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.

[Guest]

Update, guys.

Turning off layer thumbnails did not actually help.

Well, I mean, it did, but so insignificantly, that isn't worth mentioning.

[Guest]

"Anyone else watching their RAM get consumed?"

- that's what the thread is mostly about, I think 🙂

[zebra]

LOL - I suppose what I mean to say, is anyone else noting the problem as a memory leak or memory release issue (and not just slow performance due to thumbnails being on or off, or bad video card drivers, or apropriate settings....) The thread is mostly about PS CS6 slower performance with out pinpointing what may actually be the culprit. I apreciate your humor Alex!

[Guest]

Sorry, I think I just didn't make myself clear before.

Indeed, PS6 just eats all available memory, up to nearly 0. I tried to change performance settings, disable all unnecessary plugins, do different UI tweaks -- it just didn't help. You start working with, say, 4Gb of RAM available, and in 15 minutes end up with just 100 Mb. Purging cached content and cleaning memory (I use Free Memory for mac) obviously doesn't help either.

[Noel Carboni]

Alex, perhaps if you would screen grab your Photoshop - Preferences - Performance dialog and post it here, we couild talk about specifics.

As has been stated, Photoshop NORMALLY allocates memory and holds on to it - up to the amount you allow in the Performance preferences.  This is to make further operations in Photoshop more efficient.

Clearly you need to leave some room for your OS and other applications you want to be able to run.

I suggest that if you're using up the RAM space you have and finding your performance to be degraded, that perhaps you're trying to do things that require more RAM overall than you have in your system, which necessitates swapping to disk and causes slowdowns (unless you have lightning-fast disks, e.g., SSD).

That's not to say you might not have a specific slowdown problem, and it may have little to do with Photoshop's RAM usage.

RAM is cheap right now.  As in 16 GB for about a hundred bucks cheap for many kinds of systems. Regardless of whatever Photoshop problems you may be having, it may be a good time to upgrade your hardware.

-Noel

P.S., I know precious little about OSX, and I certainly don't know anything about "Free Memory for mac", but I do know something about computer operating systems in general...  I'd say that a tool that claims to "clean" your memory sounds bogus, and can't lead to anything but instability.

[Guest]

Thanks for the advice, Noel.

I woudn't post anything here if I didn't try this and that, then googled the problem, read some forums you know, etc etc.

Currently (today) I have about 50% memory allocated for Photoshop. The behaviour is pretty much the same: consume all available memory, slow down, crash. The thing is, as mentioned above -- I have exactly the same settings for PS 5.1 and PS 6, but the difference in performance is huge, on the same machine. So there are certain changes in PS6 release that cause it. I understand that this can be related to absolutely anything - it's a huge piece of code after all. So here I am, reporting Worth a try, right?

[Noel Carboni]

I think stressing that it's much worse in Photoshop CS6 vs. Photoshop CS5.1 is most important. 

Photoshop CS6 gives almost the same performance on systems that don't have the problem you're seeing.

-Noel

[Guest]

Well, I'm reporting whatever I've experienced. I've been on CS5.1 for the last couple of years or so. It's just that this knowledge doesn't really help me and other customers in this thread.

Some people just want to spend their money and purchase the upgrade, but have to wait until maybe there's some clarification about those problems.

[Chris Cox]

There won't be any clarification until you tell us what is going on on your system.

Other users are not seeing such a problem.

You appear to be seeing a problem, but you haven't given us enough details to even narrow down what you're seeing.

If you want the problem solved, you need to work with Adam to narrow down what you're seeing, and what might be causing it on your system.

[CRCJJ]

OK, you are WRONG (Noel, and everyone else that's seems to shrug off Alex, then giving some "professional" it's YOUR machine BS comment) that these problems aren't happening anywhere else or on other's machines. They ARE. I have been using PS since the VERY FIRST BETA in the '80s while working w/AP and USAToday/Gannet. Apple didn't yet have "tech support" - we just called each other and asked "has this happened to you? How'd you fix it?"

NOW, look at my post count. Yea... so you think everyone runs and reports to Adobe when a glitch comes up? NO. I've got too much work to do and will let the ones who like to do so, get the bugs out. I worked on stable PS builds until it was proven, then movde up to current. With the company now moved to upgrade w/cloud, now that's become a problem. Since it upgraded us, we now have SLOW RUNNING, MEMORY HOGGING, FREEZING, MULTIPLE FONT LISTING... etc...etc...PIECES OF CRAP CALLED CS6 on ALL machines - 6 laptops, 4 workstations (all macs), 5 i7 imacs... they ALL have PS6 problems, and the main one is speed (or lack there-of) on them all. The speed problems in 5.x were fixed by selecting 32bit mode... something you can't do w/CS6 on mac.

I've made the decision as SR.VP/Creative Dir. for the agency for immediate cease of PS6 usage, and if it's not fixed by cloud contract for the year, it will be dropped off our graphics machines. Video department hasn't had issue w/premiere or AE, but do w/PS6. Web says they are not even using DW6 and are using 5 because of issues.

YES. We expect $1000's of software to run, WITHOUT BUGS OF THIS EXTENT. right out of the box.

I'm setting here waiting for someone to tell Alex something stupid, like "shock the PRam..."

John

[DocPixel-BMW]

@Noel - It's rather interesting that you have stated a few times that it appears that the majority of the problems being experienced are by Mac users.

I'm curious as to what Macs, OS version, specs, and PS Settings are being used on the Macs that Adobe uses to demonstrate the new features in CS6.

I see nothing other than Macs being used, both on AdobeTV and recently the entire series in London Creative Week. Apparently all of those "Macs" are running PS6 and CS6 perfectly.

Regardless of user preference and statistics that point to Adobe being equally represented on Windows and Mac systems, I think it goes without saying, that the systems being used in top production environments, ad agencies and publishing, are still overwhelmingly Mac OSX.

I don't want to get into a platform war here, but even Adobe... regardless of their disputes with Apple and SJ in particular... still deem it fit to use Macs in their demos, tutorials, promotion materials, etc. It does then "appear" and would be simple "graphic designer logic", that CS6 should likely work very smoothly on that platform.

So, maybe a simple released "spec sheet" from those systems being used on AdobeTV, and any other (if any) add-ons, utilities, software, etc. on those systems might help people for the time being, to build an exact replica for their usage.

I would also like to point out though, that "some" people posting here are being overly-optimistic in their expectations of a so-called "Dot-Zero" software release. And those stating that they are experienced from many years of using PS... haven't learned much IMHO

It's common and "experienced" knowledge, that you NEVER EVER upgrade a system, whether OS or software packages, on a "Dot-Zero" release. You're simply volunteering to be a "Charlie" Tester. Anyway that's what I call them, as in Charlie Brown being continually flummoxed by Snoopy. Yes, someone has to be the Charlie, but certainly NOT some of you folks posting here from a production environment(!!!!)

As for the simple "I'm just a simple graphic designer" and I have no idea what a 3rd Party Utility is, where my plug-ins or fonts are,  etc." people,... that's just plain laziness. Google is your friend in these cases, and might I add, your computer and it's software is a very complicated tool. Was... still is... and will be for some time to come. You might take some time to learn about your "career tool box" a bit more, just as any other professional must in order to have a job, as say a carpenter or a mechanic does.

Saying software of this complexity should "just work out of the box" is just being thoroughly naive.

As for Adobe fixing this, Noel... you said it in a little whisper on page 2, and I think this is the absolute truth and biggest problem of all: management is the problem at Adobe. The engineers WANT to put the brakes on, or tweak a release a little longer, but management wont allow them to, and pushes it out "as is" and worries about the problems later. Why? Because they can, due to their monopolizing the creative software market. Quite simple and logical deduction, wouldn't ya think?

So now that I p***ed everyone off...

Ciau, and have great CS6 day!

[Noel Carboni]

A very level-headed view, Doc.  Couldn't have said it better all in one place myself.

It had crossed my mind, yes, that you'd think Adobe would have worked equally hard to make the product work well on Macintoshes.  I think it must be fundamental differences between the platforms that kept them from succeeding in bringing out the product in equal quality for both.

Some interesting thoughts...

Back 30 years, you pretty much expected a brand new car to have a dozen or two problems, many obvious, for which you'd have to take it back to the dealership to be fixed.  Today, getting a brand new car with even one obvious problem is no longer expected, though it still occasionally happens.  Back a few years, you expected a car to start to rust in 5 years.   Now seeing any rust at all is unheard of, possibly even for the life of the car.  My point is this:  Quality expectations for cars has gone up.

Newly release .0 software has always been more prone to bugs, but some years ago it was assumed by everyone that they were unacceptable, and the product should work - have value - out of the box.  Now, with the internet and automatic updates, software is being released 6 months too soon, with manuals not even ready, and we're being gently coaxed to expect less and less.

Let's not fall for it.  Let's all expect 100% functional, valuable software on the first release.  Do public betas for folks who like to tinker and who are early adopters, and wait to bring the product out until all the reported problems are fixed!

-Noel

[Guest]

//Saying software of this complexity should "just work out of the box" is just being thoroughly naive.//

Sorry, probably the single most ridiculous thing I  have ever heard.  You're saying that software engineers at Adobe who have made PS all these years, can't or won't release an equally usable product at the ridiculous prices they charge?

I see.

[Noel Carboni]

Software can be released with zero bugs in itself.  On a perfectly functioning digital system, it's actually possible for software to be perfect.

However, in this day and age of the "not locked down" personal computer (whether Mac or PC), not to mention systems built up from various almost interchangeable hardware, it is conceivable that no program can be made robust enough to work equally well on every computer on the planet.  It's a virtual certainty that no two computers, when you consider not only hardware but the software, settings, and data on the disks, function identically.  That's almost scary to a software developer.

We're faced with these facts: 

• The software design may not anticipate all the different things it will encounter out there "in the wild", and so some unlucky folks - or maybe those who have poor hardware or malware or simply have a corrupted system - will find the software does not work.
• The implementation of the software design may have been done poorly or incompletely.

I believe we're seeing some of both...  The first in that (based on overall traffic here on the forum) Photoshop CS6 seems to exhibit more problems on Mac systems than PCs (implying Adobe expects more of the Mac graphics architecture than it is delivering in the real world).  And the second that there are some definite bugs that have been uncovered (unfortunately by customers) - a few bad ones - that point to flaws in Adobe's implementation of their design.

Both of these point to the development process being rushed (which it necessarily always is), and also that the team is being pushed to develop complexity at or near the limits of their abilities (which they must, to produce state-of-the-art products).

And there is one other thing, which I believe may be more influential than most people realize:  It's version 13.0.  That means there have been 12 major RE-development efforts since the original design.

Any project in a software development organization that proposes to re-write what's already there is almost universally met with negative responses from management.  "Why would you want to do THAT?  It's already working.  People are sending us a lot of money for it, so it must be good.  Why should we spend more money on something that's already done?" 

Problem is, it's often not *quite* good enough to build new things on.

It's clear much of Photoshop at its core hasn't been touched in a LONG time, and further, it's clear that touching old stuff leads to unanticipated problems (the changes to make file saves happen in the background causing the text layer shuffling bug come to mind).

That Adobe has made Photoshop live for literally decades doesn't mean they couldn't do even more to its infrastructure to make it thrive for a long time hence.  It makes a lot of money.  I hope the managers will consider funding the development of it more richly.  Customers are noticing!

-Noel

[the_wine_snob]

Noel,

Good points, and well-stated.

I also wonder if the "dual implementation" to include the Creative Cloud, had anything to do with some of the issues that we are seeing with CS6, and not just with Photoshop, but some other programs, as well?

I have no idea how the development teams were structured, whether a whole new Creative Cloud team was hired, or formed by splitting off engineers.

CS6 just seems to have more "issues," than I can recall in a very long time. Premiere Pro CS4 had issues, but I do not recall Photoshop CS4 experiencing the same - different development teams, and different programs with different heritages. Almost every program in CS6 had a dual "front," with the Creative Cloud versions.

Just pondering there, and maybe that new distribution format had zero to do with anything.

Hunt

[Noel Carboni]

Bill Hunt wrote:

CS6 just seems to have more "issues," than I can recall in a very long time.

Interesting that you would say that, because I sense a disparity.

My own personal experience with Photoshop CS6 is that - for what I do, which is primarily photo editing, some web design, and experimentation in support of my participation on the forum - I've found Photoshop CS6 the most functional and stable version yet.  I dabbled with 3D Saturday all day - with zero glitches.  It just worked.  Whatever I try, it seems to work.  Unlike Photoshop CS5, which crashed more often for me than Photoshop CS6 does.

This does not square well with the many reports of problems we read here, from other professionals who know what they're doing.

In my opinion, based solely and directly on my own use, this is the best .0.0  release of Photoshop yet, no kidding - and you know I know what I'm doing with computers and Photoshop.  Yes, I realize that I may be lucky in that I use the portions of Photoshop that don't happen to be buggy, and that my PC workstation is particularly well-suited to run Photoshop CS6. 

But it's difficult to read that many other good folks are finding it to be outright bad for them.  I trust what they're saying.

It seems that the computing world has grown so much lately in diversity and complexity that it's just that much more difficult to make software that works right everywhere.  More people are having more trouble than ever keeping their computers working properly and stably.

And beyond all that - with more computer power comes the need for even higher quality software...  I enjoy thinking about this:  Back in the earliest days of Windows, if it would run for 8 hours before crashing on a PC XT - the most powerful computer available - that would equate to just a few moments on a modern computer.  Think about that.  The same thing applies to GPU-accelerated operations today, right?  Ten years ago, moving stuff around in a hundred megapixel image was almost inconceivable.  Now we expect to be able to Liquify such an image in real time, using a 15,000 pixel brush.

Having released a few OpenGL-accelerated products myself recently, I can say from personal experience that releasing a product to work everywhere in today's computing world is a fair bit more difficult than you'd think - and more difficult than we originally thought when we did our designs.  We ended up having to have configuration options not unlike Adobe's that people (or our startup profiler) could exercise to make things work when they don't work as expected with everything turned on.  We had to spend more time instrumenting the software to self-diagnose than we thought we would.

-Noel

[Astara_]

You are assuming that their machine is upgradable -- not just in terms of max memory, but also in terms of memory slots.  It's unlikely many here have empty memory slots -- so that entails replacing 8 or 6-12 RAM chips.  Though memory is inexpensive 12 x a 4->8GB

chip would still be a bit, as well as 6x 8->16...

That's presuming their MoBd  handles the extra memory. 

That said, and some indicate this to be the case -- they are running with 32-bit versions

of the tools, so it's not clear how useful going from 8G->16G would be.

[Guest]

UPD

So, this time I've removed all PS settings that I had, set cache tile size to 128K, turned off layer previews, turned off snapping, set 50% of ram available for the app. 4 hours, so far -- works better, not perfectly fine, but much better. Wondering what else could that be. Anyways, I can just confirm the problem with layer thumbnails. Also, app slows down when I use new feature - text styles. Takes it a while to process any change.

[julienlanoo]

So about "slow photoshop CS6 " , and freezing up some times..

So i updated my workhorse machine to Mountain Lion, so that i had the most modern drivers for my graphics card..

I also added more RAM memory..

That worked fine, a few hours, and i thought that i 've solved the problem, ( as adobe people told us that it's probably the graphics card driver ).

But today, i remarked the same things happening again, freezing while using cloning or healing bursh, slow respons..
I thought this is strange.

So what i discoverd, is that also yesterday, suddenly my HD was running low on space, strange as i store nothing on it except the apps, so i dit a litle search of the biggest folders on my HD in the terminal,

And found it was the /private/var/log, folder...  so went to take a look and emptied it..

PS CS6 worked fine again; Today again same problem it started to freeze up again ...
So went to the /private/var/log/asl folder again, an sure it was filling up with log files again ( heavy ones 15mb 20 mb's a piece even 2bm's and so on) ...  So deleted them, and now it works fine again

I made a litle automator action to empty the ASL folder or /privat/var/log/asl folder every time PSCS6 start to freez,

I'll keep you guys updated if this works out..

S

[RussellPierce]

I'm heading back to CS5 because it's too difficult to get things done in CS6. I have the same slow problems that everyone seems to be having but in addition I have weird things happening with my Wacom pen. Most of the time I select the brush and paint, nothing happens, I checked all the brush settings and there is no problem there. Other times the brush works. It also seems to freeze the program as well until I switch to the mouse and select another tool. Same thing happens with the lasso tool, the pen works sometimes and not others. I like to use the brush to paint on layer masks for soft effects, this pretty much never works in CS6. I spend half my time trying work-arounds.

[Des7]

RussellPierce wrote:

I'm heading back to CS5 because it's too difficult to get things done in CS6.

The 14th ammendement to the US constitution does in fact state: don't buy an Adobe product until about 3 months after it's released so they can fix it all 😛 Same for Microsoft, FYI.  Initial buyers are inexpensive beta testers.

[Noel Carboni]

It's been 5 months since the first bugs were reported against the public beta.

Not everyone finds Photoshop CS6 so buggy and slow that they want to revert.  I find it better in many ways than Photoshop CS5 myself, and would never consider switching back.  But that has to do with what you use it for and what your system is like.  If I were having the problems described here I'd certainly be singing a different tune.

-Noel

[Guest]

Noel has pointed out this thread to me. I'll add my 2 cents. I am using PSCS 5 (version 12.1) and I just started seeing this slowdown. This is after many months of exemplary performance. I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, 8 cores running at 2.8 GHz, 10 GB RAM, and a 100 GB blank scratch disk, which has always been plenty of power for the kind of stuff I do. Suddenly, I am getting spinning wait cursors and lazy progress bars on opening & saving small files. Operations in Photoshop lag and are slow to respond. I have already done basic troubleshooting such as repair permissions, run Disk Warrior, restart, reset power management, empty font caches, etc. I even disabled my entire FontAgent Pro fonts folder to see if it would make any difference. It did not.

[Guest]

you all seem quite knowledgeable so i will pose my question. i am running CS6 on a 2012 macbook pro, OS Lion 10.7.4, 2.3 GHz intel core i&, 4GB 1600 MHz DDR3. what i want to do is so simple in the grand scheme of photoshop.  i create an action, save the action, and want to run that action on a batch of files.  for some reason despite photoshop recognizing all the actions i have taken, this saved action will not work properly, and to be honest the issues are different every time.  sometimes it prompts me if i want to save even though i already authorized it to select dont save for that stated item, other times it prompts me to make choices on the resolution of the image i'm saving even though i authorized it to make those choices.  i can see all these commands in the action list, so it makes no sense why the program just wont execute them. other times i paste something onto the image and during the automation process it paste it in another location on the image. WTF!?
all these issues stem from a single set of recorded actions.  when i created these recorded actions ins CS4 and CS5 I had no issues.  i would still be using CS4, but my new laptop w/ Lion will not allow me to run CS4.  seriously for the money i spent on this program i expect it to be able to do something this simple. i have wasted an entire day trying to figure this out and after stumbling on this thread am coming to the conclusion that CS6 is just one glitchy b*tch! 

[JJMack]

Without you posting your actions it is inposible to know what you action actually do and the description of the problems your having are not very clear. So its hard to know if the problems your having are Photoshop problems or problems caused by the way you recorded the actions. I assure you I'll be the first to state that CS6 has more then its fair share of bugs.  Still not all bugs are in Photoshop.  CS6 is the buggest version of Photishop ever released by far.