Slow response in PSCC with selections brush

[Stagecoach]

For the past couple of years I have been happy with the speed of response of my i5 desktop for all my PS work. This often consists of working on some 25 odd RAWs from the D800 in ACR and working on single images in PS with many layers.

Just recently I have started serious working with selections and have found the speed of response slow to erratic when working on a single image in PS when in the "selections" mode and brushing, especially when using the 'refine edge' brush.

I have set up all PS preferences as per 'experts' advice and tested various combinations/changes but there is no improvement. I also have anything else shut down that could use RAM.

My desktop only has 8G RAM and after much searching I can not get additional RAM of the DDR-1333 CL9 type in the country. I can of course order from abroad but post is somewhat sloooooow at present.

The desktop uses the onboard graphics and I do not have a separate one fitted.

My question is; Is there a possibility that fitting a graphics card could speed things up in this specific situation?

For info, if any use, here's my desktop spec.

[Polar01]

Just a thought, have you tried setting up a scratch drive this I believe may help.

Cheers: Allan

[Stagecoach]

Just a thought, have you tried setting up a scratch drive this I believe may help.

Cheers: Allan

My scratch drive was set to 'C' in PS preferences Alan which is an SSD with loads of space. I have also tried with it set to a virtually empty SATA drive as well, no difference.

[Stagecoach]

I have undertaken a test that 'may' give a clue.

A full size image was cropped to the area that I required to make my selection from. From this I produced three jpeg images in PS saved at max quality 12;

a) 4586 x 4586 (not reduced)
b) 3000 x 3000
c) 1500 x 1500

In the smallest image c) both brush and refine edge brush worked very fast, no lag.
In the medium image b) both brush and refine edge brush worked reasonably well with little lag.
In the largest image a) both brush and refine edge brush worked very slow, with much lag.

The downside here of course is that larger images are easier to work with and I also need them as large as possible.

Here's an unfinished example of what I'm doing.

[revi]

Well, there is Adobe's GPU faq, where it says that "select and mask" is OpenCL-accelerated.
Not sure how the situation is now, but at one time, the OpenCL implementation on the on-board Intel
GPU's wasn't all that good (or inexistant). A modern GPU from e.g. AMD or NVIDIA has good OpenCL
support, so that could help in your case.

As for the RAM, if your computer starts paging to disk, it will slow down tremendously, even with an SSD.
If that happens regularly while you are working on an image, extra RAM would be my first priority
(no use having a fast GPU if the RAM is the bottleneck).

[Stagecoach]

Thanks for the info Remco,

I think I may have 'cracked' it

With regard to the RAM I had been watching it's performance usage on File Manager using the large and small files and it had always indicated between 1.3 to 2.1 GB available and I had never witnessed a spike when things slowed drastically during that task. PS allows a percentage limit of RAM to be set and I had not witnessed this being reached.

I delved into the BIOS and set it for 'Performance' and found this gave no improvement.

Then I noticed the Icon on the desktop 'Intel HD Graphics Control Panel' and under 3D settings (I don't do 3D) there was a box called General Settings with choices of Performance, Balanced or Quality. It was set on Balanced so I set it to Performance, no change. Tried 'Quality' and I have now opened the same large file 6 times, worked on it, deleted it, re-opened and response speed of the same selection brushes that were slow and lagging before have been fine.

What this 3D setting did and why, I have not got a clue but will monitor things.

For info I found this document useful;

https://www.informit.com/articles/ar...5887&seqNum=13

[Manfred M]

It looks like your RAM is marginal as is your video card. As I recall some of the functionality uses OpenCL, as Remco has mentioned.

My computer is getting a bit long in the tooth as well, but I am running with 32GB or RAM and have a workstation level video card with 8GB of video RAM. I had to replace the card a couple of years ago because it no longer met Adobe's minimum spec for a card (not enough video RAM) and replacing it definitely made a noticeable difference.

That being said the advanced selections and "Select & Mask" which is the new(ish) name for "Refine Edge" can really bog down with a large file. That operation seems to be quite resource intensive. I suspect that I will have to update my machine in the next year or so because some of the operations are becoming more painful.

You already have an SSD, so that is helping vs using a mechanical hard drive when paging to disk. I use an M.2 drive as my working drive when using Photoshop (and other Adobe software, especially Premiere Pro and After Effects) as it is noticeably faster than my SSD, but the M.2 requires a motherboard that is compatible with that technology.

[Stagecoach]

It looks like your RAM is marginal as is your video card. As I recall some of the functionality uses OpenCL, as Remco has mentioned.

My computer is getting a bit long in the tooth as well, but I am running with 32GB or RAM and have a workstation level video card with 8GB of video RAM. I had to replace the card a couple of years ago because it no longer met Adobe's minimum spec for a card (not enough video RAM) and replacing it definitely made a noticeable difference.

That being said the advanced selections and "Select & Mask" which is the new(ish) name for "Refine Edge" can really bog down with a large file. That operation seems to be quite resource intensive. I suspect that I will have to update my machine in the next year or so because some of the operations are becoming more painful.

You already have an SSD, so that is helping vs using a mechanical hard drive when paging to disk. I use an M.2 drive as my working drive when using Photoshop (and other Adobe software, especially Premiere Pro and After Effects) as it is noticeably faster than my SSD, but the M.2 requires a motherboard that is compatible with that technology.

As you say Manfred my machines at the 'edge' but I'm very pleased now that the tweak I have done is giving me consistently acceptable speed with the selection brush tools on full size image files.

The only conclusion I can come to is that there may have been some sort of conflict with the graphics and what I have now also noted is that my email programmes appearance on the screen is improved with page edges more clearly defined

I did go out today and get a price on a newer improved spec machine which has convinced me that any upgrade to this old one would be a waste based on its older technology and degradation due to humidity and salty air.