disk storage do you have?  If you're opening a nearly 2GB file, that's 2000 megabytes.  If you're reading from a more or less standard hard drive, which reads 100 megabytes/second, that could account for 20 seconds worth of wait time.  If you're using Flate compression that can count for quite a bit more time.

What kind of time and behavior difference do you see if you save the file without compression, then reopen it?

-Noel

[cesar.cintron]

Noel,

Illustrator will open, convert, and be ready in 20 seconds.

Photoshop is taking in excess of 15 minutes.

and even a 100mb file will take over 5 minutes to open.

The only slow app in opening any files is Photoshop, which gets exponentially worse the larger the file or the more layers in the file.

[cesar.cintron]

Noel,

Running PS CS6 13.0.1 (non cloud).

I posted my system specs in my first post (page 9 of this forum)

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 4GB (310.90 driver)

Turning off advanced GPU support in PS has no effect at all on the freezing while opening/saving behavior.

As for expecting flawless performance... if every other App (including the other CS6 Design & Web Premium Apps)  were able to do it.

Its not like I'm running a bleeding edge rig that wasn't around for Adobe to test against. Ditto with Windows 8 which even I was testing the Beta builds of, which had no problems with CS5 Web Premium, so I didn't expect any issues from CS6 (which is the case except for PS CS6).

[cesar.cintron]

Yesterday after another 32MB file took 40 minutes to open I contacted Adobe Tech Support directly.

The fix was to force PS CS6 to recreate whole Adobe Photoshop CS6 Settings folder located in AppData/Roaming as opposed to just deleting the Adobe Photoshop X64 CS6 Prefs.psp file, which is one of the things I had already tried.

Many thanks to Adobe Support Rep Sathiya for helping resolve this.

As this may help others on Windows with this issue below are the instructions I followed.

1) Make sure PhotoShop CS6 is not running.

2) From desktop press windows key + R to open Run dialog

3) Type %Appdata% and press enter

4) This opens AppData/Roaming, now navigate to AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6

5) Now rename the Photoshop CS6 Settings folder to Photoshop CS6 Settingsold

After the above I launched Photoshop and everything was silky smooth.

32mb file opened instantly and a monster 130GB file opened in under a minute.

After which I went back and deleted the Photoshop CS6 Settingsold from AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6.

I hope this helps anyone who was also having the slow file opening issue.

[cesar.cintron]

I thought I had posted the following here as well, but apparently I only posted it on the Extensis Forums.

While restting the Photoshop CS6 prefs resolved my issues for a short period of time eventually the issues would return and eventually had Photoshop crashing out right.

As such Ipulled up the Event viewer for Windows 8 where were multiple "Application Errors" for Photoshop CS6 and all pointed at the same file "CoreFoundation_v11x64.dll".

This file is located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Extensis\Suitcase Fusion 4\CoreFoundation_v11x64.dll and is apparently a product of Apple Computer.

I had already DISABLED the Extensis Auto Activate feature, but apparently this was still affecting Photoshop.

On renaming that dll to "CoreFoundation_v11x64.dll_OLD" Photoshop CS6 returned to normal operation. Even undid all the features disabled and no problems.

Note that renaming this dll file does completely brake Suitcase Fusion Auto Activation.ue, but considering they are using an Apple created dll (that was a brilliant idea...) they may not be in control of the issue.
In the meantime, activating fonts manually is a minor annoyance vs Photoshop being near unusable.

I have yet to hear back from Extensis on this issue.

[Dr Missile]

Just wanted to add to the conversation that I too am experiencing this problem. Between this and the font scaling bug, PS CS6 is almost unusable...

[Guest]

Here it starts to lag alot whenever a document is open, even a small new document with no layers, here is a video :

http://entity.be/stuff/pscs6_slow_when_doc_open.mp4

See the difference when the mouse is hovering over menus how fast the open and close, when no doc is open.

Then with a file open, how they are lagging...horrible to work this way

[Noel Carboni]

dskfvjniuohg wrote:

Here it starts to lag alot whenever a document is open, even a small new document with no layers, here is a video :

http://entity.be/stuff/pscs6_slow_when_doc_open.mp4

That almost certainly has to be a result of a problem with your display driver.

What video card do you have?

What driver version do you have?  Have you been to the web site of the maker of your video card to download/install their latest display driver release?  Display driver updates correct a great many problems.

-Noel

[Guest]

Problem seems to be solved by enabling an Aero theme in windows 7 !!

I have a Geforce GT 545 with driver 320.18 (may 2013), which is the very latest.

All other software runs perfectly smooth and fast, except photoshop cs6.

This is unbelievable, how can it run SO lagged only because Aero is not used ?

And more specific why did it only happen only when a document is open ?

[Noel Carboni]

Well, Photoshop enables compositing and other display features through the GPU.  Maybe a combination that wasn't well-tested by the driver writers?  They do make mistakes. 

It might not hurt to report it to the nVidia people.

Most people don't realize that desktop composition actually offloads the CPU somewhat.

FYI, I've never seen anything like that, though I HAVE seen many other problems with my ATI cards/drivers.

Display drivers, and the dynamics of how the GPU is used during normal computer operation are incredibly complex.

-Noel