Photoshop freezing/crashing mac Big Sur

[Stopandwatchthesky]

Hi everyone.

First of all I want to say I'm usually pretty good at troubleshooting commputer issues, but this one is driving me nuts.

I own a macbook pro late 2013 with updated PS and Big Sur versions. and I've been using photoshop well over 5 years. I use it for photo editing.

It only started, maybe a month or so, randomly freezing/crashing. It only happens when photoshop is running, so I'm guessing that would be the issue as no other time my computer will be affected. 

What does exactly happen? After only a few minutes (no more than 5) of PS running, either one of two things will happen: The computer unexpectedly shutting down or the system freezing and staying frozen for about 10 seconds before having the fans going full speed and right after just shutting down. 

I don't know how to get a log report as it seems PS is not registering as having crashed. 

At first I thought my battery was causing the issue as it was in pretty bad shape, so I replaced it, but nothing changed. 

I downgraded PS to the 22.X versions but still having the same issue. 
I only use one plugin (Beauty Retouch) and have been using it for a long time without and issues. 

I really need help as I cannot even work on my images anymore and I'm losing clients. 

[Ged_Traynor]

Hi

First thing to try when Photoshop misbehaves is to reset the preferences

If that doesn't help try using the Adobe Cleaner Tool

[Stopandwatchthesky]

I haven't modified my settings in a long time so I'm not sure how that will help, however I will try it out! Thank you for the suggestion.

[Stopandwatchthesky]

So I did the settings reset, didn't work. 

I opened an image and left PS open. I was away from my computer but looking at the screen (I was on the phone) and roughly 2 minutes after I opeened PS, the computer shut down.

I turned on the mac, did not get any crash/log/incident/report message. It is as if the shut down properly. 

Note: If I am not using PS, my mac can stay on without problems.

If I have PS open without any file open, I does not crash (I left the laptop overnight with LR and PS open just to check). 

I have GPU disabled under preferences to rule out GPU issues. gfxCardStatus does not seem to disable dedicated graphics (as it jumps back to default option) so I can't manually disbale my GPU. 

[Ged_Traynor]

Resetting the preferences restores Photoshop to it's default state, sometimes the Photoshop preferences file can become corrupt, I don't experience any issues running Photoshop but I'm on Windows, there are bugs in Photoshop but nothing that affects my work flow.

[Stopandwatchthesky]

the problem persists after restting the settings.

Installing a previous versios did not worl either.