Inspiring

Answered

Photoshop issue when using certain tools

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
April 13, 2025
5 replies
2321 views

Hi collective,

I've been pulling my hair out the last week with photoshop refusing to work for me on certain tools and I've tried everything I can think of to remedy it.

I'm extremely fortunate that the tools are more graphic design based, so I havent needed to use them in a very long time, so this issue might have been more long-lived than I'm aware of.

In short, whenever I use any of the shape tools (Rectangle, Line, Triangle etc) or the frame tool, photoshop hangs up on me in the middle of creating them, and although TECHNICALLY does make the shape desired, I get the spinny wheel of death forever until I remove it again. Photoshop isnt crashing completely, or totally frozen, just extremely lagged to the point of being unuseable.

Screenshot to demonstrate the frozen state, first prior to any issues, and then once hung up:

I can see that resource usage increases, but far from the maximum possible for the system.

My system rundown really quick.

- MSI z790 A Max Wifi motherboard - most recent BIOS version

- i7 14700k - mild undervolt to reduce heat production, AIO cooling

- Geforce 4070 ti (not super)

- 64gb DDR5 ram

- 2 x 1TB M.2 Drives for storage, one with windows and programs, the other with photo/video files for editing.

- Windows 11, most updated version

- Photoshop 26.5

- MSI MPG321CURX Monitor (4k 240hz) 10 bit colour

Things I have tried so far:

- Disable GPU acceleration (including disabling different individual GPU settings within performance menu) No improvement, which leads me to think this is a CPU related issue

- Increase available ram for photoshop to 75% of system ram (which has never come close to actually using)

- Increase cache settings

- Changed settings for remove tool etc to stable (from faster)

- Reset photoshop preferences

- Installed older version of photoshop (26.0)

- Uninstall/Reinstall photoshop via creative cloud

- Reinstall windows

- Reduce undervolt in BIOS

- Disable GPU OC through Afterburner

- Force photoshop to use Dedicated GPU

- Disabled G-Sync for photoshop specifically

- Uninstalled photoshop with creative cloud cleaner tool and reinstalled

- Disabled HAGS

- Updated all drivers I can think of

- Reinstalled up to date graphics drivers

- Opened photoshop both directly AND via Lightroom

None of these has had even the tiniest impact on this matter. I am out of ideas and I need some extra brainpower from you guys here. All I can think of might have an impact for some unknown reason is that my monitor might be causing issues, as I bought this only a few months back, but don't foresee how that would be likely, no issues otherwise.

Tools I use regularly like remove tool, stamp, adjustment layers, brushes (both regular and mixer), crop tool, dont seem to have any issues. Once I used content aware fill and there was a little glitching of the brush when adjusting the affected area for drawing information for the fill - but unsure if related.

Anyone seen this before, have any ideas? Will be extremely grateful if you can suggest anything that helps me get to the bottom of it.

Windows

Correct answer Jordan Barling

Update: I fixed it!

Thankyou for your help and assistance team, but tonight I managed to stumble on a solution myself (thanks to my OCD about files and cleaning out redundant folders from my PC, it seems!).

I cannot tell you exactly what it was that caused the issue, however I was thinking that since the Beta version worked, perhaps there was something to do with my specific install of the main one (or possibly, rather, something conflicting with it).

Due to that, I visited my %AppData%/Roaming/adobe/ folder tonight and noticed there were a few folders pointing to versions of adobe apps that are no longer installed. I FEEL like the likely culprit was %AppData%/Roaming/adobe/adobe photoshop 2024 folder which was filled with many settings files, workspaces, backups etc just like my 2025 version adjacent to it. Since the 2025 folder had almost identical files, I removed the older one.

I also found another folder named simply photoshop, which pointed to install numbers for many pre v26 versions, so removed this accordingly (I noticed that it seems the v26 equivalents now go to a PS folder instead).

A few extra small folder deletions for any redundant program installs (and some old plugin remnants from the UXP folder) and it seems that one of these actions fixed it! I apologise I didnt record exactly what I removed, as I didn't foresee it actually being effective, so my recycle bin is now empty.

I appreciate all the effort to help me diagnose the issue, and am glad that I can finally use the tools as they are intended!

I'm even more glad about this as I just was told about the Photography plan 20gb having its' price increased and was about to cancel my subscription and use a different app instead!

Kind regards,
Jordan

J

Jordan BarlingAuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

Update: I fixed it!

Thankyou for your help and assistance team, but tonight I managed to stumble on a solution myself (thanks to my OCD about files and cleaning out redundant folders from my PC, it seems!).

I cannot tell you exactly what it was that caused the issue, however I was thinking that since the Beta version worked, perhaps there was something to do with my specific install of the main one (or possibly, rather, something conflicting with it).

Due to that, I visited my %AppData%/Roaming/adobe/ folder tonight and noticed there were a few folders pointing to versions of adobe apps that are no longer installed. I FEEL like the likely culprit was %AppData%/Roaming/adobe/adobe photoshop 2024 folder which was filled with many settings files, workspaces, backups etc just like my 2025 version adjacent to it. Since the 2025 folder had almost identical files, I removed the older one.

I also found another folder named simply photoshop, which pointed to install numbers for many pre v26 versions, so removed this accordingly (I noticed that it seems the v26 equivalents now go to a PS folder instead).

A few extra small folder deletions for any redundant program installs (and some old plugin remnants from the UXP folder) and it seems that one of these actions fixed it! I apologise I didnt record exactly what I removed, as I didn't foresee it actually being effective, so my recycle bin is now empty.

I appreciate all the effort to help me diagnose the issue, and am glad that I can finally use the tools as they are intended!

I'm even more glad about this as I just was told about the Photography plan 20gb having its' price increased and was about to cancel my subscription and use a different app instead!

Kind regards,
Jordan

Anshul_Saini

Community Manager

Hi @Jordan Barling,

Thanks again for your incredible patience while we work through this. The product team has reviewed the information you shared. They would like to request a few more steps to help narrow this down:

Please try disabling or uninstalling any third-party plugins, especially the Retouch4Me plugin, which was visible in your video. We’ve seen reports where this plugin has caused similar hang behavior in the past.
If possible, can you confirm if Retouch4Me is a UXP plugin? This will help us involve the appropriate engineering team if needed.

Once you’ve tried disabling/uninstalling the plugins, please let us know if the issue still persists when using the Shape tools.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Best regards,

Anshul Saini

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

@Jordan Barling In case you don't know, if you launch Photosho while holding down the Shift key, then that is supposed to force Photoshop to open without any third party plugins.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

Does your Resource Monitor screen shot show system activity while the spinning wheel is on screen?

That looks like reasonably high CPU usage. Does it settle down when the spinning wheel stops?

Your screen shot of the entire workspace (they are usually very helpful) suggests that the documewnt is not huge, but you have several layers and a bunch of text, so take a look at your primary Scratch drive to see how big the Photoshop Temp files are? I doubt this is causing your crashes as RM does not show a lot of drive activity.

You have tried resetting Preferences. Did you do that manually? Give that a try if not.

https://helpx.adobe.com/ie/photoshop/using/preferences.html#Manually

Do you have the Beta version installed? It would be useful to test on a separate installation.

You obviously need to pay most attention to @Aleke and @Anshul_Saini and hope that the rest of us are not muddying the waters.

J

Jordan BarlingAuthor

Inspiring

Correct, the resource monitor picture is whilst the spinning wheel is running and photoshop is frozen (the mouse goes invisible in the screenshot, aparrently even whilst a wheel).
At the time I had nothing much else running on my pc, so almost all of that usage was photoshop, honestly I'd prefer if it used more for an intensive task to get it done faster, though i know that doesnt seem to be the issue here, as it rarely needs to get that high for most tasks, especially on a 14th gen i7.

The document definitely isn't that large, but this issue also happens on essentially any document, generally I work with photos imported from lightroom, and these see the same issue, even when freshly opened and just a single layer.

Haven't tried the Beta version, but that IS a good idea to try.

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

Just to make sure: Did you restart Photoshop after disabling GPU usage?

J

Jordan BarlingAuthor

Inspiring

Sure did, have restarted photoshop between pretty much every change made - and restarted the entire PC the vast majority of those times too for good measure.

Times like this I'm grateful I have a beefy PC, I'd hate to think the cumulative time lost to restarts otherwise! 😄

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

Could you please post screenshots with the pertinent Panels (Toolbar, Layers, Properties, Options Bar, …) visible?

Does setting the Tool to »Pixels« instead of »Shape« make a difference?

A

Aleke

Community Manager

Hi @Jordan Barling! I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble with Photoshop. Could you please share your System Info as it appears in the app? You can find it under Help > System Info. Just copy the info to a text file and attach it to your response, or share it with us through Google Drive, WeTransfer, or another file-sharing platform.

Thanks a bunch! 😊

Alek

*(If you mention me with an @, like @Aleke, I’ll get a notification and can respond faster.)*

J

Jordan BarlingAuthor

Inspiring

Hi Alek,

Thankyou so much for looking into this, I've had no success in changing the situation since.

System info attached.

Additional things I've tried:

Changing the monitor resolution to 1080p
Changing the refresh rate from 240hz to 180hz and 120hz

No changes with either of these.

I've noticed that the initial lag is quite significant, whilst generating a layer for the shape being made, but once it is made, the system seems to free up a little, and is MOSTLY responsive until trying to resize or move the shape again. These futher changes or amendments lag about just as bad, BUT they don't last for anywhere near as long (if that makes any difference in diagnosing).
Additionally, once the initial lag is freed up, selecting a different layer again seems to make the lag/issue go away completely, right up until you select the shape once again.

Kind regards,

Jordan

Photoshop_System_Info_dump.txt

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