Dealing With Tool Lag In Photoshop: Tips And Tricks For Smoother Editing – Adobe Photoshop is one of the most popular programs in the world. Used for a number of things, it’s a spin-off program that helps countless creators around the world.
But with all these features come some performance bottlenecks, especially when it comes to resource-intensive tasks like drawing and painting.
Dealing With Tool Lag In Photoshop: Tips And Tricks For Smoother Editing
It’s a real pain when you spend 16 hours in a complex drawing, and Photoshop starts lagging and slowing down.
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So in this article I’m going to go through everything you can do to potentially get some performance back in Photoshop!
These fixes focus on changes to Photoshop itself. We will tweak the performance settings to try and get a bit more performance and hopefully fix the lag issues.
Photoshop, and almost every other drawing program, does all or most of the brush calculations on the CPU. And to be completely honest, they’re not that optimized.
You don’t notice this because people tend to use small brush sizes, but it becomes more noticeable when you increase the brush size above 100 pixels.
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So it’s not really a “fix” to just reduce the brush size, but unfortunately there’s not much more you can do if the brush size is what’s holding you back.
If you want to paint large areas, a more efficient workflow would be to select an area and then fill it.
You can try the wash option to get a more “natural” look and brushes. Or you can use a smaller brush to draw it. It’s not ideal, but it is what it is.
Photoshop needs to keep track of each pixel and its state. So more pixels means more things to track. It will soften Photoshop and your computer.
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Generally speaking, even for print media, you don’t need to go above 16k. And for things that will only be viewed digitally, it usually doesn’t make sense to go above 4 – 8k resolution.
Fun fact: When you draw something in most digital art programs, you’re not “drawing” anything. What you’re actually doing is placing extremely tiny dots, thousands of times on each stroke. So close that they look like one long line/dash, but in reality they’re just a bunch of dots in a line.
So what you’re doing by increasing or decreasing the “brush spacing” is increasing/decreasing the distance between each point.
Basically, the smaller the distance between the dots, the more dots there are and the smoother your line will look. And the opposite is true when you increase the distance.
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And as you can imagine, more points means more resources needed. This means that lower brush spacing values require more processing power than larger values.
There is no set value where you can adjust the spacing between the brushes; it depends on what you can give up. In general, you can increase the distance between the brushes to about 15 – 30% without the individual dots being too visible. So play around with it to find out what works for you without too much delay.
The Soften setting in Photoshop softens your stroke so it’s easier to create clean strokes. But it also makes it look like your stroke is lagging behind the cursor.
If you have a small brush spacing value, the brush will appear to stay smoothly behind your cursor.
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If you have a high smoothing value for the brush, it will appear to “snap” into place when you enable smoothing.
So make sure you don’t have antialiasing turned on (set it to 0% or a low value when you don’t need it) if your brush seems laggy.
But they can also slow down your brushes because they essentially add more steps between the first click and the drawing of the stroke.
However, you should be careful to disable some of the brush dynamics, as some specific brushes rely on these dynamics to look the way they do. So if you turn everything off, it can look plain and boring.
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But if you’re having trouble with extreme brush lag, you should try to see if turning off some of the dynamic brush effects helps.
One of the reasons Photoshop can slow down is because you don’t have enough RAM. This is especially prone if you have less than 16GB of RAM and are working on projects with thousands of layers or frames.
Photoshop generally does a good job of choosing a good amount of RAM for itself; if you think it is not enough, you can also change it manually.
Just click the Change button in the upper left corner, scroll down to Preferences, and then click Performance.
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Depending on how much RAM you have, I generally advise not to exceed 90% of the allocation. Other parts of your system also need some RAM to run, and if you don’t have enough, you can experience system-wide lag and lag.
This setting and the one immediately after it are fairly new additions to Photoshop, but they are very welcome.
Specifically, this setting means that some Photoshop processes that previously relied on the CPU can use the GPU instead, significantly speeding up those processes and freeing up valuable processing power for other uses.
If you’re using the latest version of Photoshop and have a compatible graphics card, this setting should be automatically enabled for you, but if not, here’s how you can enable it yourself.
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First click on “Change”, but in the upper left corner, scroll down to “Preferences” and then click on “Performance”.
It’s a great feature that speeds up many CPU-bound aspects of Photoshop by allowing Photoshop to use more cores than it could before. This means that all of Photoshop is much faster with multithreaded compositing enabled.
Just like using your GPU, this option is also automatically enabled if you have a compatible CPU in newer versions of Photoshop.
Click Change, but in the upper left corner, scroll down to Preferences, then click Performance.
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Just check the box in front of the marked “Multithreaded Composition” option and start using this new feature.
As with using your GPU, I suggest restarting Photoshop to make sure the setting change takes effect.
In Photoshop and other Adobe products, “Scratch Disks” are temporary locked storage locations created by the application to save data while working on a file. They can be on one or more storage devices on your computer.
You can think of them as a “hot” storage location for Photoshop for relatively quick storage and retrieval of temporarily stored data.
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As you can imagine, these scratch drives benefit from being on fast drives with plenty of space. Almost everything in Photoshop is affected by scratch disks, so it’s important to make sure you have enough space for them.
If your main drive is filling up or you want to move your scratch drive to another drive, here’s how to do it:
Click Edit, but in the upper left corner, scroll down to Preferences, then click Scratch Disks.
After that, you will see a screen to select the scratch disk. This screen shows you how much space is left on each drive and lets you choose which drives you want to use as scratch drives.
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I suggest making sure your scratch drive is on a fast SSD with at least 50 – 100GB of free storage space.
These are changes made at the operating system level to make Photoshop run faster. You can achieve incredible performance by optimizing the applications running on your computer.
When you’re running resource-intensive tasks like Photoshop, you need all of your computer’s resources on it. But many apps have a nasty way of running programs on your computer in the background.
Sometimes these programs are necessary and important, but most of the time they are useless if you don’t actively use them.
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And then there are the programs you intentionally have open in the background, whether it’s a browser (especially Chrome with multiple tabs open), a chat program, email software, or something else. They can consume a significant amount of resources.
I can’t tell you to turn off anything specific, so you have to make a decision here to see what background programs you need and what you can get rid of.
Open Windows Task Manager (press Ctrl + Shift + Esc) and sort running apps by memory or CPU usage to find the biggest culprit.
Giving the Photoshop process the highest priority is basically telling your computer that Photoshop is an important application and should get the first piece of the pie (computer resources), even at the expense of other possible applications.
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This is especially important for Photoshop because process priority largely determines the allocation of CPU resources, and the CPU is the most important component for Photoshop brush performance.
However, it is important to understand that this is not a free show. You are simply taking CPU resources away from another application by giving it to Photoshop.
Most of the time, that’s fine. But if you