[octavian]

Hello everyone, I've been looking through the forums and can't find anything relating to my problem, so here goes. Hopefully Bob or someone can help....

I'm using a mac pro intel duo core. unfortunately I only have one gig of ram right now. I'm running photoshop cs2. Now i used to own a dual g5 (non intel) with 2 gigs of ram until Maya 8 Fried it completely.

problem with both machines has always been when running cs2 and setting a brush to "direction" or with certain "scatter" properties, photoshop would eventually crash. No warnings, nothing. it just stops working and I have to force quit it. thus I lose any unsaved work.

I've allocated separate scratch disks, given it up to 200 gigs of it's own space, changed history states down to like 2, you name it..... for some reason I can't get any better results. as you painters know, direction and scatter are crucial. I'm going to buy more ram, probably boost it up to 6 or 8 gigs. But I think that this is not the problem. I'm not sure more ram will help.

Can anyone help? does anyone have this same problem, at all?

I'm desperate, please for the love of god, tell me where I'm going wrong.

k thx

[Ben Mauro]

i dont know how it works on a mac, but i have that problem with my PC.

On a PC if your GDI Objects reaches over a certain number it will freeze up. on
mine its about 4,500. and about 1,500,000k in my memory usage.

it happens regularly if you load up a lot of custom brushes and open all the
brushes up in the right click window. For some reason it is really taxing on the
system, it builds up over repeated use until it locks up.

Though none of this solves the problem....and i have no idea how to bring up a
task manager on a mac.

i have CS2 lock up on me 1-5 times a day...

[FallDamage]

I had the same problem, and I reverted to CS1 because of it. I couldn't find any other solution, given how much I was using the scatter brush at the time.

[B0b]

can u link to the brush, i'll give it a bash on CS3

[octavian]

Ben mauro: hey man, it's good to hear from you, how you been! hope all is well with you. It's relieving to hear and actual explanation of what is going on. sorry that it happens to you too, but at least I am not alone. you learn to save a whole lot dont you? haha. so do you think if I reduce the amount of brushes in my file, that would help? I do notice that the more brushes I have loaded, the more cs2 seems to chug along.

Fall Damage: that is not good news.... I wonder if cs3 is any better?

BOb: you can find two of the problematic brushes here: http://www.screamingzen.com/BOb

However I must admit that it doesnt really matter which brush you use... as long as it has "direction" set in the shape dynamics under "angle jitter" tis going to crash on ye, er.... me. also scatter does it quite a bit too. basically if I don't use a brush with the most minimal characteristics, it's going to freeze up at some random point... apparently following what Ben Mauro said in his above post.

I hope cs3 solves all this nonesense. Behave photoshop, behave.

[Ben Mauro]

yeah, save all your presets and setup, then its not a big deal.
just got CS3 so i will see how it stack up. not sure if you reduce the amount of brushes if it will solve the problem.

things are well, just chuggin' along.

[B0b]

what size canvas are you working on with these brushes?

[octavian]

Hey BOb, I'm working on around 1200 pix on widest side to start. it does it then, just as much as it does it when I uprez to around 3k on the widest side. but it doesn't really matter what size i use. how'd those brushes work out in cs3? I'm curious to know.

[Ben Mauro]

been using CS3 all day.....still crashes, and a bit buggy.

but its a little better.

[octavian]

yikes, not good news. you know, I've been talking to some other who use PC's and or Macs and they dont seem to have these problems. it seems spotty at best. maybe it's the "version" of cs2 that we have Ben, and I don't mean the latest "up to date" fixes. but then again if it's doing it with Cs3... I dunno. Cicinimo uses a lot of brushes with direction and stuff and he told me he doesn't seem to have these problems. hrm.

[B0b]

on my laptop - dual core2 - 2GB RAM - 10GB Scratch - (XP SP2) i've played with 5000x5000px with multi layers and both brushes without a problem.. (75% RAM usage to PS , image cache of 8 and history of 10)

i'm going to try it on my newly installed vista 64 workstation tomorrow

largest brush i was using was a 1200..

[octavian]

thanks for this info BOb. I'm gonna have to work out these bugs. or just break down and go back to a windows machine.... because my windows machine at work doesn't have these problems with the same brushes at all.

on a side note, I found that if I'm running AIM at the same time as photoshop, the crashing happens a lot more. if I don't run AIM while using Photoshop, then I can paint almost free of crashes. wtf? is AIM some sort of huge memory hog?

also, how important are the scratch disks? because I have had one set up before and have gone without and don't seem to notice much of a difference in Photoshop's behavior. should photoshop be on the start up drive, and the scratch disk be a partition of a separate drive? right?

[Disco_Science]

I used your brushes in cs2 for 3 mins and it crashed, same thing with any directional settings all cs2 brushes will crash for me. I tried your brushes in cs3 and i've been working np for the last 20 mins.

These brushes are sweet btw=), u dont mind if i use them do you^_^.

I'm using cs3 extend btw.
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[B0b]

[xbrianx]

Hmm, if you do load all of your brushes in one right-click, try deleting the larger ones....or ones you don't need. Try deleting the brushes that come pre-set with the textures added....you can add them yourself I have a 3ghz Pentium 4 processor with 1gb of RAM. I almost always have 2 Firefox tabs open(Gmail Inbox and Meebo(I use it as AIM)) and with PS and Firefox open, I'm using about 700KB out of around 1600KB(that includes the pagefile space). I did a piece at 7200 pixels wide and Photoshop never closed, of course it did take a few seconds to move it around at full view.

Try removing brushes and textures you don't use, change the font preview to small(if it isn't already), and try turning off programs running in the background that you don't necessarily need. For example, that Quicktime program that is only for allowing it to open faster. All of those should help your PS startup time and hopefully stop the crashing.

[mattyuk]

I mentioned I had this, it was the Barbrieri brushes that fucked up mine. Since I reset the brushes, it works fine.

[machinesandhumans]

Hi I'm getting what sounds like the same exact issue as the rest of you. I am running CS3 on a Macbook Pro. I have previously had this issue on a PC running CS2 and I have never had it happen in CS. All this of course doesn't move the problem forward for anyone, but i'm glad to see that I'm not the only one with this issue. I talked to some Adobe techs today who didn't have much help, but I will do the same tomorrow and link them to this page if I can. I do note an inconsistency with the crash time. Sometimes it will happen immediately and sometimes it will take a few minutes of constant brush work. I don't believe it is an image size issue, I was running a relatively small 1200x1500 pixels.

Ack.

Mark

[B0b]

how much RAM do you guys have alocated to PS?

[xbrianx]

B0b: I have a gig of ram, and use the stock amount that PS has it set to. Like I said, I've worked on a 7200 wide image WITH Firefox running and multiple tabs(which usually makes it around 70MB, I think) and still had no problem of long waiting time or crashing. So, I never really bothered changing it.

[octavian]

Hey, it's great to see this thread rolling....
obviously not everyone encounters the same problem. But it's refreshing to see I'm not the only one.

BOb: I'm using a Mac. I've allocated 75% of my 1gig of ram to ps.

Xbrianx: hey man, thanks for the info. I've tried all that. I've had it so streamlined that there were no patterns, no preview window open, nothing extra going, only ONE brush loaded... and when I put it on "direction", it crashes... everytime. it never crashes at the same amount of strokes, always random. I cant even begin to understand what the feck is going on with PS cs2

Machinesandhumans: cool lemme know what the techs say!

Disco_Science: hey, NP

[machinesandhumans]

Hi people.

I just talked with Adobe and really no luck there yet (fourth call, hold music nearly unbearable) I have found one solution that seems to work so far, but Adobe doesn't understand why. On the advice of a Mac Tech I opened CS3 using Rosetta and haven't crashed it yet. Supposedly this will run slower, but may work as a temporary solution. Has anyone else tried this? (To use Rosetta, right click CS3 app icon go to "get info" then in info click "Open Using Rosetta" button, then open PS)

Incidentally as a test while running in native Mac environment I deactivated direction control on one of the offending brushes and this seems to keep it from crashing. Direction seems to work with Rosetta.

I am running OSX 10.4.10. Is anybody here running 10.5 and having this problem? Have people reinstalled CS3 and found the problem to be persistent (I have not reinstalled yet).

Also of note, Mac Tech was a Beta tester for CS3 and mentioned that there was a known issue with CS3 beta and custom brushes, brushes disappeared during use but no crash....

as to Ram question Bob, PS ram usage is set to 70%.

.....oh one further note (after 5th call to Adobe (and an extended Muzak version of Marvin Gaye's "Aint' Nothing Like the Real Thing")). There is a known issue involving installation of cs3 after uninstalling any downloaded beta version. They are reccommending that I uninstall CS3 completely (all apps) and run a new cleaner script for this problem, then reinstall, will report back with more....

Mark

[octavian]

Mark, thanks for your insightful and promising post!!! keep us up to date and I hope the music doesn't kill u first. Voice jail can be the worst place to be stuck imo.

[Guillaume Le Tual]

I know that bug very well. It has nothing to do with your Mac/Pc.

Update your Photoshop CS2 to at least version 9.01, or to the latest version (ver 9.02). They have fixed that bug in version 9.01

"Adobe Photoshop 9.0.1 (CS2) update - English only
� Photoshop no longer hangs for several seconds when using painting tools with quick strokes." (they should have said crash!)

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3446


CS3 (version 10) doesn�t do this bug for me, neither did version 9.01 and above.

Of course your system's stability and capacity has a lot to do if Photoshop crash or not. But in this case, it's a software bug... I used to always save my file before turning on the brush scattering option.

Guillaume Le Tual
www.letual.ca

[octavian]

hey Guillaume la tual: I have installed 9.02 however I went straight for it from 9.0... i've just reinstalled cs2 and put on 9.01 first. so far, I'm not having the problem occur. maybe this does fix it... but it seems you can't install 9.02 until 9.01 or it skips fixing the problem. I'm doing a lot of work today from home so we'll see if it crashes.
thanks so much for your reply.

[octavian]

so I've uninstalled cs2. I reinstalled it, then added the first patch 9.0.1 and then patch 9.0.2 and this seems to have solved my problem!!! I painted all day yesterday with a brush using the directional setting. today i will turn on AIM and paint with those settings and see if I can get away with that too!

so if you were like me, and had just installed 9.0.2 thinking it will contain both fixes and fix your problem, it wont. you must install in order. or just install 9.0.1 at least.

a BIG THANKS to everyone for helping and especially Guillaume le tual for coming up with a solution.

thank you thank you thank you.

[speculart]

this has been a problem for me on every computer I have ever worked on Pc or Mac. It is the biggest problem with photoshop and the only problem I have with it. I was hoping that it would be fixed with cs3 but still remains the same. I am a little confused that Adobe dont know about it as its a common problem and easy to replicate. This thread gives me some relief in companionship at least!