If you’ve installed Photoshop CS4 and the wow factor of smooth zooms and pans have given way to anger and frustration of brush strokes that suffer from disasterous lag, here’s a few easy tweaks that will get it back up and running like the Photoshop of old, even with all the eyecandy.

Now I’m using a Intel Core 2 Q6600 here with a Nvidia 7950GT. These tweaks have worked for me and if they don’t for you then maybe think about upgrading.

  1. Go into the Preferences (Ctrl + K) and turn off “Open Documents as Tabs” in Interface.
  2. Now goto Performance and click on “Advanced Settings” under “Enable OpenGL Drawing” which should be checked if you want the whiz bang new features.
  3. Now this may seem counter-intuitive  to speeding up things but uncheck everything in the “Advanced Settings”. Even the “3D Interaction Acceleration”. Uncheck everything!
  4. Shut down Photoshop and then open it back up again.
Now just try painting something. Go on, hit b and start stroking away! The lag should be totally gone. Plus if you feel the need to pan slide and smooth zoom, that will also work!
I have to say that the 1 second lag of dragging windows around is still there. Hopefully Adobe will get off their arses and releases some bug fixes soon.