Photoshop Speed on Mac Question

[artofretouching]

I am finding that I can no longer use the Healing Brush with any level of real-time speed. It's too slow to use, and filled with inaccurate clicks. Does yours work as expected, or is is super slow too?

I am on an i7 Mac, and should be plenty fast, always has been. But for the past 24 hours, I went back to Mountain Lion 10.8 and re-installed up to El Capitan 10.11 testing Photoshop 2014 and 2015.5. I created a custom script that created the types of files I work on now (36mp Nikon at 16-bit with Smart Objects).

While I found that 10.8 with CC 2014 was the fastest with my Action by nearly a minute (compared to 10.10 and 10.11), the Healing part of the Action still had slowdown issues. I am wondering if The basic concept of Healing on top of a 7432px Smart Object at 16bit is simply not feasible.

The only thing I can think of, is that my own workflow is so non-destructive, that PS can no longer maintain it with these high megapixel cameras. We know that Lightroom is slow as molasses with them, so maybe Photoshop just can't handle it either?

[klev]

Re: Photoshop Speed on Mac Question

I don't understand the claims that it's non-destructive. If you reprocess an image or adjust warping on on some layer, you invalidate everything on top of it. That doesn't offer improvements.

Try the following. Check memory allocated to photoshop via its preferences. Check memory used in activity monitor. If you're good on both counts, try disabling thumbnails and closing the histogram palette. It doesn't seem to compute anything that is off screen, and this may be enough. That workflow still sounds like a cruel and unusual punishment though.

[skoobey]

Re: Photoshop Speed on Mac Question

Why do you want all those layers to be able to reverse, when the point of retouching is to change the image???

[artofretouching]

Re: Photoshop Speed on Mac Question

Thats exactly why I use Smart Objects, so I don't actually have many layers. One Smart Object contains all the RAW data that can be modified with Camera Raw, one cloning layer (only because Camera Raw's cloning sucks), and the Smart Object supports all of the Smart Filters that can be modified at any point in time. So, I only use one pixel based layer, out of necessity.

[artofretouching]

Re: Photoshop Speed on Mac Question

After further testing, Smart Objects had nothing to do with it. Turns out it was the "New and Improved" Advanced Graphics Processor options. I had 30 Bit still enabled from testing. Once I disabled everything on this page, all my issues went away.

I can also offer I tried changing the memory options from 70% to 20%. Would you believe Healing went even faster? My guess is that since Macs have such low ram anyway (usually 8 or 16gb), it's all going to the scratch disk anyway. So it just frees up the OS.

Who knows. It's all arbitrary anyway. As my extensive testing showed we were all better off 2 years ago. But largely, it doesn't really matter since all tests were in the same ballpark of results. Just dont turn on that 30-Bit option.

[klev]

Re: Photoshop Speed on Mac Question

After further testing, Smart Objects had nothing to do with it. Turns out it was the "New and Improved" Advanced Graphics Processor options. I had 30 Bit still enabled from testing. Once I disabled everything on this page, all my issues went away.

I can also offer I tried changing the memory options from 70% to 20%. Would you believe Healing went even faster? My guess is that since Macs have such low ram anyway (usually 8 or 16gb), it's all going to the scratch disk anyway. So it just frees up the OS.

That's good information. I didn't know how much ram you had, but OSX is a bit ridiculous. It swaps constantly, and it's worse if things are tied up. You can alleviate a bit more in the way of irritations by disallowing spotlight indexing on the path where Adobe writes its proprietary pagefile. I can't remember the exact path, but disabling indexing on /Library works. You shouldn't have to poke around there anyway, as it's a very bad place to store anything temporary. I can't remember if any caches are there, but if so it's better to use a script to use a script to deal with that in a consistent manner. I would say a cron script, but I don't know how to script a forced reboot on OSX (standard unix halt commands aren't a good idea).

Who knows. It's all arbitrary anyway. As my extensive testing showed we were all better off 2 years ago. But largely, it doesn't really matter since all tests were in the same ballpark of results. Just dont turn on that 30-Bit option.

It happens. Apple rearranged a number of things with El Capitan to the point where I'm surprised CS6 still works. I had to completely reinstall a bunch of /usr/bin packages, eg LaTeX and OpenCV, basically anything that I handled through brew to avoid dealing with local or user level installations.

[jayp]

Re: Photoshop Speed on Mac Question

Artofretouching, I have a Mac Pro, late 2008, dual 4 core Xeon with 10GB of RAM. CS6 worked great no matter what size the image was, but CC, starting with 2014, has been terrible. Many aspects are much slower than previous versions, but the Healing brush in particular does as you said, especially on images with multiple copies of the background. I contacted support, when I first got CC 2014, and got all the usual questions about other software, third party plugins, etc., but they never addressed the speed problem, and as far as I know, still haven't. It appears to get a bit worse with each update as well.