CS6 Crop Tool performance lag

In your crop tool, have you enabled 'Delete Cropped Pixels'? It is enabled by default. If it is, can you try deselecting it? You can see this option on the Menubar once you select Crop tool.

Well, can you then try enabling 'Delete Cropped Pixels' and see if there's a difference in performance?

Again, this depends on various factors including but not limited to RAM available/ allocated to PS, Scratch Disks & what data is PS scrubbing when it's committing your Crop action. I cannot replicate your scenario here unless I have the exact same file that you're working on.

Let's see if a SME pops in to share their views here.

I think the heavy calculations involve the Smart Objects. As a test, rasterize all the SOs but don't flatten the document. Now the crop should be almost instantaneous.

SOs are always retained, even when entirely cropped out and when "Delete Cropped Pixels" is enabled. And they are entirely visible when dragged back into the new canvas area. I wonder why their presence drastically adds to the cropping calculations when all that happens is that they become partially or completely hidden?

Adobe has had multiple problems having to do with checking the boundaries of things (reference the flap over whether snap to layer was selected).  Perhaps this operation is triggering some of that same code.

I agree, it seems wrong, and in fact actually deleting the cropped pixels is sometimes faster.  I've noticed the delay myself since the CS6 beta and never thought to question it.  Glad you did, Charles!

-Noel

I found that a crop which was taking about 30 seconds with 10 Smart Objects in the document was reduced to about a half-second if the SOs are rasterized first.

Relaunched and retested. Same result. The SOs are making the crop about 60 times slower.

Yep, I wouldn't expect a constant factor of 60 for every document. The doc I have here is 1800 x 3000 pixels, 16-bit and contains 10 SOs and nothing else.

Upsized the docs to 3600 x 6000 pixels (4 times the pixel count). 43 secs to crop the SOs, 2 secs to crop rasters. Repeating the test gives consistent results.

My test results with Photoshop CS6:

10000 x 10000 pixel 8 bits/channel collage file with 13 raw file smart object layers, 2 PSD file smart object layers, and a white background.

• Crop to 9100 x 10000 pixels:  77 seconds

Undid the crop, then rasterized all the layers, which took 2 seconds.

• Crop to 9100 x 10000 pixels:  4.6 seconds

With Photoshop CS5:

Same file with Smart Objects

• Crop to 9100 x 10000 pixels: 72 seconds

Rasterized (also took about 2 seconds to do)

• Crop to 9100 x 10000 pixels: 13.2 seconds

I think it's pretty clear there's a serious slowdown problem with the Crop Tool, but it's not a new problem.  While it may have gotten a little slower to work on a document with multiple layers of Smart Objects in Photoshop CS6, operations with rasterized layers got much faster.

-Noel

I can confirm the CS6 big improvement over CS5.1 when cropping rasters but equally dismal performance from both versions when cropping SOs.

Concentrating on CS6 again and my particular example, I think it significant that when cropping the rasters there is no disk activity, but when cropping SOs there is a constant significant writing to disk for the duration of the operation yet never any reading from disk. That was repeatedly consistent.

Cropping a Smart Object usually means that the Smart Object is going to have to be re-rasterized for the new document (and re-color converted, re-transformed, etc.).  Yes, re-rasterizing the Smart Object will create a lot of data that might write to the scratch disk.

None of that that should change between versions since the introduction of Smart Objects.

Chris Cox wrote:

 

None of that that should change between versions

So you're saying you made Ps CS6 work better by accident? 

-Noel

Thanks, Chris. Yes, as I said above, I get consistent behaviour and performance when cropping SOs with CS5.1 and CS6. The difference between versions is the most welcome dramatic improvement in cropping speed of raster layers.

Chris Cox wrote:

 

Cropping a Smart Object usually means that the Smart Object is going to have to be re-rasterized for the new document (and re-color converted, re-transformed, etc.).  Yes, re-rasterizing the Smart Object will create a lot of data that might write to the scratch disk.

 

When the document is simply being cropped without resampling, as in the case which prompted this thread, isn't all that expensive re-rasterizing of SO unnecessary?