If Adobe® Photoshop® is running slow, freezing, crashing, locking up, unstable or otherwise flaky, FIRST be sure you have updated your Adobe applications, and Windows or Mac OSX operating system.

Where are the best expert tips about how to troubleshoot and uninstall Photoshop? How to reset Photoshop preferences, troubleshoot, step-by-step instructions with screenshots?

If you've done all the troubleshooting and reached the point of un-installing Photoshop to re-install, Archive install, clean install, or Erase your hard drive to "nuke" problems like force quit required, won't open and program errors, be sure to first Deactivate Photoshop so you don't waste one of your limited Activations when you re-Activate.

See "Solution 5" here for the correct sequence order of steps to apply the OSX updates: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/875/cpsid_87512.html.

Windows 8 7 & Vista XP Windows PC update instructions are HERE.

PRINTERS, PLUGINS, COLOR, VIDEO, HAXIES

CS5 and CS6 now run in 64-bit by default. CS4 and earlier run only in 32-bit mode.

This brings up nasty compatibility problems when users try to run incompatible old or buggy 32-bit plugins on newer 64-bit systems. They may get lucky setting Photoshop up to run in 32-bit mode.

To change Photoshop to run in 32-bit mode on a Mac, do a "Get Info" on the Photoshop12 CS5 application icon, and check "Open in 32-bit mode" — until your 3rd party plugins are updated for 64-bit CS5:

But remember: The big advantage in running Photoshop in 64-bit is it can use all your RAM (32-bit mode only allows Photoshop to use around 3GB RAM) — that is a huge deal breaker when working on larger files.

PHOTOSHOP TWAIN PLUG-IN

HOW TO RESET TRASH PHOTOSHOP PREFERENCES

Resetting, deleting or "trashing" your Photoshop user preferences to restore default settings is one of the first troubleshooting routines I try because it is pretty common for preferences to get corrupted or have a funky setting enabled somewhere that's too time-consuming to track down.

But actually, I might try testing in a new User account first because it not only rules out Photoshop preferences, it rules out all User preferences.

After deleting Photoshop's preferences, a new fresh set of preferences will automatically be created with Adobe factory default settings (except for any 3rd-party plug-ins that may have been installed — so be sure you track down remove those plugins to rule them out, these may include plugins for font utilities like Font Agent Pro FAP, TWAIN scanner drivers, NIK).

BACK UP PREFERENCES & SETTINGS:

I like to keep a BACKUP folder of my Photoshop preferences so I can just swap a suspect set of preferences for a known good set — that way I don't have to reconfigure all my custom settings if resetting them doesn't clear the problem — I can just drag my suspect prefs back in place and restart Photoshop and continue troubleshooting.

FONT ISSUES (imagine that)

Bad fonts and font caches are prone to corruption and cause Photoshop to crash.

HERE are Adobe instructions on how to troubleshoot and clear font caches in CS5.

HERE is a Macworld article on clearing font caches in Leopard.

FONT AGENT PRO 4 (FAP) also had bugs that cause an opening lag and missing font warnings anomalies in Photoshop — troubleshoot these known problems by simply removing the FAP plugins from Applications> Adobe Photoshop CS5> Plugins. Insidersoftware has posted bug fixes to their CS5-10.6x font problems with their font-management app (FAP4) and their Photoshop plugins.

Users have also reported problems with Suitcase. Plugins for Suitcase are managed from Suitcase itself so try unchecking the check box for Photoshop and you may not have to "Force Quit" Photoshop again.

VIDEO DRIVERS (cough, cough)

On the Microsoft® Windows® side, buggy and out-of-date video card drivers are causing Photoshop problems, including crashing, redraw anomalies, color errors, corruption... be sure to update your video card software and firmware.

The Apple® Mac® operating system Software Update generally handles video driver updates, so if you're on a Mac, chances are you don't need to worry about finding updates for your video cards. If you do find a video updater for a Mac, I advise you to slow down and research it thoroughly before installing it.

ISSUE: Photoshop CS5 won't open .psd files or new files

Most likely all you need to do is update your video card driver from the GPU maker's website. What you're seeing is a bug in the video card driver related to OpenGL, and Photoshop is defaulting to drawing the image with OpenGL, but gets no errors from the driver, so Photoshop doesn't know that it didn't work. (Chris Cox, Adobe forum).

OpenGL bugs: Apple and Microsoft have known problems with OpenGL on some video cards...if you want to rule OpenGL out in Photoshop, go to Preferences> Performance> GPU Settings and uncheck Enable OpenGL Drawing as shown in this screenshot:

If your Photoshop Open GL options are grayed out — you cannot select "Enable OpenGL Drawing" or check boxes in Advanced Settings in Photoshop preferences — more than likely your video card is unsupported, it does not support OpenGL.

See Photoshop Help / GPU, OpenGL support | Photoshop CS4, CS5.5 "Photoshop CS6, CS4, CS5 leverage the graphics display card's GPU, instead of the computer's main processor (the CPU) to speed its screen redraw. For Photoshop to access the GPU, your display card must contain a GPU that supports OpenGL and has enough RAM to support Photoshop functions — at least 128 MB of RAM — and a display driver that supports OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0..." (Adobe site).

TYPICAL CYCLES OF VIDEO DRIVER PROBLEMS

Snow Leopard 10.6.4 update seriously broke the NVIDIA drivers making Photoshop unusable for many users using NVIDIA video cards. This was reportedly fix with Apple' s August 2010 NVIDIA GRAPHICS UPDATE for SL Snow Leopard DOWNLOAD.

Leopard 10.5 on Intel Macs running 30-inch Apple monitors may exacerbate the crashing due to video card driver issues.

Leopard 10.5.8 Snow Leopard 10.6.3 CS3 CS4 CS5 Photoshop crashing when moving layers in Layer pallet and dragging layers between multiple windows have caused me grief and Adobe has pointed to Apple bugs in 10.5 and 10.6 that affect CS3, CS4 and CS5 — most notoriously "QuickDraw" bugs that crash Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop engineer Chris Cox explained the problem in a June 2010 forum post:

In the simplest terms: Apple crashes often in _SetDstBits32RGBA, _GetDstBits32RGBA, and SetPixMapPixel (these are usually the top symbol on the stack in the crash report)

These crashes appear to have been introduced in MacOS 10.5, and improved slightly in MacOS 10.6, but still continue to be seen in MacOS 10.6.3.
These crashes do appear to be x86 specific (I cannot find any reports of a similar crash for PowerPC).

These crashes occur in multiple applications that use QuickDraw, and from many different parts of Photoshop (including in third party plugin UI).

These crashes are still seen in Photoshop CS5 (a Cocoa app) when third party plugins or scanner drivers use QuickDraw (in the 32 bit addressing mode, of course).

The crashing functions are low level accessors used from multiple parts of the QuickDraw code, and cannot be coded around.

PS: Chris Cox wrote me that Photoshop CS5 doesn't use Quickdraw code, so I ugraded and lo and behold my Quickdraw crashes virtually stopped.

CS2 Photoshop 9 PS9 Program Errors messages using Tiger 10.4x:

"Could not complete your request because of a program error" when trying to open a file.
“Could not create a new document because of a program error” when trying to make a new file.

Certain Epson print drivers including some other print drivers are causing these Photoshop error messages under Mac Tiger 4.0.

• SOLUTION FIX to try: Delete the Epson Print drivers from Print Center, Disconnect the internet modem ethernet/telephone, run Disk Utility Repair Disk, purge Photoshop preferences (and Photoshop application if necessary), run all Adobe and OS updaters... continue with the basic troubleshooting Photoshop.
• Check with Epson for latest print drivers. Some users have reported that some Epson drivers are incompatible with Tiger.
• Some users have reported that running Disk Utility Repair Disk and/or fsk -y fixed the Epson driver problems, others have reported it didn't fix the problem.

An Adobe BUG that is causing Photoshop CS2 PROGRAM ERRORS when opening files in Photoshop CS2 is directly related to Adobe CS2 Version Que.

• WORKAROUND try: 1) turn off Version Que, (2) Open Illustrator (to deal with any font conflicts) then open Photoshop and the problem files.

Microsoft fonts Entourage text copied to the clipboard are also causing Photoshop CS1 and Illustrator to crash on opening, Photoshop won't open. (This was supposedly fixed in CS2.)

• FIX SOLUTION is to clear the clipboard of the the Microsoft or Word text.
  Either Copy some Finder fonts to the clipboard or Log Out Log In, and then open Photoshop.
  Open Text Edit, create some text and Copy it (in effort to flush the Clipboard).

Another Apple bug for Photoshop crashing on opening, not able to launch, Photoshop won't initialize: if you have UK GMT timezone set.

Aside from the above issues, Photoshop CS and CS2 seems to be super sensitive to bad fonts, so be sure to rule out the fonts if you are having stability issues.

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In real-world layman's terms, my fire drills for troubleshooting Photoshop crashes, freezes, lockups, including crashing, freezing, locking up, Unexpectedly Quitting:

Rule out RAM gballard.net is also important troubleshooting. In addition to crashing, kernel panics, Type 1 Type 2 Type 3 errors, Unexpectedly Quitting, corrupted files and disk errors, typical symptoms of bad Ram in Photoshop include rows lines patches of bad pixels on screen that also print (the actual file is being corrupted). If the bad pixel areas are on the monitor, but do not print (the actual file is not corrupted), video card or video-card drivers are prime suspects. Remember, video cards also have flash firmwares to flash update.

Test Hardware Interface gballard.net for the hardware's ability to transfer data free of corruption on hard disk drive interfaces (such as SCSI, IDE, etc.). See the bottom of the linked page and DOWNLOAD Timothy A. Seufert's dctest. Dctest assumes that your CPU and memory and disk are working fine. There are OS9 and OSX versions in the download.

If running Apple's Disk Utility's FirstAid Repair Disk and Repair Permissions, and the Mac's fsck -y Unix command cannot fix any all disk problems, I would recommend running third-party disk utilities BEWARE! gballard.net only as a last resort.
Bad Blocks apple.com on the hard drive can also cause a computer to be very unstable....

Also be sure to remove all non-Apple USB, FIreWire devices, including the Ethernet cable from the network to rule them out.

Photoshop CS CS2 CS3 CS4 seem to be super sensitive to bad fonts, so be sure to rule out the fonts if you are having stability issues.

Also make sure Photoshop application folder is in its default location and that it has not been renamed: HardDrive> Applications: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Troubleshooting Photoshop won't install, from the original Adobe Install CD, try copying the 'Adobe(R) Photoshop(R) Folder' (100 to 150 MB) to the desktop - this folder contains the installer and all its files. Eject the CD, and run the installer from the desktop.

• This copy-installer-folder-to-hard-drive technique works on the Adobe installers that require us to verify an original full install CD (insert the full retail install CD, when the installer asks for it point it to the CD).

My most decisive TroubleShooting technique — Empty = Versatile gballard.net — is to Test on an OS–Suspect Level. In less than an hour, this method effectively rules out the hardware, the install and its other third–party issues.

Ann Shelbourne offers some sage font troubleshooting advice, Ann wrote:

• Have you cleaned out your AdobeFnt.lst files recently?
  Do a Search for "adobefnt" and delete all that you find — except for "AdobeFnt.db".
  (Don't worry, they will re-create themselves as needed).
• Have you ruled out conflicts between System fonts and your other fonts? (Ann continued)
• Have you ran Cocktail?:
  Launch Cocktail
  Choose "Pilot"
  Check everything on the first dialog and set to "Automatically: Restart"
  Then click Options and check everything except "Cookies"
  Return to main panel and click "RUN"
  It will take just a few minutes and should improve performance.

Try changing the time zone then change it back to the correct time zone that you are in but first trash your PS Preference, if that does not work try changing the City within the time zone and then change it back. Or some kind of combination. But again, each time trash PS preferences maybe even restarting the computer.
Ann Shelbourne added, if you are in the UK, don't choose GMT but choose your nearest city by name.

This sounds goofy — but it has worked for a lot of users.

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In severe cases — to prepare a Mac for a Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) — I follow my troubleshooting MELTDOWN procedure gballard.net. In addition to repairing any Bad Blocks, this procedure will be conclusive in a couple hours, plus the time it takes to ZeroWrite Write Zeros, if the problem is hardware or installed software or damaged hard drive....

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