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Question

Photoshop is poorly optimized... Will they improve it?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
January 26, 2022
3 replies
1598 views

I made large projects since I went to college but my experiences with Photoshop wasn't good and it never changed. As of today, I'm using M1 Max with full specs and yet the experience with large project was same as 2014 with Mac Pro 2013. It's so slow and every single tasks shows spinning rainbow

Adobe told me that pixeld based software and computation is very difficult and impossible to optimize for large project which disappointed since they really didnt improve it since 2014 and I see both CPU and GPU aren't using that much while I work with 50~100gb of PSB files. The usages was around 5%. That's it! Am I suppose to believe what Adobe is saying?

I know that there aren't many creators with large project but Photoshop is def not optimized well no matter how powerful Mac computer I use. Instead, Adobe kept telling me it's almost impossible to optimize with pixel based computation. Am I supposed to accept their explaination which didnt solve for 10 years? I did everything to solve this problem such as using a fast SSD, more RAM, fast CPU and GPU, and more since 2010. But it never improved.

Are they willing to improve Photoshop for lagre projects in future?

macOS

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Earth Oliver

Legend

are you saying that you're working on saved files that are 50-100GBs? Nothing Adobe can do is really ever going to improve that situation, and you'll need to find a way to trim down your file size. If you don't already use Linked SOs, you're going to need to learn how. And speaking as someone who regularly retouches some of the largest commercial prints in the world, my files rarely exceed 20GBs.

A

aiur4Author

Known Participant

Smart object isn't helpful as I have tons of individual layers especially for particular series.

Earth Oliver

Legend

There's always a better way. I've been pushing the limits of Ps for 30 years and one of the requirements is that you need to regularly rethink your workflows to get around the technology without wasting all your hours waiting for it to catch up.
You mentioned before that you have several scratch drives. Are those all internal? Are they 500MB/s or faster? If you're using external USB for scratch, you're going to be in for a bad time. Nothing Adobe can do is going to speed up the application if you're using a slow scratch.

TheDigitalDog

Inspiring

@aiur4 wrote:
Are they willing to improve Photoshop for lagre projects in future?

The short unspecific answer is yes, Adobe is always working on performance which is why more and more functionality is moving to GPU and newer chips.

The non specific answer and the only one that can be provided here is this: Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don't know.

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"

D Fosse

Community Expert

Actually it's a bit of a two edged sword. Every time they take advantage of new OS or hardware developments, they may need to abandon support for older OS/hardware - leaving a lot of users out in the cold. This is a very real issue that we've seen here many times.

One random, but very specific, example is the SSE4.2 instruction set requirement in CC2021. This excludes Photoshop from running on older CPUs. It p*d off a lot of people, as you can imagine, but it's an actual performance optimization. So it's a tradeoff.

Earth Oliver

Legend

But where was that performance gain and how much really was it? And sadly, no matter what performance improvements they've made over the years, the one that hasn't changed is that we're still not able to save files faster than 300MB/s. Yes, on my new M1, with a screaming fast 6,000MB/s drive, Ps is still only able to save at 300MB/s.
I've just tested to verify, and a 15GB 8bit uncompressed .psb takes two minutes to save. If i delete a few layers, convert to 16bit, then enable compression, the file save takes more than 5 minutes! Well, i don't really even know how long it takes, because it's only at 42%, after 5 minutes...

And remember, most people have auto-save recovery enabled, so anyone working on large files, has to deal with those slow auto-saves in the background, in addition to the glacially slow regular save.

D Fosse

Community Expert

It depends what you mean by large. I routinely work on files around 10-25GB, with zero problems. Everything is as fast as I would expect it to be (for lack of any hard parameters to measure speed by).

There are some teething problems with M1, maybe that's what you're seeing.

But to get down to the bottom line: working with really huge files is all about your scratch disk. That's where the heavy lifting is. Forget RAM (never enough anyway), forget CPU. You may need several terabytes of scratch disk space!

A

aiur4Author

Known Participant

I dont know your workflow but I already have many scratch disks. No improvements. It's quite bothering as I work on a large project.

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