I use a 2.6 MacBook Pro with 4 Gig of RAM every day. Everything on this machine runs beautifully, and I rarely, if ever, experience enough lag in any app to become frustrated.
Photoshop CS4 is the only exception.
Extremely frustrating problems include:
- up to 10 second pause before refresh when zooming in and out.
- 5 to 20 second pauses when selecting/deselecting layers.
- stuttering and crippling lag when dragging an image around, especially when zoomed in.
- unresponsive reactions to layer nudging.
- anywhere from 10 second to 5 minute (not an exaggeration) pause while saving for web, accompanied by frequent crashes.
- all of the above problems are completely random and not consistently reproduceable, though they occur very regularly.
As a professional designer, I’ve been used to ignoring Photoshop CS3 and concentrating on the work I was doing. This is exactly how a good tool should function. With Photoshop CS4 I spend far more time frustrated and conscious of the unresponsive & clumsy tool than I do paying attention to what I’m trying to do. Apart from being constantly and unbelievably frustrating, it’s costing me time, and therefore money, and affecting the quality of my work.
Dear Adobe, you should be very worried. I have spent a great deal of energy lately wishing for an alternative to Photoshop. Having customers whose loyalty is based on nothing more than a lack of viable alternatives to your product is a perfect opportunity for a competitor to drink your milkshake, and earn the gratitude of customers like myself. You, the creators of the Quark killer InDesign, should know that very well.
The first Photoshop CS4 update, 11.0.1, solved none of my problems. As a customer who bought CS4 new, and not as an upgrade, I don’t have the option of downgrading to CS3, although I would dearly love to. Providing me with a free downgrade wouldn’t really solve my problem – Photoshop CS4 would still be painfully slow – but at least I could work in peace again.
How about it Adobe?
Are you a designer using Photoshop CS4? Tell me about your experiences in the comments below.