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Question

Photoshop CS6—many problems. Slow.

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
June 20, 2012
15 replies
194631 views

I'm hoping someone at Adobe can address the numberous bugs and general slowness in Photoshop CS6.

Before installing (MacBok Pro 2010 Intel i7, 8GB Ram) I whiped my drive and installed OS Lion. So CS6 went on clean.

What I'm finding:

1. General slugishness all around.

Layered PSD files I was using just fine in CS5 are now extremely slow. An examle is a small (20mb) web design file. So it has many layers (maybe 200, not 2,000) mostly comprised of typographic elements—not many layered effects to speak of. Not many image layers, either. Layer folders are slow to move, folders can't be moved using the shift + arrow key consecutive times, making it difficult to move a range of folders xxx pixels to the left, for example.

Things that were pretty snappy before, are now slow. This is very similar to the problems I and many others saw with the initial relase of CS5—in the next version (12.0.1 I think?) Adobe fixed the issue.

2. Problems with type, example keybaord arrow keys stop working many times when toye is selected. Frustrating.

More of a general rant here, but insted of (at least in addition to) a lot of other 'features' like video in PS extended (why not use Premiere?), 3d, etc., it would be really smart for Adobe to make core elements work better: A big complaint among interactive desigers is that type renders so poorly compared to CSS html. Maybe this could be addressed, as photoshop is used for the design of most all websites.

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smurphy2342

Inspiring

I hope you can figure things out to make it run better. We have been using CS6 since the beta and have only seen slowdowns due to video. We are one of users that is SOO happy that they added in video editing into this new version. We are an online retailer that edits hundreds of stills per day and were trying to find a better way to integrate more video. This solved everything! We can now edit videos inline with our stills and use actions as if they were stills. Amazing!

Anyways, we have found that we do get slowdowns occassionally. A quit and restart of Photoshop usualiy does the trick but we do sometimes have to do a full computer reboot, though we I don't recall having to do that since using the Beta. Ramping up the RAM used in preferences should help too.

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Exciting_operator0B35Author

Participating Frequently

I wanted to chime in again. I have a clean system all around. I reformatted my drive (MacBook Pro 2010, 8GB ram, 7200 speed HD) with Lion. So no concerns here about old CS bits and pieces floating around. Also, no antivirus software installed, nor 3rd party plug ins, all typefaces are clean based on the Adobe problem type script.

What did help speed and performance for me was turning off layer previews. Really helped!

But it would still be good to find out about known bugs. I haven't seen such a list anywhere.

For example, for me:

1. When I place Illustrator CS6 art into PS as a smart object, it places at an odd scale, like 99.821% x 100.51. (Initially on paste the toolbar reads 100%, but as soon as 'return' is slected to place the art, non-proportional scaling occurs. Very odd.

2. Keyboard controls not working with the type tool, and it seems other tools as well. So arrow keys won't work, I've also noticed that tool shortcuts will stop working at times. Very frustrating working with type!

Any way to inform us on known bugs, and a timeframe for the next update?

Thanks!

Chris Cox

Legend

1) is because of the snap to pixel behavior (can be turned off in preferences)

2) Seems to be somethign external -- still being investigated with other users.

What sort of utility software: literally anything that isn't part of the stock OS and isn't an application. Font Agent Pro is a font management utility, for example. Dropbox is a file syncing utility. etc.

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Exciting_operator0B35Author

Participating Frequently

I have 'snap vector tools and transforms to grid' turned off in prefs. unless you mean another preference? also, i was under the impression this only applied to vector tools and transfroms, as menioned in the name. not smart objects, which i am referring to. either way, with it turned off, i still get odd scaling.

Noel Carboni

Legend

Just a small point in answer to your comment that "type renders poorly compared to CSS HTML"...

Understand that in most browsers, the rendering engine has information about the actual display the type is being rendered upon, and is taking advantage of things like knowing the colored columns on the display are in a particular order to enhance the font smoothing results. Photoshop has no such knowledge of the final display, and thus cannot use color to an advantage during font rendering. That said, being able to force it to do so under certain special conditions would be a nice option.

-Noel

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vikki_w

Participating Frequently

I have this general sluggishness issue as well, it's insanely frustrating. I upgraded from CS4 to CS6 and I am regretting it at the moment. Photoshop CS6 will produce a spinning beachball for 10-30 seconds when I simply try open a tiny 1.5MB file, or try to save a file. This is stuff that happened without a single bat of an eye in CS4. I even bit the bullet and upgraded my RAM from 4GB to 8GB thinking that might be the issue, but it really hasn't impacted anything. I've played with the performance settings as some on these board suggest (ie. Cache levels are at 4, RAM is at 65% of 8GB, drawing mode is at Basic as I find the Normal setting to make things even more sluggish).

Seriously, I've spent a day and a half in some sort of spinning beach ball limbo over the most trivial files and file sizes - I have the hardware to support this stuff, and it all used to work pretty smoothly in CS4. Why isn't CS6 just working so I can get on with work?!

Specs, for the record: MacBook Pro (model 7.1), 2.4GHZ Intel Core Duo, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics card.

I even checked to see if there are new drivers for my graphics card, but there are not. Any advice on how to get my new snazzy PS6 going smoothly would be grand.

Adam Jerugim

Inspiring

Both of you seem to be working with smaller files (size in MB) with lots of layers. One thing that has changed from CS4/CS5 to CS6 is the default tile size for some systems with multiple processors and a good amount of RAM. I would suggest going to the Performance preferences and changing the tile size from 1024K to 128K. This will help speed up opening your files and should make working with those "web" files much better.

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vikki_w

Participating Frequently

I will do what you suggest, but 1) my tile size was already set at 132K, and 2) in my most recent spinning beachball case it was just a 1.5MB JPG one-layer photograph that caused the issue. Any other tips? I am really happy there there are Adobe employees on this board adressing these questions by the way. Thanks for looking into this - I'm no software technician, I'm just a grapahic designer! I don't know how the guts of these programs work, or much about the performance levels, etc!

Chris Cox

Legend

1) try turning off the layer thumbnail in the layers palette and see if it helps

2) toye ?

Photoshop type does not render the same as all OSes and browsers - but they don't render the same way either.

CS6 type should be much closer to the OS and browsers, but can't match them bug for bug.

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Exciting_operator0B35Author

Participating Frequently

thanks for the tips. i do appreciate it. turning off thumbnail previews immediately helped the issue of not being able to move a folder set with cmd + arrow. previously, i would get the nudge tool filter dialog, and after a 3-4 second pause, the layer set would only move 10px, regradless of how many times I keyed the arrow key.

my tile size was set to the default of 128k.

looking forward to 13.0.1 soon.

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vikki_w

Participating Frequently

Hi Chris,

Again, I have ONLY been experiencing sluggishness in CS6 and nothing has changed in my system setup between CS4 and CS6.

I have to most up to date video card driver for my computer (NVIDIA GeForce 320M). There is no further update available for this card from NVDIA. It never caused a problem on CS4.

I do not run any anti-virus programs, being on a mac, which nixes the bad anti-virus software (Norton) option.

I have no third party plugins installed in photoshop that I know of (though how can I be absoultey sure of this?)

And it's interesting you mention corrupt fonts:

1) The files I am opening that are causing the beachballing don't have font layers on them

2) merely clicking on the type tool in CS4 would immediatley throw down the "Cannot complete your request due to program error" window and I would have to force quit photoshop, though in CS6, the type tool actually works. I manage my fonts with Font Agent Pro and only have ~40 fonts activated at any time. None of those fonts are corrupt.

Any other ideas? What could I be missing here? I'm still in spinning beachball land....beginning day 3 now....

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