6 Replies Latest reply: Jul 16, 2011 3:59 PM by Chris Cox RSS

    Photoshop CS5 Crash on XP SP3

    n8turepix Community Member

      After updating to the latest patch (12.0.4 x32), CS5 faulted and produced this Dr. Watson log:

       

      The application, C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Photoshop.exe, generated an application error The error occurred on 07/14/2011 @ 14:30:19.921 The exception generated was c0000005 at address 00FBB7E5 (Photoshop)

      The faulting module was Photoshop.exe.

       

      I will never buy another version of Photoshop until it implements journaling to recover lost work.  Microsoft Office does it, and so does SQL Server.  It's not that hard to write the code.  For the price of this product, journaling is a requirement.

       

      My system has plenty of memory and disk space, and I never had any failures until the latest patch.

        • 1. Re: Photoshop CS5 Crash on XP SP3
          Chris Cox Adobe Employee

          When does it crash? What were you doing?

          The most common causes of crashes in Photoshop CS5 are: video card drivers, scanner drivers, third party plugins, printer drivers, and corrupt fonts.  So we're going to need additional information to help you figure out the cause of the crash.

           

           

          I will never buy another version of Photoshop until it implements journaling to recover lost work.  Microsoft Office does it, and so does SQL Server.  It's not that hard to write the code.  For the price of this product, journaling is a requirement.

          Go to moon, pick up rock, how hard can that be?   It's a lot harder than you think.

           

          MS Office is dealing with changes on the order of bytes at a time. That's easy to journal to disk frequently.

          SQL Servers journal periodically, not continuously, and need very fast disks to journal changes on the order of megabytes.

          Photsohop works with changes on the order of 10s of Megabytes to Gigabytes at a time. Even with the fastest disks available today, that isn't easy to journal frequently.  Making such a feature not interrupt your work, not consume your entire day journalling, and act like a reasonable feature in a professional product: that's not so easy.

          • 2. Re: Photoshop CS5 Crash on XP SP3
            n8turepix Community Member

            At the time of the crash, it was recalculating the histogram (I clicked the refresh icon in the histogram palette.)  I have not had another crash today to see if it repeats.

             

            Journaling can be very lightweight.  All PS needs to do is record the tool in use, the tool position, and the pixel value(s) chosen by the user to input to the tool.  Record a list of all these operations, and then play them back in sequence starting with the original file if the application crashes.

             

            In other words, if I'm selecting with the magic wand, all PS needs to record is the tolerance, the pixel value where I clicked, and whether or not it's contiguous.  Just a few bytes.

             

            Yes it could take quite some time to regenerate the lost image by replaying the tool actions in sequence, but at least the user could walk away from the computer and let it run automatically.  It would also prevent the inconvenience of starting all over trying to judge how much to adjust a curve, how much to feather a selection, etc. Think of this method of journaling as simply a revision to the Actions code so that it records all the parameters needed to reproduce the final image from the file's original state.

            • 3. Re: Photoshop CS5 Crash on XP SP3
              Curt Y Community Member

              n8turepix wrote:

               

              Journaling can be very lightweight.  All PS needs to do is record the tool in use, the tool position, and the pixel value(s) chosen by the user to input to the tool.  Record a list of all these operations, and then play them back in sequence starting with the original file if the application crashes.

               

              You need to believe Chris Cox as he is a senior photoshop programmer.  If he says it is complicated and technically impractical it is much harder than you fanaticize.

              • 4. Re: Photoshop CS5 Crash on XP SP3
                Chris Cox Adobe Employee

                All PS needs to do is record the tool in use, the tool position, and the pixel value(s) chosen by the user to input to the tool.

                Again, that can be a huge amount of data, even for the operations in Photoshop.  When you consider third party plugins, it gets much worse (many can't playback precisely).  Think about the realtime input for a tablet device when painting:  200 samples per second, about 36 parameters per sample (32 bits each), modifier key state, plus the internal state of Photoshop at the time each sample is applied (random number tables and indices, colors that change with each application of the brush tip, etc.).   We've tried recording it.  It's a lot of data, even to record in RAM.  And we're still working on making that record reasonably.

                 

                We really have looked into this problem. We are trying to make improvements.

                But what you are proposing is not reasonable for an applicaiton like Photoshop.

                 

                We're also working hard to make Photoshop crash less often. But we've reached the point where most of the crashes aren't in code under our control.  We rely on the OS and drivers to work correctly, but we can't do much about them when they don't.  It's not like we can code around the file system because it has a crashing bug, or the OS save dialog because it crashes when creating thumbnails....

                • 5. Re: Photoshop CS5 Crash on XP SP3
                  n8turepix Community Member

                  I have the full Dr. Watson log, which includes a stack dump if you want it.  It's too large to paste into the editing applet (hangs the browser.)  I'm glad you are working on recording user actions in detail, I believe you when you say it's difficult but I urge you to keep trying.  Tablet data are highly correlated, so LZW compression should allow it to be saved in a lot less space.  I understand the plugin issue.  I think long-term Photoshop needs to change the plugin spec to implement journaling and give writers the opportunity to write to it.  For plugins that don't do it, Photoshop could stop during a journal recovery and let the user tweak the plugin and then resume or have the recovery stop, just like Actions give users the ability to open a dialog box at an action step and manually input to it.

                   

                  Much of what I do doesn't involve plug-ins.  I know that's not true for others.  But any journaling recovery feature, no matter how imperfect, would be a great help to users everywhere.  As with much of software doing something imperfect creates learning, which helps refine future efforts.

                  • 6. Re: Photoshop CS5 Crash on XP SP3
                    Chris Cox Adobe Employee

                    Tablet data are highly correlated, so LZW compression should allow it to be saved in a lot less space.

                    Only if you can apply some sort of predictive coder and reorganize the data to increase available pattern length. And it's pretty noisy data to start with, even if correlated at a coarse level.  (yeah, I've done more than a little research here :-)