Do not move files from one machine to another. You can copy files as backup on the same machine, but don't bring them into a completely new environment. That's inviting problems. The same setting may have a different meaning in the new context. I suspect that's the reason this was removed.   Things that can be saved out and reloaded, like actions and brushes (.atn and .abr files) are safe.   There's another very good reason you should not migrate preferences. The preferences contain a lot more than your own user settings. It's the entire application configuration, including lots of hidden parameters and system-dependent parameters. Crucially, they are rewritten on every application exit - as opposed to read-only program files. If the shutdown sequence is disturbed or disrupted in any way, this can corrupt settings in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. Errors will accumulate, and with new application code that could cause latent problems to surface.   Corrupt preferences can cause weird and inexplicable behavior that is often misinterpreted as application bugs.   Take this opportunity to start with clean sheets. ... View more

My solution is to continue to create artboards at 144dpi By @7billionbuddhas   That's irrelevant in this context. The ppi value isn't used on screen. It could be 1 ppi or 1000 ppi and it would display identically.   Pixels per inch, ppi (not dpi!) is a simple formula to translate pixels to a physical size where that's needed. It's not needed on screen. It's needed for print, and a few other things that involve physical units like font sizes. But not screen.   Do not upsize your images. The browser will do it atomatically anyway. If you send 2x, it will ultimately display as 4x.   There are ways to code websites to allow for high resolution images to display at native size on high resolution displays - in other words, they are coded to override the automatic scaling. But that's not something you can rely on. ... View more

When I view at 200% the dimensions are correct By @7billionbuddhas   The dimensions aren't actually "correct" - they just agree with the automatic scaling to 200% that all web browsers and consumer-grade photo viewers do when they detect a high density display. This uses four screen pixels to display one image pixel.   This automatic scaling is the industry standard workaround to ensure that the same material can be used regardless of what screen technology the user happens to have. Without this scaling, we'd need two separate internets.   Photoshop can't do any automatic scaling - it's used for a whole lot of other purposes than web. But you can call that scaling if you want to see it the same way as web browsers/photo viewers display it.   As I'm sure you know, a digital image doesn't have a "size". It only has pixels. The correct way to display an image is one image pixel represented by exactly one physical screen pixel.   I'm reposting the screenshot I posted earlier in this thread: ... View more

DirectX12 is an API, application programming interface. Your GPU is able to communicate through that API, that's what "DirectX12 support" means.   However, the feature level is the actual, physical capabilities of the GPU. The feature level is what the GPU can do. That's a hard physical limitation, not something that can be updated. ... View more

The plus sign is the name you have given the layer. You have apparently done this by double-clicking the layer and typing + in the highlighted field. That's how you name a layer.   Aside from that - for a beginner, this seems like an extremely complex layer setup, and it's not even clear what they're supposed to do. Why do you need to clip standard pixel layers to an underlying empty layer?   I would strongly advise you to start with a much simpler layer structure to get a feel for what they do, before starting to build up these towers of layers.   In any case, if you need to add/subtract/intersect masks on the same image, it's easier to do with grouped layers or smart objects, instead of stacking them on top of each other. ... View more

This has nothing to do with "single core". Denoise runs exclusively in the GPU, it doesn't even touch the CPU.   Denoise is a complex AI based operation, it takes a bit of time even on high end systems. It will never be instant. 10 seconds sounds about normal, depending on the size of your raw files. The timing is directly proportional to the megapixel count. ... View more

The Lightroom catalog is a file, completely separate from the Lightroom application. You can store the catalog file wherever you want, and make as many backup copies as you want and store them wherever you want. It will be there even if you uninstall Lightroom, ready for when you reinstall. ... View more

Precisely. It really is as simple as that. If you want to see accurate color on screen, you need to profile your display with a calibrator. A Mac needs that too.   The exact same principles apply, irrespective of platform. ... View more

@Ricardo CGI  We need to get into how this actually works. Functionally, color management is very simple. There's a source profile (document), and there's a destination profile (display). As you work, the former is converted into the latter, in a perfectly standard profile conversion, and these corrected numbers are sent to screen. That's all.   If both profiles are correct and accurate, and the conversion executed correctly, the image has to display correctly, by definition. There is either a conversion, or there is no conversion - depending on whether the application supports color management or not. There is nothing in between.   Historically, the difference between Mac and Windows is that on Mac, the conversion is called by the application, but the execution is sent out to the OS. On Windows, the application handles everything - the OS just makes the profiles available when requested.   The downside with the Mac model is that there's an extra layer where bugs can happen. And they do - e.g. https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/photoshop-not-showing-correct-colors-update-after-3-weeks-of-troubleshooting/m-p/15126107/page/2#M851090 which is still unresolved.   I have worked as a photographer at an art museum for, oh, seventeen years now, using wide gamut Eizos all the time on Windows. Obviously, in this line of work, color accuracy needs to be absolutely perfect. Color management on Windows is rock solid and never fails as long as the application gets it right.   (edited and rewritten for clarity). ... View more

  Everything that isn't color-managed on Windows gets oversaturated By @Ricardo CGI   That is actually true for MacOS as well. But more of the OS-native apps are color managed on Mac. On Windows, Photos and Edge are fully and reliably color managed. Explorer and the desktop are not, and that's the one that trips people up.   The application still has to support it. You have applications that don't do color management on a Mac too - but if you have a false sense of security just because it's a Mac, you're going to get into trouble.   Especially now, as Display P3 is more and more used in the Mac community as a universal profile for everything, from document to screen. In fact, that's the definition of a non-color managed process (source and destination profiles are identical) - which won't be noticeable inside the Apple bubble, because everybody does it. But it creates problems out in the rest of the world.   There is no problem using a wide gamut monitor on Windows as long as you understand which of your apps are color managed and which are not. ... View more

@DoubleSupercool  No, that's not what I'm saying. The interface isn't the problem.   The problem is the image window. A vector image can be scaled indefinitely and still always be rendered at full screen resolution. So it can just scale with the UI.   A raster image is different. It still needs one image pixel to be represented by exactly one physical screen pixel. So it cannot scale when the UI scales. It has to stay unscaled. If the image scales with the UI, a 4K screen is wasted in Photoshop, you're not getting the high resolution you paid for. ... View more

Premiere Pro and Bridge will create huge caches over time unless kept in check. You need to keep an eye on them. Haven't used After Effects so don't know about that.   You manage the caches from the apps' preferences, and if you have other (internal) drives you can redirect them. By default they are in your user account on the system drive. ... View more

I propose a visual way to contract, expand, and feather a marquee selection By @Josh32367144i052   There already is one: Select and Mask. ... View more

Just the way the operating system works, nothing Adobe can control. It has always been like this. ... View more

You might also consider just Exporting directly from Lightroom. ... View more

When you switch back to the normal preset   By @Aytaç   I just want to stop for a moment to make sure we're all on firm ground. So just a quick recap of the basic mechanism, bear with me:   The MacOS presets are the equivalent of calibration targets - white point, black point, primaries, tone curve. As such, the presets are supposed to directly alter the monitor's behavior (although the precision doesn't need to be particularly high).   Enter the monitor profile, which is where the high precision correction is done. Not by changing anything in the display path, but by providing an accurate map so that the application can correct the very numbers it sends out. In other words, the monitor profile describes the monitor in detail, in its present calibrated state. Each target has its own corresponding monitor profile.   If you switch targets, the calibration software should automatically also switch to the corresponding monitor profile, and load that into the OS.    And here's where I'm getting with all this: Photoshop needs to be relaunched whenever you switch targets. When Photoshop starts up, it loads the monitor profile it gets from the system - and uses this profile for the remainder of the session. To load a new profile, it needs to start up again.   Just wanted to have this on the table. ... View more

You don't need to worry. As long as you're using a legitimate version now, nobody's going to go into your past history. The main goal of Adobe's anti-piracy efforts is to go after those who sell and distribute illegal software, and then to disable any illegal copies.   Remember, a very large portion of users who have pirated copies, have bought them in good faith. They have no idea they have been scammed. The offers often look entirely credible and above board. ... View more

I still find it hard to believe that this is really a MacOS bug, as I just can't imagine that only a handful of people on the internet are noticing this By @riccknl   Keep in mind that the vast majority of Mac users have iMacs with a single integrated display - and few of them use any external calibration. In that closed environment, the system "Display P3" profile probably works well.   But there's an interesting smoking gun in what @Aytaç  wrote above: "If you select "sRGB" as the TONE CURVE in DisplayCAL, you get almost the same result as on Windows" The interesting part of this is that Display P3 uses the sRGB tone curve.   Just hypothetically, if the Display P3 tone curve, aka sRGB, was hard-wired in the GPU output to screen, this could explain the whole thing. Note that I'm not saying this is what actually happens, but sometimes a hypothetical explanation can narrow down the questions to ask.   Just for historical context, the sRGB tone curve was originally specified to match the native behavior of a CRT monitor. It doesn't follow a regular gamma curve, and notably, has a flat "toe" near black. Modern LCD displays have a slightly different native response. It's not a big difference, but enough to be visible side by side - especially in the shadows.   Normally you wouldn't try to modify the monitor's tone curve dramatically in calibration. You basically want native behavior if that's not too wildly off. In a color managed process, this will all be remapped by the monitor profile, in detail, so that the net result is perfectly linear. ... View more

If that means a 512 GB system drive and 24 GB RAM, you're definitely on the low end of what will work for Photoshop, and you will need to take some precautions.   Apple silicon uses shared system memory for the GPU, and the GPU can eat up a lot. So that means you have effectively about half that available for Photoshop, and the OS may need to constantly allocate and reallocate that memory to where it's needed.   Then there's the Photoshop scratch disk. That's Photoshop's main memory, with RAM more as a fast access cache beyond the base memory needed for loading all of Photoshop's submodules. The scratch disk contains all history states for all open documents, with added overhead for some advanced functions. Each history state potentially adds the full uncompressed file size.   So there are a couple of things I would recommend. One, dial down the number of history states as much as possible. The default value of 50 will eat up your system drive in no time. Take it down to 10 or 12. Second, don't open too many files at one time. And third, set the memory allocation in PS preferences to 60-65 %. The higher you set it, the higher the chance of choking the whole system. ... View more

Be aware that you don't have (and can't claim) copyright on AI-generated material. That's legal consensus pretty much everywhere now. ... View more

Got it. Then the recovery file was corrupted too. It can happen - if the power cuts just as the data are saved, nothing can salvage it. ... View more

I see you're illustrating step one in the boot sequence there, Bob 😄   But seriously, I have one too: ... View more

That's correct. "Color" in Photoshop has a narrower and more precise meaning than it does in everyday speech.   In Photoshop, you need to make a distinction between Color and Luminance. In your example, you want to change the luminance component, not the color component. In fact, the white wall doesn't have any color at all.   White > Gray > Black are not colors, they are the complete absence of color. It's the luminance scale. Hence, Replace Color is not applicable here as the others say.   What you need to do is to select the area you want to modify, and make a mask in an adjustment layer that allows you to do what you want (Curves or Levels). ... View more

We see this from time to time - and a lot of those users have come back and reported that a clean install and clean preferences fixed it. In other words, it seems to be a corrupt install and/or corrupt preferences. My money is on the preferences, which contains a lot more than your own user settings. It's the whole application configuration, including a lot of hidden parameters and system dependent parameters.   Also note that if this is a laptop with dual graphics, they are prone to conflict. The general advice is to disable the integrated GPU as per section 6 & 7 here: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-gpu-graphics-card.html  ... View more