Select and Mask freeze

[Bill_Hornbostel]

Yet another person having issues with Select and Mask. Until the most recent CC update, seemed to work fine. Now, whenever I attempt to use the Refine Edge Brush Tool within Select and Mask, Photoshop freezes: the little animated spinner just spins and spins, endlessly, while Photoshop gobbles up an ever-increasing amount of memory (I watched for a little while on the system monitor while it ate up an extra gigabyte of memory before I was forced to end the process).

Computer stats: Win 10 pro, 64 bit, Core i7-4790K, 16 GB RAM

GPU stats: AMD Radeon R9 380, 4 GB RAM; driver up to date

I've tried fiddling around with the performance settings, specifically those pertaining to the use of the graphics processor (changed from advanced to basic drawing mode, turned off Use Open CL, then just tried turning off the use of the GPU entirely), but to no avail.

I've tried looking through the forum for better solutions, but I haven't found anything. So, uh, help?

[Terri_Stevens]

Afraid I don't have a solution for you, but you could try going back to an earlier version of the Radeon driver. Is this just a single graphics card or do you have it linked to a second?

[Bill_Hornbostel]

I've got just the single graphics card. I've tried rolling back to a couple of different, older versions the Radeon driver, but I get the same freezing problem. I've also gone up to the most recent "optional" driver version (17.6.1), same problem.

One difference I've noticed is that, regardless of the driver version, when Select and Mask causes Photoshop to freeze, it doesn't consistently hoover up extra memory.

[Bill_Hornbostel · Accepted solution]

OK, for anybody coming across this later on, I seem to have solved the problem, at least for the moment. It appears that Photoshop has an issue with using a a scratch disk other than the C drive (I have an SSD boot drive, and an HDD data drive). Changed the scratch drive back to C, and it has stopped crashing.

For about a week, I've thought that it was an issue of Adobe and AMD not playing nice with each other. It really seems to be an issue of Adobe software not playing nice with itself.

[sjp-picker]

I had the same issue on a windows 10 pro system with PS 21.0.0. I had 2 non-system HDs ( E:\ and F:\) listed as scratch discs. When I eliminated one of them, everything behaved normally. When I tried to list 2 of them again, the freeze issue recurred. So, I just eliminated the E:\ drive, which had the smaller scratch space and everythying in SELECT & MASK behaves properly.

[ironchef_marc]

I have the same problem with the CC 2018. I do the quick select then PS freezes and I have to quit through Task Manager. I did try changing my scratch disk to C drive and it did not fix the problem.