Photoshop CS4 crashes after Snow Leopard Upgrade

I had the problem of crashing (rolling beach ball) in CS4 in Leopard (not SNOW leopard) and these 2 things worked for me:
in Photoshops go to Preferences; Performance; un-click "Enable OpenGL Drawing" + putting the memory to 50% (1500 mb).
Not sure which of the 2 did it for me, but now I'm able to do stuff again in Photoshop.

I've experienced almost everything crashing since upgrading to Snow Leopard, but Photoshop CS4 is the worst. Unfortunately I can't even get to the PS preferences in time to tweak the settings as recommended in this thread since PSCS4 consistently crashes no more than 5-30 seconds after it finishes launching.

I've already wasted plenty of time going through all of the typical novice-thru-advanced troubleshooting rigamarole, all to no avail. So basically it's to **** with Photoshop CS4 for now, not an easy task albeit a would-be welcome one if only a viable alternative existed. On that note, I sure wish Apple (or someone for chrissakes!) would develop a Photoshop alternative, something that fully leveraged state of the art Mac OS X technology and offered a 101% "Cocoa application" look and more importantly MAC FEEL/EXPERIENCE!!!

I'm not sure how many more hours any of us have to waste in our lifetimes waiting for Adobe applications to startup, and for that matter, sometimes even waiting forever for them to fully shut down! How about a "real" Mac image processing application that uses the imaging filters I've come across in Core Image Funhouse, Acorn and Pixelmator. I haven't the words to properly articulate how much quicker, smoother, and fruitful these processes are than those in PS.

But alas, I digress, for the time being it's most important that I find a way to get this bloated Adobe pig up and running again.

As for Apple? Holy S#!+ has the ball been completely dropped with Snow Leopard. Thus far this has been my worst Apple experience to date.

Add this one to the list of suffering CS4 users. My first ever post in my life.

The details CS4, Master Mac, Serial - YM90101ZXYL, Built 10B504, 4 gig

The story, upgrading and updating to 10.6.1 all CS4 programmes instantly crashed when using save as, save, or export. This happens about 70% of the time.
An erase of the hard drive and fresh install NO UPDATES CS4 was fine, After a couple of days I took a chance and updated the apple software (included is HP printer driver 2.2 and canon printer driver 2.1 included in the update package. almost as soon as the printer driver was around 50% downloaded CS4 started crashing. (photoshop / illustrator / indesign) All updates from apple are now installed and I have to save at almost every stroke I make in CS4 as I have deadlines, and I have fooled around too much with this upgrade. I will not go into the inability of scanning with my HP CM1312nfi MFP (networked), but any resolution there would be nice also, as now I have to scan to the memory card and then network out to the the desktop.

I run CS4 - Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign - all day long ev˚Ker since Snow first came out and updated tp 10.6.1 the day that came out and have no zero problems on 4 different Macs.

Usually these kinds of problems are due to third party software or hardware that doesn't play well with either the OS or CS4.

The only way to find it is through the process of elimination. One good place to start is to restart then hold down the shift key when you hear the bong. You should start up in Safe Mode. Run CS4 for a while and see if it's any different.

Kevin

Like the rest of these posts, I'm frustrated with the CS4 apps crashing. Simple tasks in Photoshop have become a nightmare! Saving to JPG.... forget it. Well, I've reverted to the almost forgotten Adobe ImageReady from CS2. It does a lot that Photoshop can do and it doesn't crash. So, if you have been updating your CS products and you do have ImageReady on your mac, use it.

This is the only option that really works for what should be a routine, no brainer task as saving a PSD to JPG.

Adobe ... Apple ... please PLEASE post an update to end this misery!

I'm encountering the same exact problem... I did a complete clean Install... No plugins added... Tried very simple save to JPG or save to Web and Photoshop Crashes... The program window just dissapears, not even a crash report window appears... Everything was working fine on Leopard... I guess I'm going to have to Roll Back... I will be reporting this to my Friend at MacWorld Mag... Other Graphics designers and Photographers should know of this problem that makes the Adobe Suite useless under Snow Leopard.. This is a reproducible bug...

I don't think this problem is directly related to "Snow Leopard". I actually started having the file "Save" and "Save As" problem after the Photoshop CS4 update but that may have coincidental. I Upgraded to Snow Leopard figuring a new O/S might fix file save issues.
I think I finally got it "Worked Around" and in the process found an easy, albeit annoying fix.

Annoying Fix:
Create an new Admin level user and use that to run programs that won't save (Turns out to be most of them)

Work Around: (Some already mentioned in this thread)

1- Go to PS CS4 preferences and turn off "Open GL" (This was an old Leopard + PS CS3 Fix)

2- Set PS CS4 memory usage to 50%

Those things helped PS CS4 a bit but not all of the other programs

3- Go into Applications => Font Book, highlight all of your fonts and Validate all of your fonts. Delete All of the fonts with Yellow or Red flags. Then to be sure you rebuild the library, you can do a Safe Boot, shut down and do an normal boot.
(This fixed some other programs like Safari, Firefox, MS Office, etc.and this might have actually been related to Snow Leopard)

4- A guy on another Apple Discussion thread, named Mr. Pi, posted this last work around on October 3, that seems to have fixed the problem. It involved file sharing and I will snip from his post as well as provide the link.
--- Snip ---
-1. Start by opening System Preferences
-2. Select 'Sharing' from the Internet & Wireless section
-3. From the list on the left choose 'File Sharing' and turn it off.
-4. Delete anything listed in the Shared Folders section
-5. Turn File Sharing back on
-6. Log out, then Log back in
-7. Done!!

--- End Snip ---
Here is the link to his post (It's Oct 3, about 3/4 of the way down "Mr. Pi" titled "Fixed It!"
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2168885&start=45&tstart=0

Conclusions:
I'm Not sure about the Open GL or memory setting fixes but they helped a little. The corrupt fonts were a real hassle and those had to be fixed to run Firefox.

I think Mr. Pi struck the beast in the heart but you won't like that fix if you network several operators via a common drive. But I'm sure Apple and Adobe can get that worked out in short order now that it's been isolated.

Best of luck,
Dennis


BTW, As of 10/12/09 on that other thread, everyone is still applauding Mr. Pi's Fix so that might have been the biggest part of the problem.

Dennis,

Thank you very much for the suggestions on the possible fixes... I will try these out tonight and report back what I find... It has been so frustrating to have to work on my notebook (Leopard) while the workarounds/fixes are found... I sure hope this works out... If it doesn't I will probably roll back this weekend so I can work on my desktop again... Again, thanks for the suggestions, they are much appreciated... Crossing my fingers...

Dave

Dave,
I hope it works out for you and you don't have to roll back. I really think it was the last Adobe update that caused the problem and not Snow Leopard since I had the problem before I installed Snow Leopard. I actually installed Snow Leopard in hopes it would fix the "File Save" / Crash problem.

But with Snow Leopard, if you use Adobe Lightroom, you will really like it when you set it to run in 64 Bits.

Again, Good luck.

Dennis

Dennis,

Yipeee! Looks like it worked.... I opened up several files, used Save As.... and Save for Web and it worked like a charm... I even opened up a couple 400MB+ Panoramic files and saved them successfully... I am so psyched! Thanks so much! Also tested out Bridge that was immediately crashing after a few browses through folders... So far so good... I have not been able to make it crash! Awesome. Thanks again for the post... I do use Lightroom, I unchecked the 32 Bit option and noticed that the 1:1 rendering process goes way faster... Thanks for that tip as well... Pretty Cool!

Mr. Pi suggestion worked for me on two macs and LAN .... fingers crossed....

Have not had a PS, Mail, Safari crash in several days.

had folders listed in shared folders, once I deleted those all has been good.

Message was edited by: Gary Tate

Glad to see someone here ecstatic..... nice change

Thank you, and thank you Mr. Pi.

I have been following this thread keenly since I upgraded to SL, experienced constant PS crashes, downgraded back to 10.5.8 (and wasted a weekend !).
Can anyone else confirm that the most recent solution consistently fixes the problem ? (Dr PI - file sharing etc...).
Before I go wasting another weekend upgrading I want to be sure that the crash problem has a difinitive solution here.....?

Dr pi solution has worked for me over the week to ten days. I have only one crash in PS. Mail and safari seem to be working fine also. I am running 10.6.1 on an iMac and Powerbook pro.