Photoshop 2021 slow and laggy [LOCKED]

[adamt18510785]

This thread is now locked by a moderator and you are welcome to continue a civil discussion in a new thread or add to the bug report that goes to the product developers. See the link in the answer marked "Correct".

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I'm going to start this new thread for the new version of photoshop. 
There are hundreds of comments about 2020 being slow and laggy and not a single adobe rep has even acknowledged it. I was hoping the upgrade would solve everyone's issues but alas that isn't the case. 

So this thread is for all you old and newcomers with new and old machines where photoshop runs like crap to complain about. Maybe their newest software might be seen for them to do something.  

I'll go first: 
Ryzen 9, 64 gigs of 3200 ram, 1080 ti gfx, 1nvme 3200mb.s ssd for programs, 1 tb sata sdd cache drive, 2 tb WD black for files. 

Photoshop takes almost 3 seconds to do simple things like changing to a shape pen tool to make shapes. 
Lags on anything pen tool, and type tool
Played with every setting in the performance and went through their pages on optimizing. 
I even went through the Nvidia setting but only gained a slight boost in performance. 

[Stan Burman]

Similiar issues here...

Running Photoshop 22.0.1 on a 2019 Mac Pro (macOS 10.15.7 Catalina) with plenty of RAM, scratch disk space, etc.

Some Photoshop tools are very slow.

For example, Lasso Tool used to draw small space to add to current selection takes approx 5 seconds to add selection. First selection goes okay, but additional selections lag badly.

Same results with brush tool in Content Aware Fill preview when attempting to brush to add or delete content source pixels.

Thanks for your responses so far. Would be great if this can get fixed soon.

[julianb33927996]

SAME PROBLEM HERE!!!

Brand new Feb. 2021 iMac with every upgrade imaginable.

Adobe Creative Cloud, with everything up to do.

I work in Photoshop and Bridge throughout the majority of my day and the past months have been a nightmare. I understand that technicians are working on this, but come on. Months of lag and inability to work efficiently without any sort of acknowledgment or expedition when it comes to correcting the issues. As someone that has been using Photoshop for years and paying a premium for the software monthly, it would be nice to feel like someone actually cares about the clients that use this product.

If you need more details, please see all of the other comments on this.

[MKSA]

Why are you preventing us downloading 2019 when it worked flawlessly? Bring back the ability to download that version until your engineers actually get serious about fixing 2020 we pay for this and use this in work environments, I am not subscribed to something "experimental" this is WORK TOOL !!!!!

[MDamiani57]

Try turning your firewall off see if that works it worked for me because the subscription being online the firewall checks every connection.  

[thach98A1]

I experience some heavy lags and stuttering in PTS 2021. Then I noticed the grids for snapping popped up very briefly whenever that happened so I went to View and disable Extra (hotkey Ctrl H). Or you can disable Smart grids. These solutions momentarily did it for me (although it will likely be back within an hour). Let me know if this helps.

[defaulthczb1w99g24a]

I just updated after being bugged numerous times to update my payment information to renew my subscription, so I did, and now Photoshop is about unusable with the same issues.  What the Hell is going on Adobe.  Photoshop is so laggy now and workflow is horrible.   I have an EVGA Nvidia 3090 RTX Graphics Card, and an i9-9940X CPU with 14 Cores and a ridiculous amount of memory in my systerm.  This is fully your product and whatever these last updates were totally screwed it up.  Please fix this POS, I can't get any work done now.

[IkonikFilms]

They don't care my dude. Theyve become the [removed by moderator] giant corporation that doesn't care about its core users.

[mountaineer1965]

I have an older build PC but it has been just fine until I ran the 2021 update: BIG MISTAKE!  Now I am unable to work.  My screen freezes, kind of: I can click around and turn layers on and off but the image never shows the adjustment.  I add a curves layer and the layer shows up, I adjust the layer and the image preview never changes.  I change the opacity of a layer and the image looks the same.  Once it locks up like this the only fix is to restart my computer and then I am able to make 3 or 4 adjustments before it happens again.

Here are my system specs (yes, old but worked just fine a few weeks ago): Windows 10 Home (64-bit, version: 10.0.18362 build 18362), 16GB ram, Intel i3-4160 (3.6GHz, 2 cores w/hyperthreading), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 1GB, Western Digital WD1003FZEX hard drive.

Any help is greatly appreciated as I am paying Adobe hard earned money and for the last few weeks getting NOTHING for it.

Thanks,

[MKSA]

Same problem make a single change and the screen is not updated. Saddest part is that it worked OK for the very first day and not one day since then.

[Christian~F]

This is (just) one of the problems I'm having. It's usually when I'm panning with my Wacom Intuos 5 Touch. The current tab freezes (other tabs are fine and I can do as I please) and the only option is save as and close, re-open and try to pick up if no serious damage was done. My system is very new though, just over a year old. Win 10, core i9 processor with 8 cores overclocked to 4.7ghz, 64gb ram, GeForce RTX 2080, adobe apps installed on 1tb ssd.

I just had my boss in here, showing him how turning on a layer takes four seconds!

[paulg82719226]

Same issue. With it ending up in crashing iMac. So freaking frustrating!!!!

[cliffd60413526]

me too - crashes contstantly. more than 2 layers and the beach ball them crashes I've a 2019 imac 5k 27 inch 32 GB ram in all over 2k for the computer now its useless - might have to go to the dark side and another program - tried everything to resolve this issue - really annoyed and fed up

[paulg82719226]

I got on a chat conversation with tech. He did some optimization and seems to be fixed. 

then I started having problems with Bridge. And unchecked ALL STARTUP SCRIPTS.  It to seems to be working since I did that. 

there definitely seems to be more bugs with this latest version of Photoshop and bridge. 

[doctorvalentine]

Same problem here. Everything was running great just yesterday, and now all of the sudden, the entire lineup of CC apps (even the 2020 versions) are infuriatingly slow. It's taking 5-10 minutes just to activate a font. It's taking several minutes just to launch an app - assuming it launches. This is ridiculous. 

[tasty requirement]

I don't recommend the update for anyone, I've lost a couple of days of work trying to get this project finished, the frustration of drawing with the pen tool as a web gradually appears because photoshop is displaying every position the curves have been in, the only way to clear the screen seems to be saving, closing and re-opening the file. This used to work perfectly but now it's confusing as hell... as I use the move tool the part of the display that's still functioning is gradually gets smaller until I also have to restart the program. Not to mention the amount of crashes. It's meant to be a professional product that we're paying a premium price for here!

Well, at least I can replace the sky in photos with ease ...

[Paula Shin]

I'd also like to bump this thread with the frustrations I'm having with PS CC 2020

I had to update from 2019 version since I formatted my pc and the earlier version I could find to download was 22.2.4

It is frustratingly slow close to 2019. And I have quite a beast of a PC. RTX 2080 Super, 32GB RAM, i7 7700k, etc

Its slow to use text, transform, even selecting layers is laggy. 

A comunity manager here said to roll back to previous version while Adobe fixes this.

But I can't roll back to CC2019 and CC2020 is this shitstorm in every thread I found. 

Does anyone have a solution?

Is the new (2021) version better in performance?

[smackmick]

I did not see this message before, but it looks like they have tried to fix it in 2021 by making the entire app take 30s to several minutes to come up.  They need to fix all of this ASAP.  I actually went back and used V13.0 to get anything done.

[lindac59935593]

NO...NOTHING FIXED...POS!

[mojo potatoes]

I too am having many of the issues in this thread - lagging performance, selection tool takes seconds to trace with, pen tool has wonky tablet performance when using the stylus, it's just overall an unenjoyable experience that has me looking at further buying expensive parts to counter the clear programming issues. ADOBE, you are messing with creative professionals ability to create. I usually end up spending at least 10 to 15 minutes trying to figure out Photoshops problems every single time I go to work on a new project. This is very demotivating and makes me not want to work.

System Specs: 

AMD 3900x, Nvidia 1070 ti, 64gb ram, Samsung M.2 SSDs.

[symphonym88449613]

Adding to this, I'm having a lot of really silly lag during basic operations as well as a suspected memory leak, and the scratch disks are constantly full on a 1tb ssd. Keyboard shortcuts also randomly stop working which is incredibly frustrating and does not fix on a reboot, nor does it seem to utilize my graphics card when it starts acting up despite recognizing it.

Confident it's not my computer but:

Intel Coffee Lake Core i9-9980HK

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060

32GB DDR4 2666MHz

Windows 10

[Stan Burman]

Similiar issues here...

Running Photoshop 22.0.1 on a 2019 Mac Pro (macOS 10.15.7 Catalina) with plenty of RAM, scratch disk space, etc.

Some Photoshop tools are very slow.

For example, Lasso Tool used to draw small space to add to current selection takes approx 5 seconds to add selection. First selection goes okay, but additional selections lag badly.

Same results with brush tool in Content Aware Fill preview when attempting to brush to add or delete content source pixels.

Would be great if this can get fixed soon. Or at least get an Adobe person to tell us whether or not this problem is being worked.

[garethc35499348]

I'm having so many issues also. Pretty top end system and the new version lags like crazy. Rolled back to 21.2.4 and its relatively insanely fast again. I don't know what they've done but...

[shartman1976]

I have also been suffering problems since the update to Photoshop 2020 (the severity came and went with different updates, but it never went away) and now 2021 has gone back to being almost unusable. I am running a fully updated Windows 10 desktop with an Intel i9 9900k, 64gb ram, Nvidia RTX 2080 (I've flipped between the Creators and Game Ready drivers and neither seems to make a difference), 2 NVME SSDs and 4 more SATA SSDs for 5 gb of fast drive space to separate the OS and Photoshop from file and scratch drives. There is no excuse for this software to be running poorly, yet it constantly hangs, has refresh errors when I move objects or use the select tool, etc. It's beyond madenning to pay this much a year and now be on the second full version of Photoshop without a stable, professional working environment.

[Ronald N. Tan]

If people need to roll back, you need to contact Adobe Tech Support via Chat. They will provide (generate) a link specific to you and you can download the previous stable version they have on their end. Due to my "ancient" system from 2009, I had to revert back to version 20.0.8 (CC 2019) and everything is "flying for me" in turns of screen redraws.

I agree with many. Something went wonky and/or combination of the recent GPU and CPU heavy AI and ML advancements in Photoshop.

I have been a SUPER HAPPY paying customer since 2018 as I find the 20GB Photography Plan perfect for me. I hope my portfolio with Portfolio and I *love* the selection of fonts available via Adobe Fonts.

I know it's frustrating and annoying. I hope Adobe will acknowledge and rectify these unacceptable performace oddities and hiccups.

[joshuaOneNine]

I'm also experiencing very slow performance since the last update. Even doing the simplest tasks like editing text is slow and very laggy.