Photoshop locking up (caused by texture brushes?)

[Helium Macaroni]

So I recently started screwing around with checking the 'texture' box in my brush palette in PS CS2 and ever since (or so I think) I've been having problems with Photoshop suddenly crashing. I'll be painting along steadily, when all of a sudden my stroke will cease to be put down as if there's a lag, but the program doesn't recover, instead the next stroke I apply after the lag causes the menus to go all white, and cause Photoshop to lock up until ctrl-alt-deleted. I believe I've narrowed the problem down to including texture in my brushes. I was using a set of brushes downloaded from the internet, which also included various textures which some of those brushes drew from. I believe the same problem happens when I create my own texture and use that in the texture brush as well. Since every time Photoshop crashes, the recently created brushes, and recent setting changes disappear, I've had some problems keeping track of what is causing the crash after the program restarts.

Anyone have any ideas about this phenomenon? I'm assuming the problem could be a corrupted file within the texture folder. Though I wouldn't know why creating a new texture to draw from would cause a similar program error.

I'd appreciate any input anyone has.. this has been a constant problem and has even followed me from my last system.

[Yoonjin]

is it a bitgtexture libarary/heavy textures?, check your brushspacing aswell. textures most often take alot of resources.

[rasdasa]

Yea, I've been having the exact same problem. I've noticed it happens to me when I put the Angle options for brush control to "direction"
If I figure anything out I'll post it here.

ras

[Wetterschneider]

Okay, I have had this problem for years, since cs1 on multiple machines. It got so bad recently that I reverted to 7 just so I could get some damn painting done. Sadly, 7 also had the problem... complex brushes for an extended period caused PS to hang.

So I've made 2 adjustments to memory usage, at it appears to have helped. First I changed the cache settings in preferences to 4. The cache is what zoom levels are kept in memory for speeding painting. Second, I set the number of history levels to 8 (it defaults, I think, to 20).

So far no crashes in 7 after 2 weeks with new settings, but it may be because I have been avoiding the most complex brushes. I became confident enough with the test to move back to cs2 and so far, no hangs.

Try it, and if it still hangs for you post something here.

[prince911]

I tried that, it didnt work for me.
I have CS2 with 6gig of ram. Photoshop lets me use 2.7gb, apparently it says tahts the max i have.
If the brush angle is set to "direction" and I use for a while (like 1min) PS crashes.

[Wetterschneider]

Whew, how time flies. I'm using CS4 on a 12 gig machine now, running under Vista 64. You must be running a 64 bit operating system to take advantage of your 6 gig, for reasons too arcane to go into here.

As to the crashing... I couldn't say. But Adobe tech support is very responsive when it comes to fixing problems, even if it is all done through email, so it might be worth a shot.