Expert: Scott Valentine - 5/2/2010

Question
QUESTION: Hey Scott,
I'm an llustrator/designer who uses CS4 all the time, and have used the Adobe products for about 15 years. I have a MacPro (less than 3 years old, Quad Core Intel Xeon, 3 GHz, 4 GB RAM) and my system ran so smoothly. Notice past tense. A few weeks ago Photoshop started acting really crashy. Granted, I was working on 11 x 14" 350 ppi file with many layers, masks, etc. But I did notice that the file size seemed to bloat to unreasonable proportions, reaching 1GB in size though the math in terms of layers did not make sense. Simply running a lighting effects filter would cause the program to crash, or sometimes simply saving the file would make it crash.
Now I'm working on an assignment (rush job of course) and having ongoing the same problems. I've been on tech support to Adobe several times and have an open case number. I've trashed my Preferences file (no help). The last guy I talked to had me disable Open GL Drawing (what! No ability to rotate my artwork?!).
This is very frustrating and mysterious. Everything worked fine for years (CS4 for nearly 1 year). I've made no changes to my system or added software, not even a font. My Graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT) has up-to-date drivers.
I've moved this job to my laptop to work on it there and see what happens. But I still need to solve the underlying problem. Could my Graphics card have gone bad? How could I find out?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Marty

ANSWER: Ouch! I'm not sure I can provide any more help than Adobe support, but I'll give it a shot...

Since you've already trashed the prefs file, have you tried reinstalling? Try using this cleanup script:

http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/cs4clean.html

Now, the down side is that this may require you to reinstall the entire suite, so read the instructions carefully. This may not be the solution for you, but it's one suggestion.

As for the graphics card, it's certainly possible, but I'm not familiar with Apple's error handling for hardware. If OGL is indeed causing the problem, it's probably due to incompatible updates between both CS4 and the card's drivers. I suspect that didn't work for you, though. You could try allocating more video memory to the application - if that works, then indeed the document exceeds Photoshop's memory allocation limits.

To test the graphics card, see if NVidia has a diagnostic you can download (I haven't looked). They typically provide something like this for Windows, but I've not had a need to look for Mac diagnostics. You can also try to find the card's preferences and change the amount of GPU load - generally an optimization setting.

The document could possibly be causing problems, which I have encountered. The thing to try is to save a copy with layers turned off, then open the copy. Alternatively, save out multiple documents of groups of layers, and then work on those separately. This is reaching a bit, but also worth trying.

How does the document work on your laptop?

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Scott,

Thanks for such a prompt reply. Since the crashes have been occurring on several documents, I don't think it's a corrupt file. And since the documents have been running smoothly on my laptop (MacBook Pro 4.1, 2.1 GHz, 4GB RAM), it does isolate it out as being somehow related to my tower computer.

Haven't tried reinstalling (trying to do things in hassle order from least to most). And at this very moment, #1 priority is getting this job done without the client knowing about my tech headaches!

Will check out your other recommendations as well.

thanks again, and have a weekend,
Marty

Answer
Sorry I couldn't give you better guidance, Marty. But you are right to focus on your client! It's a good thing you have a laptop as a backup, and it helps with the troubleshooting.

If reinstalling doesn't work, let me know and I'll see what other resources I can dig up.

-Scott