This is most likely a corrupt file.   The main problem with external drives is all the extra layers of the interface, USB drivers, protocols, etc. That results in a vastly increased risk of file corruption - especially if you save directly to it. Never do that, save locally, then copy over.. Not only because of all these extra interface layers that complicate the save process, but because of worn or loose cables and connectors. It only takes a nanosecond broken connection, and your file is toast. Never touch the drive while transfer is in progress.   (the speed you mention is the nominal speed. You never get that in practice because of all the extra layers. An external drive will never be nearly as fast as an internal drive running directly over a PCIe bus) ... View more

As Conrad says. The Intel UHD 630 isn't up to current standards. It may work and it may not work, but either way it won't work well. You'll need a Nvidia RTX. The sweet spot is RTX 4060 (or the newer 5060), excellent performance for a modest price tag. The higher models will be faster for most AI-based tasks, but the rapidly increasing price is in most cases not worth it. ... View more

@Miss_Val22 And that conclusion is wrong. You can hardly blame Windows or Photoshop if it displays oversaturated on other devices. We don't know how those other devices are set up, what applications you're using and whether they support color management at all.   You keep saying you didn't have any problem before, but nothing about what your current settings are.   The most likely explanation is that you're not embedding the color profile. Without a color profile, all colors are undefined.  This can happen if you have "played with" color settings without knowing what you're doing. Reset everything to defaults!   This basically works correctly out of the box - but a special note if you use Export or Save For Web. Here, the "embed color profile" checkbox is unchecked by default. Once checked, it sticks.   Getting a Mac won't fix your problem. Photoshop works identically on both platforms. You can mess up color settings equally on both.   Start by posting a screenshot of Photoshop's Color Settings dialog. ... View more

Corrupt preferences can cause all kinds of strange and unpredictable behavior. The preferences file contains a lot more than your own user settings - it's the whole application configuration including lots of hidden parameters. It's complex. It's everything that has been modified since the virgin first launch.   Preferences are prone to corruption because they are rewritten on every application exit. An irregular shutdown, or interrupted shutdown sequence, can corrupt them.   Preferences are stored in your user account, not in the installed program files. An uninstall will not touch them, you have to manually delete it. ... View more

First of all, there is no reason to match all these profiles, and in fact you shouldn't.   Set ACR to open in the color space you prefer, like Adobe RGB. This profile will be embedded into the processed RGB file ACR sends to Photoshop, and override any other working space you may have set there. The main thing in Photoshop is to have policies set to "Preserve Embedded Profiles". This is the only important setting! Set your monitor to Native, not any emulation like Adobe RGB. The monitor has its own native color space, and that's fine. It's not supposed to match anything else. Any preset will only limit its capabilities. Run the calibration software. When it's done calibrating, it will measure the monitor's color space in that calibrated state, and write a monitor profile that describes how the monitor behaves, in detail. It's a standard icc profile. This profile is automatically set as system default for that monitor. You don't need to do anything. When Photoshop starts up, it gets this profile from the operating system. Photoshop - and, independently, ACR! - uses this monitor profile in a standard profile conversion, from the source color space into the monitor color space. Those corrected numbers are sent to screen. This way, the image is correctly represented on screen.   Get all these ducks in a row first, then come back if it still doesn't look right.   EDIT: looking closer at the screenshot, there is something strange going on in the highlights. It's clearly the monitor profile, but it's not clipping; it looks like the whole tone curve is different, in all channels. The takeaway from that is that it's not a defective profile, it looks like the wrong profile. Which again brings me back to what I wrote above. ... View more

@Michael26531295kdax  That wasn't what anyone said - it was just mentioned in passing as a possible cause (hacker-modified code). Which isn't entirely unreasonable, given the extremely high volume of pirated copies being offered on the internet, to unsuspecting buyers.   But the general consensus is that this is most likely the GPU driver. If not that, then possibly an overheating/malfunctioning hardware component.   The bottom line is in any case that a modern application cannot cause a BSOD. That's prevented by sandboxes and insulating layers. What the application can do, is trigger a BSOD by making specific calls that expose latent problems. ... View more

Agree with Axel. The only logical conclusion is that Lightroom is the real problem. ... View more

First of all, I would reset SFW preferences, not Photoshop preferences (you need to google that; I can't recall which keys to press as you launch. But either way you can rename/move the SFW settings folder in your user account, which does the same thing).   Secondly - the preferences are much more than your own user settings. It's the sum total of the application configuration, including lots of hidden parameters that are dependent on other settings. It's complex, and that's why corrupt preferences can cause weird and unpredictable behavior. ... View more

@patricktheart  If you lose your preferences in minor dot updates, something's wrong, like not having full administrator privileges in your user account.   With a major whole-number version update, preferences do not carry over, they never have. There is an option to migrate preferences, but I don't recommend it because of the high risk of accumulated errors carrying over as well.   As for actions, brushes, anything that can be saved out - save out and keep it in a safe place. Then it can always be easily reloaded. ... View more

Let's get some realism into this. Have you scrolled down to check all the other resource hog processes running? This is just a random screenshot from a cold started machine, no applications running.  And no, I have no idea what all this is:   And if you take a closer look, these CC processes aren't actually doing anything. They're just sitting there.   A few hundred MB of memory is totally insignificant. Once you open some image files to do actual work, you'll be needing orders of magnitude more memory than you have installed in total, so Photoshop uses its scratch disk to handle all the data. However much you have installed, there's not enough RAM to handle that. That's not Photoshop, that's the reality of editing raster based pixel images.   If you have performance problems, this is not the reason.   ... View more

Do not attempt to install on a non-system drive! It's the wrong way to go about it.   You only save around 2-3GB, which is absolutely negligible in this context. It's a drop in the ocean. You can free up 10-50 times that by doing a thorough cleanup on your system drive!   In any case, a large part of the installation will still end up in your user account on the system drive.   Start by running disk cleanup in Windows. That can be surprisingly effective.    If you're using Bridge, purge the cache. Empty the recycle bin. Take a look around your user account. All of your applications dump things here that you probably don't need, a lot of it won't be removed again even if you uninstall the application.   Hibernation can be disabled, that alone can give you 10 GB or so.   There's an excellent free utility called WinDirStat that shows you exactly what fills up your drive and where it is.   And all this is just to get Photoshop installed. To actually get some work done, you need about 100-250 GB for the scratch disk. You can get away with less, say 50, if you work with small files, don't have more than one open at a time, and reduce history states to 2-3. ... View more

@QINGCHARLES  To repeat what I wrote above:   Photography is, or can be, art, and as such you can do whatever you want, with whatever tools you find applicable. But to put your name on it, it has to be your own work. The level of manipulation is irrelevant, as long as it's your manipulation.   Photoshop has never been an ethical problem. You had to do the work to get what you want. With AI, an outside agent is doing work that you claim as your own. That's unethical. To me, this is a crystal clear line in the sand and I have no problem seeing where it goes.   Again quoting myself, I don't have a problem with AI as long as it's clearly stated and upfront. ... View more

I can't reproduce it. The tonal values of the image are preserved, so you won't necessarily get 128 - but you should get neutral gray R=G=B on the clicked point. I get that here.   This isn't something I normally use, so I may be missing something. ... View more

  Excellently put, @Kevin Stohlmeyer    However: digital cameras themselves manipulate and deceive by interpreting what they are capturing with presets. Analog cameras and darkrooms did that too. That's not the breakpoint here. The great divide is passing AI-generated material off as your own creation. That's deception and fraud, by definition. You didn't do it.   @QINGCHARLES  Arguing that "it's just a little bit" is a false and invalid argument. If it was that little, you wouldn't need to use AI.   Photography is, or can be, art, and as such you can do whatever you want, with whatever tools you find applicable. But to put your name on it, it has to be your own work. The level of manipulation is irrelevant, as long as it's your manipulation.   I don't have a problem with AI as long as it's clearly stated and upfront. It'll be dull and boring, because AI can never invent, only imitate and copy, but it'll be ethical. It's the desire to deceive that gets me every time. ... View more

As with everything else, it's the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the user.   Fifteen years is a pretty good return on investment. If you buy a computer, do you expect that to be fully functional and up to date for fifteen years? Of course not. If it broke down after, say, ten years, you wouldn't sue the company that made it, would you?   There's a kind of mental trap here that many fall into. Since it's not a physical thing, it's expected to "last forever". But it doesn't, because it gets outdated and obsolete. The rest of the world has moved on. ... View more

It has always been a golden rule of computing to never use period in the filename. It's just one of those things you don't do. Make it a habit to use underscore instead.   A period signals that what comes after is the file extension.   Often you can get away with it because Windows is smart enough to count backwards, stopping at the last period. But if, say, you have set Windows to hide file extensions, as many do, things go wrong. Just don't do it.   ... View more

Not sure what the problem is - you have an active button to save a new set of shortcuts. That's the one you need.   You can also save shortcuts as part of a whole workspace, that can sometimes be even more convenient.   If you choose a shortcut that is already taken, you'll get an option to override and replace the old shortcut. Just hit enter. ... View more

@korkmaz_8987  You should always have file extensions visible. You apparently had them hidden, and that's when it's easy to get double extensions like in your case. Keep that box unchecked.   The problem elsewhere in this thread is corrupt files, regardless of extension. ... View more

See the troubleshooting guide below, in particular this section: 6. Check and delete the TempDisableGPU3 or TempDisableGPU2 files Using the same methods that you used to find the Logs folder, find the CameraRaw or GPU folder. On Windows, the location is: %APPDATA%\Adobe\CameraRaw\GPU On Mac, the location is: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/GPU If an unhandled, fatal error occurs during GPU initialization, Camera Raw or Lightroom leaves behind a TempDisableGPU3 file (or TempDisableGPU2 in some cases). In the GPU folder, find the subfolder for the application you are using and check for these files.   https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/acr-gpu-faq.html?x-product=Helpx%2F1.0.0&x-product-location=Search%3AForums%3Alink%2F3.6.6    The point is that this file is supposed to stop ACR from launching if there's a system error - but if the error no longer exists, deleting this file lets ACR initiate again. ... View more

First of all, are you saving directly to an external drive? If you are, save to local disk and copy the saved file over. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/networks-removable-media-photoshop.html    Other than that, "If I merge all layers then save PSD it will save in a fraction of a second" points to a problem with layer compositing. Try to uncheck these: ... View more

@am3104photo  Thanks for reporting back, that's very interesting and very useful to know.   From time to time we see these reports of memory leaks, both on Mac and Windows, and it's always a mystery because most of us can't reproduce it. But this suggests it could be either a corrupt install or corrupt preferences (or both).   Going forward, a completely fresh install with fresh preferences will be my first suggestion.   We do know that migrating preferences is pretty common. I've always warned against that, because the risk of accumulated errors carrying over is high, and with new application code it may suddenly bring out latent issues.   I wrote above that this excessive memory reported is virtual memory including the Photoshop scratch disk. That turns out to be not correct, the scratch disk is not included here. It is virtual memory, but actually the system pagefile. When that fills up, the whole system chokes. ... View more

Do you suggest using a Monitor Calibration Hardware tool such as "Datacolor Spyder X Pro?" By @JGiunta   That is always recommended - but for the purposes of this discussion, it needs to be clear that it doesn't affect the file itself in any way. It just lets your monitor reproduce it correctly, so that you can properly see what you're doing, instead of having to guess.   As for your original question, as the others have pointed out - a "CMYK checker" is pointless if they don't specify which CMYK profile to use. And no, there shouldn't be general desaturation, only those colors that are out of gamut in the specific target CMYK profile.   I'd go elsewhere. There is no indication that Printify has a properly color managed process - or even that they know what they're doing. ... View more

If you reset preferences on quit, the home screen will come right back. Resetting preferences returns the application to factory state, and that means home screen active.   Try this: Uncheck "auto show home screen", then open an image, close it out again, and then shut down Photoshop with just the regular workspace but no image.Then it should stick. ... View more

It's not about the "same" zoom ratio. It's about 100% specifically.   100% means that one image pixel is represented by exactly one physical screen pixel. There is no screen resampling, so screen resampling algorithms are not in the equation. You see every image pixel, as it is in the file.   ... View more

I don't think this is difficult at all. If you don't want your images tagged as AI, then don't use AI. ... View more

I don't understand this. If you're using Generative Fill, you're using AI. You can't pretend you're not, and you can't try to pass it off as something it isn't. That's not ethical.   If you're using the Remove Tool, you can turn off AI. ... View more

This is something I have never, ever heard of before.   It does sound like something is interfering with either the monitor profile, or the calibration tables. The latter sounds more likely. In a Mac, there is a series of presets that could easily interfere with any calibration tables made by a calibrator. ... View more

For my part, I would like a toggle in Photoshop to prevent all use of Generative AI so we can avoid this situation for images where we need to show that it is entirely our own work. By @jane-e   Yeah, that's what all of this boils down to. If they could just do that, this whole discussion would be moot.   If you use AI, own it.   If you don't want to use AI, just turn it off entirely (that's what I'd do). ... View more

@SK321  It's very easy to avoid the tools in Photoshop that use generative AI. That is entirely under your own control. Both the Remove tool and Content-aware fill can be set to not use AI.   If it's just a speck of dust, why would you need AI to remove that? We have removed dust without any problems long before AI.   What surprises me nowadays is how AI is considered necessary for even the most trivial tasks. ... View more