Photoshop CS4 Bug Avoidance Tip

Yesterday when I got home from work I had Adobe’s Production Premium suite sitting on my desk. Yay! I needed a newer copy of Flash for a client, so I bought a package that had a lot of other goodies in it as well. I imagine the only ones I’ll be using extensively are Photoshop (web design), Flash (web), Illustrator (drawing) and Soundbooth (for the podcast).

Now, I have no intention of blogging about this stuff to much here. I plan on relaunching my tech blog and doing more there, but until then, here is the place. So the actual problem. Apparently CS4 leverages your graphics card’s GPU for doing some of its work. This makes it faster. Sounds like a good idea. However, I have had two problems that (so far) turning this feature off has fixed.

First, a persistent hand cursor. Sometimes the hand cursor is active and I can’t make any edits to a file no matter what tool it is I pick out of the toolbox. Frustrating.

Second, the clone stamp tool (one of my favorites) was not working well at all. It was not updating its position on alt-click and occasionally creating streaks through the entire image (obviously not what it is supposed to do).

So far turning off the GPU acceleration has solved both problems. The program works fine...it is just slower.