Sounds to me like you are looking for an excuse to updgrade.
How big is the brush in pixels Dan? Adobe aren’t working with CS3 anymore obviously, its the most stable version I’ve ever used so far.
Did you try my suggestion? If its crashing on more than one machine, then most probably its a driver or some other piece of software you installed on all of them thats cramping Photoshops style.
Downgrade, upgrade, anything is better then CS3. I don’t need an excuse when CS3 crashes ALL the time. I won’t go into the many, many hours of troubleshooting that I went through, including at one point reformatting the hard drive and only installing the OS and CS3. But it really doesn’t matter now. It would be nice though if I could get my money back for the "upgrade" that never worked for me. But like I said, I’ll pawn it off on someone else and hope for some spare cash in these tough economic times.
Mark, to answer your question the brush size is 186 px. A bit large perhaps, but I even remade it at 50 px with no improvement. I have been using that same brush for about 5 yrs now. It works perfectly in every other version including CS4. The only other time that it crashed was in the first release of CS2. Then I helped identify that it was an actual problem with Photoshop, and Adobe released an update that specifically fixed the brush problem.
You are right, I’m sure Adobe doesn’t care about CS3 anymore. I am just happy that they got it right with CS4.
CS3 is a huge disappointment to me. It crashes every 5 minutes when I use brushes. …I do not think that it is specific to my system
I downloaded the trial version of CS4 and so far it works like a dream. No crashes yet.
By all means upgrade to CS4. That seems to be your preferred solution and it makes much more sense to move forward than to expend more time troubleshooting a legacy app version.
However be aware that CS3 runs bombproof on tens of thousands of boxes, so your reported problems are specific to your systems. If you do want CS3 troubleshooting step one would be to specify your exact system setups in complete detail.
If you say so. I’m not so convinced. It is something with the way CS3 works for it to crash on my and my co-workers systems with regularity. Maybe it is finding some minor fault with our setups, but if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. And all other versions work. So it is the weak link and therefor useless to me.
How many of those thousands of other people use the same custom brush that I do in the same way that I use it? Perhaps there is still a bug but a very specific one.
I would look into hardware problems then blaming the software. Look into RAM as well as the Ram sockets on the mother board as a possible problem. Go have the computer checked out. There were a fair amount of defective computers produced by Apple with this issue.
Photoshop is super sensitive to bad hardware.
AND
Go and download the 30 day Demo of PSCS4. If the problem still continues, then you have eliminated some doubt.
Ann, you are right. We should be doing maintenance much more regularly.
Thank you all for your help and for letting me vent. I am DONE with CS3 and will either continue to use CS2 or if I can afford it, CS4. Problem solved. Hope everyone has a happy holiday season.
Ann has a good point there about Fonts, now THAT’S a reason that it may be crashing on all your machines. Again Dan there’s nothing wrong with CS3, its completely stable and reliable I’ve used it in about 14 different studios this year alone, amd believe me, its OK.
If CS3 is crashing constantly then there is something wrong with the setup. An upgrade to CS4 may leave you in the same boat as before if its a hardware issue.
It seems I said this before, but I used CS3 from the earliest public beta through many subsequent builds and both public releases. It never crashed on me.
CS4 (trial version) has already unexpectedly quit on me twice, fortunately not with any image open, no big deal.
I have not mentioned anything so far because I have not really taken the time to examine the situation, read log files, flush caches, eliminate fonts, etc. But given the same setup as I run CS3 in, CS4 has some performance problems that is slowing it down. Watching the CPU usage I find it very low when it gets in it’s slow mode.
As for crashing it definitely crashes more than CS3. The crashing seems to have something to do with the use of third party plugins.
I really need to look at a lot of things before I really start complaining. This is just my initial observation.
It seems the poor Windows guys are having lots of trouble with the Nik plugins. But what I told you is what I know. I will be testing the current Mac versions.
What are the advantages of 64 bit over 32 from a practical stand point?
Speed and capability and of course the use of much more RAM!
Which is limited in 32 bit and of course more multiprocessing usage.
It is not exctly this will work faster or that will work faster but if this is built in the right way it will fly like the wind and if it is not it might still fly faster.
If it is built to work on 64 bit and you work with it on 32 bit well you won’t get much more out of it.
So that is what you get more capability plus progrms that can be designed to take advantage of the expanded capabilities will function as you expect faster more stable and doing things that might not function well at all in 32 bit.
Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!
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