Photoshop Element lag, high cpu usage on left mouse

Report · Apr 12, 2019

Hi,

My System

System:

Lenovo thinkpad T530 (optimised for performance)

Windows 10 64 bit with all updates

Gaphic card: Intel 4000

RAM 8GB

HDD: SSD Samsung Pro 250 GB

Photoshop Elements 2018 with all updates

Problem description:

only Photoshop is started, no other programs

on empty white layer if I try to use some of the tools like brush, pen, eraser, ellipse tool, also hand tool

with use I mean only click and hold left mouse button without any movement of the mouse

the cpu usage goes rapidly to ~ 35-40% after long work with the tools (on images) the system performace goes down.

and even if I release the left mouse button cpu need more time to recover.

What I already tried:
- Performance settings (like decrease history, cache level)

- I tried different settings for RAM starting with 70% up to 83%

- I deactivated also the use of Graphics Processor for adjsuting Facial Features

- i tried to play around with opacity, flow, spacing, sizes of the tools

- i reseted also preferences of photoshop

- i reseted also the tools, the brushes

I tried also on my older laptop thinkpad T500 with Photoshop Elements 12 and ther is the same behavior

conclusion

ther is something in Photoshop what causes extremly high cpu usage on holding left mouse button

Maybe there is someone who had the same problem, and hopefully ther is a solution for this problem.

thanks in advance for your responses/suggestions

KR

Jarek

Report · Apr 12, 2019

Moving to Photoshop Elements from Photoshop

Report · Apr 12, 2019

Hi, like I heard Photoshop users (not photoshop Elements) have the same problems, so I posted already in both groups... to get more possible solution ideas.

KR Jarek

Report · Apr 12, 2019

I haven't come across any threads on the Photoshop forum with the issue your describing, Photoshop and Photoshop Elements are two completely separate applications hence the reason for a forum for each

Report · Apr 12, 2019

Yes, I have seen rare similar complaints about high CPU usage for Lightroom and Elements. The answers in the forums have all been the same: you should be glad that you get high usage, that's exactly what is expected; there were much more complaints about 'inability' to get more from the CPU. By the way, those complaints for excessive usage were for CPU usage around 100%. If you can find links to similar questions in Adobe forums, it would be interesting to examine those discussions again.

Report · Apr 12, 2019

Hi thanks for you replay I will take a look on those dissccusions.

I'm not really happy because the system starts to lag. When I additionaly move the mouse - to use the brush, after few strokes 20-30, photoshop is not usable it lags and I can not change to use another tool.
I have to wait about 1-2 Minutes until the cpu usage goes down.
CPU usage stay high during 1-2 minutes even though photoshop has nothing to do on the image, all strokes are on the screen and Photoshop is doing something in the background (Organizer is of course turned off)

Report · Apr 12, 2019

So, you have a real slowness issue. The CPU usage is just an indicator among others.

From your system specs, we can say that:

- you have enough RAM (important with PSE2018) and memory reservation for PSE is correct

- you have a good SSD drive (but in my opinion, 256 GB is a bit short)

- The issue may be with the scratch disk if the SSD is the only hard drive, not enough space.

What I don't understand is that you can't totally "turn off" the organizer on Windows. And that's where we find the major slowness sources.

If you check the running processes in the task manager, does it show something significant for the organizer?

To 'forget' the organizer completely, you should at least open it once to disable all 'automatic' features like face recognition, smart tagging, search for missing files etc.

Can you post the first 15 lines of the info dialog you get from the menu Help >> System information?