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13" Performs SO slowly with Adobe Software

M

marty1990

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 25, 2011
418
25
England
Now, am guessing it's due to my Adobe suite. Either way, it runs slow.

I do advertising in university, and I do a lot go graphic work. I had PS CS4 on my Windows laptop, and it ran perfectly.

Since I was doing a lot more graphical work, I forked out and bought the new, and current MBP 13". I went for a Mac because they're supposed to be brilliant at multi-tasking, as well as the fact 'professionals' supposedly use Mac's for graphic work.

However, if I have Photoshop CS5.5 open with iTunes running and Safari, the Mac lags. I figured it might have been due to the combination of all three being open, so I closed all but Safari and opened up Illustrator. It took about 5mins to open. Then it was really laggy, and trying to open up files took forever. I then closed it, and re-opened Photoshop. Tried to open a PSD and that took a few mins to open.

Everything else seems fine, so am guessing it's the Adobe software? I've also noticed when any Adobe software and iTunes is playing a song, the song skips.

What's going on?

Another thing that's bugging me with Photoshop... I again don't know whether it's the application on my Mac, but when I resize a brush, and go to use it on my canvas, there's no outline for the brush. I have to keep on adjusting the sizes until it works again. Finally, if I'm using a tool like the clone stamp, and attempt to change my tool, Photoshop just does't recognise I'm trying to change tool, and each time I click a specific icon, it thinks I'm still on the canvas and clones in something.

Flash is also very laggy. Especially on video's.
 
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marty1990 said:
Now, am guessing it's due to my Adobe suite. Either way, it runs slow.

I do advertising in university, and I do a lot go graphic work. I had PS CS4 on my Windows laptop, and it ran perfectly.

Since I was doing a lot more graphical work, I forked out and bought the new, and current MBP 13". I went for a Mac because they're supposed to be brilliant at multi-tasking, as well as the fact 'professionals' supposedly use Mac's for graphic work.

However, if I have Photoshop CS5.5 open with iTunes running and Safari, the Mac lags.
Click to expand...
Macs are good at multi-tasking, but Adobe is a resource hog. There are a few things you can check:

Performance tips for Mac OS X
 
Thanks for you reply. I added some more to the original post, since I posted before I'd finished. I realise I should have put them in a specific post for Adobe software... but figured I'd just lash it in here while I'm posting about Adobe.
 
marty1990 said:
Thanks for you reply. I added some more to the original post, since I posted before I'd finished. I realise I should have put them in a specific post for Adobe software... but figured I'd just lash it in here while I'm posting about Adobe.
Click to expand...

If by Flash you refer to Youtube - make the switch to HTML5 http://www.youtube.com/html5

Edit: With respect to issues with multi-tasking while utilizing Photoshop - that is weird, because I am almost positive my 13" MacBook Unibody [http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-2.0-aluminum-13-late-2008-unibody-specs.html] is less capable specs-wise than your Pro; however, I witness no such glitches in iTunes or with the brush tool. It is worth noting that I do use CS5. Whether this makes a difference, I don't know; but, again, I'm not having any problems.
Also, I have upgraded the RAM to 8GB - which certainly helps & is quite cheap nowadays.
 
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I've experienced a few of the brush bugs that you mentioned in Photoshop and I have only used it briefly since I installed the CS5 suite a week or two ago. I haven't noticed it being particularly slow, but the last time I used photoshop was on a six year old mac mini.
 
marty1990 said:
Another thing that's bugging me with Photoshop... I again don't know whether it's the application on my Mac, but when I resize a brush, and go to use it on my canvas, there's no outline for the brush. I have to keep on adjusting the sizes until it works again. Finally, if I'm using a tool like the clone stamp, and attempt to change my tool, Photoshop just does't recognise I'm trying to change tool, and each time I click a specific icon, it thinks I'm still on the canvas and clones in something.

Flash is also very laggy. Especially on video's.
Click to expand...

Check your preferences. Brush tips should be set to normal rather than precise. If they still don't show up hit caps lock to make sure that isn't the issue. It's had a few other brush tip bugs too though. Photoshop is very ram hungry. If it lacks enough ram, it goes to scratch disks, meaning if you're using a laptop, that's often your bottleneck. Current generation cpus are capable of running photoshop quite fast if you have the right supporting hardware. If you're just going to be short on resources, make sure you're not working at 16bpc (in case you do). It does occasionally alleviate banding issues in smooth surfaces when making heavy adjustments, but that's entirely avoidable anyway.

By the way, photoshop and the rest run fine on both macs and PCs these days. Macs had a ton of advantages for many years from fonts to software that was best supported (or only available) on Macs to better handling of colors. These days it makes practically no difference. It's just that it was like this for so long that Macs became kind of a standard in some of these areas (like publishing). They're still pretty much the norm in these areas, but it's not at all reflective of a lack of capability within Windows.
 
Strange, CS5.5 runs like a raped ape on my 13". Photoshop prolly takes 3 seconds to load. I'm sure 16gb of ram and the SSD are the culprit :)
 
Elbert C said:
Upgrade the RAM on your Mac.
Click to expand...

This. If you don't have at least 8GB RAM don't even bother installing CS5.5.

I have CS5.5 on my Windows workstation here, it has 2x2.5GHz quad-core Xeons and 8GB RAM it and CS5.5 runs like crap compared to CS4 on the same machine. Same for the Mac.
 
Sounds to me like something is wrong - even with a stock setup (5400rpm and 4gb memory) the current 13" pro is a decent if not amazing system for Photoshop.

Have you tried re-installing the system afresh? I think you might have some kind of software corruption with either your Adobe or Lion installations, or you might have a hardware fault. If this doesn't make a big difference, I'd take it in to Apple and see what they say.

Beyond the current issues, if you can afford it, I'd definitely suggest doing the upgrade to 8gb memory - it's very affordable at the moment and makes a *huge* difference for Photoshop. An SSD is also a big upgrade, but pretty expensive.
 
I'd definitely check the system memory usage in the activity monitor. You haven't said how much RAM you've got but I am a fairly basic user and have found that upgrading to 8GB has made a massive difference. I'm almost always over 4GB just with a few office apps, twitter, Safari open. If you're using Adobe CS then you should definitely upgrade to min 8GB, RAM is very cheap atm too, I paid about £30 in the UK recently for 2 x 4GB. Next best upgrade would be SSD but that's much more expensive obviously.
 
Re-install your applications to see if that makes a difference.

If not, check activity monitor. If this is the cause of your problems, then up grade to 8GB of RAM and if you have money lying around, invest in an SSD and your 13'' will perform like a 'raped ape'.
 
Personally I'd throw my more memory at the problem - push it up to 8GB minimum and maybe have a look at a faster hard disk (assuming you need a decent amount of space at a reasonable price), something like a 7200rpm. I'd also investigate whether it is possible to look for more 'Mac native' solutions like Pixelmator because unfortunately I don't think things are going to improve when it comes to Adobe on Mac OS X.
 
If more ram isn't an option at least boot into 32 bit mode. Just control click on the application icon ---> get info--->check the box that says run in 32 bit mode. If you're at 8GB of ram or more, there are several possible culprits. Try going into preferences under spotlight and moving your system/library folders to privacy so that it can't attempt to index scratch disks (really old bug). If it's still slow try the disablevmbuffering plugin, and turn off opengl drawing (do these one at a time to test). Also make sure photoshop isn't set to use all your ram. Don't set it over 70% or so. The system requires some, and starving Lion on ram is going to kill your performance right there. In fact if you're low on ram I'd drop what photoshop can use and test it at 50% or so and boot in 32 bit mode.

Another thing to test in photoshop, especially if low on ram, kill the navigator and histogram functions, and turn off thumbnails (layers, paths, channels, and whatever others). Doing that can definitely speed things up on larger files, and now is the time to get used to labeling things rather than relying solely on thumbnails :D. It's a good habit for later on.

MrNomNoms said:
I'd also investigate whether it is possible to look for more 'Mac native' solutions like Pixelmator because unfortunately I don't think things are going to improve when it comes to Adobe on Mac OS X.
Click to expand...

I can't agree with you on this part at all. He's an advertising student. Not only are Adobe products some of the most common in that area, but Pixemator lacks any kind of cmyk support. It would not be a good idea getting used to an interface which he couldn't use for work later on. It's pretty easy to just upgrade ram a bit, and possibly install a small ssd in the opti bay as a scratch disk if he still needs it.
 
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thekev said:
I can't agree with you on this part at all. He's an advertising student. Not only are Adobe products some of the most common in that area, but Pixemator lacks any kind of cmyk support. It would not be a good idea getting used to an interface which he couldn't use for work later on. It's pretty easy to just upgrade ram a bit, and possibly install a small ssd in the opti bay as a scratch disk if he still needs it.
Click to expand...

Actually this is what he said:

I do advertising in university, and I do a lot go graphic work.
Click to expand...

To me it sounds like he works for a university in the advertising department - you do know that universities do marketing? He never said he was a student only that he does 'advertising in university'.

Going back to what I said, it won't matter how much you chuck at Adobe you're going to always have lacklustre performance - Adobe have you by the balls and you have no where to run other than to accept what you're given. Btw, CYMK isn't something that is universally required in all facets of advertising.
 
MrNomNoms said:
To me it sounds like he works for a university in the advertising department - you do know that universities do marketing? He never said he was a student only that he does 'advertising in university'.
Click to expand...

"Advertising in University" says student to me.

"Advertising for a University/Advertising in a University" would suggest a workplace.
 
NutsNGum said:
Due to the slow eradication of the quality of the written English language, I would imagine.
Click to expand...

Some individuals, whose second language is English, fail to pick up on such nuances. Understandable, if this is the case.
Incidentally, many Americans, whose first & only language is English, fail to pick up on such nuances as well. Eradication? Sure, sounds about right.
 
visim91 said:
Some individuals, whose second language is English, fail to pick up on such nuances. Understandable, if this is the case.
Incidentally, many Americans, whose first & only language is English, fail to pick up on such nuances as well. Eradication? Sure, sounds about right.
Click to expand...

Not only Americans, plenty of people over here are the same.

"Should of, would of, could of."

"There, they're, their."

It's a travesty.
 
Don't forget affect and effect or the correct use of articles a, an, the, etc!
 
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