Photoshop: CS6 Slow compared to CS5.1 with large files

I have also tried all the fixes above AND on a brand spanking new iMac (3 weeks old) that is maxed out for RAM and is installed on a Solid State drive and as soon as I get to working with larger files for a concerted time it becomes unusable.

Just put 'Photoshop CS6 slow' in Google and it's easy to see the problem. I would imagine the guys at Adobe will have been instructed certainly never to admit there is a problem. With the power of social media they will certainly be very keen to quell any and all disquiet.

Not good enough Adobe. Currently I want my £900 back!

I'm sorry for the folks experiencing this problem, but I have just tried to reproduce it on my PC workstation, and I find I cannot.

My system happens to be of similar power to the one described at the top but it is not a Mac - it's a 2007 design Dell Precision T5400 running Windows 7 x64, 8 cores, 16 GB, SSD storage, ATI Radeon HD 5670 1GB card.

I just opened a 9909 x 6501 pixel astroimage I happen to have on hand with over 40 layers. It's a mosaic of Hubble images.

• Display update when I move a curve on an adjustment layer is immediate while I'm moving the point on the curve, whether a global adjustment layer or one clipped to a layer below.

• Panning works smoothly. Even the flick panning nicely slowed down and settled pleasingly when I let up the mouse button.

• I can move layers and groups around perfectly interactively.

I just duplicated almost all the layers, so that now I have 81 layers.

• I see no difference in performance. It's still perfectly interactive.

• I saved the file with the extra layers and it's a 5 GB PSB file. The save took 21 seconds to complete.

Layer thumbnails are on, and all the while during testing I have been playing an internet radio station (without any skips) and I have a bunch of other apps open.

Is this a Mac-specific problem?

I'm currently downloading the big zip file posted above to give it a try. I'll report back when I do.

-Noel

I am also having problems with cs6 on a macbook pro. I mainly paint and use large files with many layers. Opening up a large file I am already working in, it begins fine, then starts to slow and suddenly photoshop will become seriously slow to a point were just one brush stroke will require waiting for the spinning wheel, attempting to zoom in will cause it to freeze like its using the scratch instead of ram (I have 8gig installed). This same file works absolutely fine in CS5, which indicates that it is not my system, but when CS6 slows it also effects my entire system. I played around with the optimization setting trying various combinations which made no difference with 100% efficiency. However, what I did discover, which may be important and people should check, is when it suddenly becomes slow, the CPU usage will spike and max out both cores. Is it possible that under certain conditions, there is a problem with how CS6 handles CPU usage?

Hello "Noel CarbonI" - why exactly are you in this thread if you aren't having any issues with CS6 Photoshop?

You may not be a complete Sock Puppet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpupp... ) but it's hard to believe that someone who hasn't got a problem would just randomly start commenting on a thread where there's a real issue.

>Hello "Noel CarbonI"
>why exactly are you in this thread if you aren't having any issues with CS6 Photoshop?
>You may not be a complete Sock Puppet
>it's hard to believe...

Hello David, do you insult everyone you meet? Frankly I don't give a rat's behind what you believe. But I'll tell you:

I'm here because I was led here by a link on the Adobe Photoshop General Discussion forum, on which I am a contributor.

I'm here because I like to help try to get to the bottom of Photoshop issues.

As a graphics software developer who sells into the Photoshop market I find knowing the product and market very well are advantages.

In this particular case I'm trying to reinforce or dispel a growing feeling I am getting that Mac users in general are less happy with Photoshop CS6 because they're generally having more problems than PC users - for some reason.

My best guess at the moment is that Photoshop CS6, with a higher reliance on advanced GPU support, isn't able to use the GPUs in Macs as effectively as those on PCs because the existing drivers don't give the solid support needed, and Mac users simply don't have the flexibility to mix and match driver releases with their OS updates that PC users have.

I also am starting to wonder whether there is more PC development talent at Adobe than Mac, though I know well that some of the very brightest people there do work on both systems.

What's your agenda, David, with your first post in this thread? Alienating people you don't know? At least my posts are on-topic.

-Noel

If you'd been in this thread from the beginning you'd have seen I've been active from the start - it's very convenient for Adobe that suddenly you can only see the most recent replies, not the rest of the 270 comments that form the main bulk of the discussion.

If you could see the rest of the comments, you'd see that this issue is happening on PC and Mac. You'd also see that peoples main issue is that they have gone from a perfectly functional CS5 Photoshop to a CS6 Photoshop that has massive slowdown in some circumstances.

What's my agenda? Getting the software fixed, pure and simple. I'm tired of being told that it's my problem that Photoshop has regressed and your "it's fine for me" comment is of no help whatsoever.

Funny thing... My goal is the same - help Adobe determine what their problems are so that they can develop fixes. I just don't go about accusing other people of subversion in the process of doing it. Instead I try to catalyze the information flow.

In case you hadn't noticed, Adobe seems to gravitate toward considering this a performance issue, and where there are performance issues I've shown that they've been around for multiple versions.

That you think there is just one issue here ("this issue" - your words, singular) shows that you really don't understand the complexity of the process running state of the art graphics software. It's pretty clear from the thread above that there's something Mac-specific going on, among other things. And much confusion.

You have to accept that a certain level of hardware-software integration responsibility lies on your shoulders. This is the price we all pay for being able to buy software that cost millions of dollars to develop for only a few hundred bucks.

I've shown that the software can actually work well; apparently all the parts of my PC system (GPU, drivers, etc.) all happen to support Photoshop CS6 perfectly. That's your clue to look for integration problems on your own system, and seek specific fixes (e.g., driver updates). Waiting for someone else to fix your problems is going to be frustrating.

What video card do you have, and what driver version have you installed?

What, specifically, seems to be slow on your system?

-Noel

This is one of the prime reasons I swapped to Mac after having used Windows machines since version 2.0 (before that DOS).

Mac users do no have the flexibility of a lot of hardware choice (unless you start flashing your own VGA cards in which case all bets are off).

Aside from the various hardware flukes that can have an adverse effect on Windows machines I too believe there definitely is an issue that seems to effect Mac machines more.

If only for the fact Mac users are less flexible in their choice of hardware and drivers (which is a good thing in most cases).

I am glad several issues have been found and are being worked on. Hopefully these will be resolved quickly too and if there are any other issues hopefully they will be found soon as well.

As for demanding my money back... this is not an option when you make your money from this software. We just have to make do with what we have.

a strange thing is this "get satisfaction" forum. how is this possible not to see the older posts????? i don't think this is right, how can we quote something said here???

hi noel,
im kind of confused about your results with the large file.

you are working on quite the same configuration as mine, also the same year.
mine is mac pro and yours is pc. both are not the latest and the best.

i tried to upgrade as much as possible, ati 5770, ssd, 16gb ram.
almost exactly the same hardware as yours.

now i'm confused! how is this possible that you don't see any slowdown, even with the "thumbs on".

i could not find an older post here because we see only the recent 15 now, but i'm quite sure that there was someone with really maxed out PC, a lot of ram, etc, who also had a major slowdown?

is it possible for you to make a short movie of moving the white dots in the large document i posted with the thumbs on.

if that is true what you are saying, than i'm going to buy this old PC of yours and work on it from now on.
and also finally realize that adobe is not supporting apple anymore:))

I'm glad we've got someone to "catalyze the information flow" on this thread - that's really helpful

Chris, is the layer thumbnails slowdown issue being worked on, or you can't even reproduce it? Is it an isolated or widespread issue?

If it's related to CPU and video card, I'm on Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz, using nVidia 9400M and 9600M GT. Mac OS 10.7.4. All CS6 updates applied.

Extreme slowdowns are occurring when layer thumbnails are enabled (especially nudging multiple layers).

Thanks

Any update and or response to the jagged pan some of us have been seeing? I commented a couple weeks ago about this issue.

Chris, have you been able to duplicate it at all? To recap, I have a ~100mb file with around 150 layers open (this problem is not unique to this file size or layer count - it happens on small files in both regards as well). Most tasks between PS CS6 and PS CS5 are pretty comparable, except for the pan with the hand tool, or double finger pan on the trackpad. I use this tool all the time and the jagged movement really screws up my workflow, especially on larger files.

I am experiencing this problem in its worst form on my macbook air, i7 1.8 ghz w/ 4 gigs of ram, os: 10.8. Before you blame my specs as the culprit, please remember the same pan on the same file is at least 2x as fast on PS CS5 than it is on CS6.

I downloaded Ray's file and experienced the following:

There are speed improvements in CS6. However, there are also slowdowns.

Faster in CS6, slower in CS5:
* Opening the file (dramatic difference)
* Panning/Scrolling (subtle but palpable difference)

Faster in CS5, slower in CS6:
* Dragging a layer or group of layers
* Screen refresh/redraw when turning a layer/layer group on and off

I've optimized my CS6 settings as suggested in this thread, so the dragging around of layers and screen redraw when turning layers on/off are *tolerable* enough in CS6 that I can now spend the majority of my time in it, but they it certainly doesn't match up with CS5 performance in those two specific areas for me.

I'm on a MacBook Pro; have posted my full system info earlier above.

I previously had problems with Photoshop CS6 under OSX Lion - especially with large files with multiple layers (and especially with shape layers).

Essentially moving multiple items became very slow when any size thumbnail was turned on in the Layers palette. I know this is a widely reported problem.

Well this was solved for me by buying a new Mac with a much better graphics card!

Now I've updated to Mountain Lion and the slowness has returned - moving single items around is jerky. Moving multiple items around is extremely slow.

Once again the problems disappear if I turn off thumbnails in the Layers palette.

Sigh.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Photoshop CS6 slowness returns after update to OS X Mountain Lion.