Troubleshooting Common Issues With Brushes In Photoshop For Better Results – Adobe Photoshop is one of the most popular programs in the world. Used for countless things, it is a juggernaut of software that helps many developers around the world.
But with all these features come performance hits as well, especially when it comes to rich tasks like drawing and painting.
Troubleshooting Common Issues With Brushes In Photoshop For Better Results
It really hurts when you’re 16 hours into a rough drawing and Photoshop starts to lag and slow down.
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So, in this article, I will be going through everything you can do to get back to work in Photoshop!
These settings focus on changes within Photoshop itself. We will be tinkering with ways to test and squeeze performance down a bit and hope to fix our remaining issues.
Photoshop, and pretty much every other drawing program, does all or most of the brush calculations on the CPU. And to be honest, not all of them are well organized.
You don’t see it because people tend to use small brush sizes, but it becomes noticeable if you increase your brush size above 100 pixels.
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So there isn’t much to “fix” just reducing the brush size, but unfortunately there isn’t much you can do if brush size is your issue.
If you want to paint large areas, the most efficient move would be to select an area and fill it.
You can try to make a choice to get a more “natural” look of the brush as well. Or you can use a small brush to paint it. It’s not perfect, but it is what it is.
Photoshop has to track each pixel and its position. So, more pixels equals more things you can store. This slows down Photoshop and your computer.
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In general, even for print media, you shouldn’t go above 16k. And for things that can only be seen digitally, there is no format that goes above 4 – 8k resolution.
Fun fact: When you draw something in most digital programs, you don’t “draw” anything. What you are doing is putting tiny dots, thousands of times over and over. They are so close that it looks like a long line/stroke, but in reality, they are just dots on a line.
So what you are doing by increasing or decreasing the “brush area” is increasing/decreasing the distance between each dot.
In particular, the smaller the distance between the dots, the more dots you have and the easier your line will look. And vice versa if you increase the distance.
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And as you can imagine, more dots require more tools. It means a lower brush spacing value requires more drive power than a higher value.
There is no fixed value you can set the brush spacing to; it depends on what you can afford. In general, you can increase the area of the brush up to 15 – 30% without the individual dots being too visible. So play around with it to find out what works for you without reducing too much.
The “Smoothing” setting in Photoshop softens your strokes to make it easier to create clean strokes. But it makes it look like your stroke is left behind your spring.
If you have a low brush position value, the brush will appear to be left behind your source.
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If you have a high brush smoothing value, it will appear to “sprout” in place when the smoothing is turned on.
So make sure you don’t have your smoothness turned on (set it to 0% or a lower value if you don’t want it) if your brush looks left.
But they can slow down your brushes because they add more steps between the first click and when your stroke is drawn.
You have to be careful when turning off some of the brush properties, though, because some special brushes depend on these changes to control how they behave. So if you delete everything, it can seem simple and boring.
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But if you have too many brush issues, you should try and see if turning off some of the electric brush effects is useful.
One of the reasons why Photoshop can be slow is that you don’t have enough RAM. This usually happens if you have less than 16 GB of RAM and you are working on projects with tons of steps or frames.
Photoshop usually does a good job of getting the right amount of RAM to allocate for itself; if you find that it is not enough, you can change it manually.
Just click the “Edit” button at the top left, scroll down to “Preferences” and click on “Performance.”
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Depending on how much RAM you have, I usually recommend not going above 90% of the allocation. Some parts of your system also need more RAM to run, and if it’s not enough, you may face lag and hangups.
This setting and the next one is a new addition to Photoshop, but it is very welcome.
This arrangement means that some Photoshop programs that were previously dependent on CPU speed can use the GPU instead, running those programs and freeing up valuable CPU processing power for other things.
If you are using the latest version of Photoshop and have a compatible Graphics Card, this set should be enabled manually, but if not, here is how to enable it.
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First click on “Edit” but at the top left, scroll down to “Preferences” and click on “Performance.”
It’s a good feature that speeds up many of Photoshop’s CPU-bound features by allowing Photoshop to use more cores than it could before. This means that Photoshop is all faster and Multithreaded Compositing is enabled.
Similar to using your GPU, this option is automatically enabled if you have a compatible CPU in newer versions of Photoshop.
Click on “Edit” but at the top left, scroll down to “Preferences” and then click on “Performance.”
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Just check the box in front of the option labeled “multiple combination”, and you will start using this new function.
As for using your GPU, I would recommend restarting Photoshop to make sure the mod changes are made.
In Photoshop and other Adobe products, “Scratch Disks” are temporary storage areas created by the tool to save data while working on a file. They may be in one or more storage locations on your PC.
You can think of it as Photoshop’s “cache” for quickly saving and retrieving temporary data.
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As you can imagine, these scratch disks benefit from faster drives with more storage. Pretty much everything in Photoshop is affected by scratch disks, so it’s important to make sure you have enough backup for them.
If your hard drive is full, if you want to move your scratch disk to another disk, here’s how to do it:
Click on “Edit” in the upper left corner, scroll down to “Preferences” and then click on “Scratch Disks.”
After that, you will see the disc selection screen. This screen shows you how much space you have left on each drive and allows you to choose which drive you want to use as the primary disk.
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I recommend making sure your scratch disk is on a fast SSD with at least 50 – 100 GBs of free storage.
These are the changes made at the operating system level to make Photoshop work faster. You can achieve an incredible amount of performance by managing the applications running on your PC.
When you’re doing intensive tasks like Photoshop, you need all of your PC’s resources to go with it. But most of the tools have a nasty little way to install programs on your PC running in the background.
Sometimes these programs are important and valuable, but most of the time, they are worthless if you don’t put effort into them.
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Then there are programs you have open in the background on purpose, whether it’s a browser (especially Chrome with multiple tabs open), a chat program, E-Mail software, or something else. They can spend a lot of money.
I can’t tell you to delete something exactly, so you’ll have to make a management call here to determine which background programs you need and can remove.
Open the Windows Task Manager (Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc) and adjust the Programs that run with Memory usage or CPU usage to get the best results.
Giving Photoshop priority means you are telling your PC that Photoshop is an important application and should get the first share of the pie (PC resources), even if it hurts other applications.
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This is very important in Photoshop because the main program determines the allocation of CPU resources, and the CPU is the most important part of Photoshop’s brush performance.
It is important to understand that this is not a free operation, however. You are losing another request for CPU resources by giving us Photoshop.
Most of the time, this is fine. But if you