Lightroom Classic freezing and glitching on MacOS

[adamhiram]

I started having this issue with Lightroom Classic on MacOS, and I am curious if this is a common or known issue that others have experienced. This only happens when I use the adjustment brush tool, and only started happening recently, presumably after the latest update from Adobe.

• After making just a few edits, Lightroom starts freezing for a few seconds at a time. This is similar to what I have experienced when making way too many edits with the adjustment brush or spot healing tools, but now it happens almost immediately.
• This is often accompanied by screen redraw issues, where it leaves large blank rectangles where I expected the screen to be redrawn.
• Sometimes the selected areas start to look pixelated or "glitchy", showing a random green bar, or repeating portions of the image.

My original assumption was that something in the most recent Lightroom Classic update introduced this bug. This is the first time I've done much with the adjustment brush tool since the last update, which was needed to support the Nikon Z6II raw files. However my bigger concern is that this could be something wrong with my GPU. I am working on an iMac, so if that is the case, I don't have too many options.

There are a number of reasons why I don't think this is GPU related though

• This only happens in Lightroom Classic
• This only happens when using the adjustment brush tool
• The glitches only persist on the screen until I switch images and switch back

Does anyone have any thoughts on what could be causing this, and more importantly how I might fix it?

Here are some examples.

1. In this first example, a simple brush stroke resulted in this pixelated/glitchy block.

lrbug-01 by adamhiram, on Flickr

2. In this next example, another brush stroke resulted in a much more glitchy area, including a green bar and some repetition of the image being displayed (part of subject's face repeated).

lrbug-02 by adamhiram, on Flickr

3. In this example, large portions of the image failed to redraw

lrbug-03 by adamhiram, on Flickr

4. And this one just had it all.

lrbug-04 by adamhiram, on Flickr

 

[Space Face]

I'll be interested in reading the views on this.

I occasionally had similar issues on my previous computer with LR5 (which I think was the last version before subscription so in can't update it). I work PC and not Mac but the issue looks the same. I took it to be a graphics card issue but not sure on this. Thankfully, it's not happened since I got my new PC over a year ago.

 

[nokk]

photoshop has been buggy for me since the last update. it's freezing and crashing whenever i try to use a brush on a mask. i found a work around, but it makes me wonder if they didn't screw something up. you could always try a fresh install of lightroom.

 

[adamhiram]

I didn't have any issues with the version that was current through November 2020. That's when I got my Z6II body and had to edit the Exif data to be able to import imagesinto Lightroom at all. Then in December, Adobe released updates to Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, and Camera Raw that supported the Z6II.

Shortly after updating, I started experiencing constant issues with Photoshop. Most of the time it would let me spend all day editing, but would give a "program error" when I tried to save, which is the worst possible time to break. As a result I started saving my work after each significant edit.

• I didn't experience these issues with the adjustment brush in Lightroom until last week (February 2021), but it was also the first time I did any extensive editing with the adjustment brush. I tend to do a lot more postprocessing with winter images with snow to find the right balance of white highlights and recovering some of the texture, and I prefer to stay in Lightroom if I can.
• This week I updated my system to macOS Catalina, and so far I have not experienced the strange glitches when using the adjustment brush in Lightroom. It is still slow and freezes for a few seconds after each new brushstroke, but that's probably because there are already so many brushstrokes on the image in question - when it was glitching, it would take a dozen brushstrokes to make a simple edit that normally would have been just one.

So the bugs definitely seem to correlate with software updates to Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, and don't seem to be a hardware issue, per se. However I also found some additional information on it potentially being driver related. The claim was that Adobe would release an update to its products that relied on an update to GPU device drivers to work properly, and if not updated together could result in unstable behavior like that I experienced. These issues improving after updating to macOS Catalina could be a good indicator of that, but it's only been a day so time will tell.

 

[smoke665]

For the last 2 years everytime they released major updates I had trouble with my Nvidia graphics card. The first time I pulled my hair out till about a week after Nvidia released an update to the graphics card. This year I waited a week before doing the Adobe update for Nvidia to catch up. No problems at all this time.

 

[PJM]

Using LR Classic 10.1 on 2019 iMac running MacOS 11.2. No issues seen so far.

 

[adamhiram]

Using LR Classic 10.1 on 2019 iMac running MacOS 11.2. No issues seen so far.

Hmm, I'm using LR Classic 10.1.1 on a 2015 iMac running macOS 10.15.7 (Catalina). Perhaps it is time to update to Big Sur. Thanks for the info!

 

[smoke665]

@adamhiram just for the heck of it, when you open creative cloud, it lists your apps and says up to date or need to update. Out beside OPEN are 3 dots.

click on it and it opens another screen which on the right side gives information, first thing is Compatibility. Does yours say works with this computer or give errors.

 

[adamhiram]

click on it and it opens another screen which on the right side gives information, first thing is Compatibility. Does yours say works with this computer or give errors.

It says "Works on this computer" for all components. Thanks for the tip, I never knew that was there. I would hope it would not proceed with automatic updates, or would at least provide an obvious warning if there was a compatibility issue, but who knows.

 

[smoke665]

I would hope it would not proceed with automatic updates, or would at least provide an obvious warning if there was a compatibility

Unfortunately that isn't quite the case. On each of the last two years when they did the major updates, my graphics card was compatible, but the drivers were not. I had major problems with adjustment brushes each time until NVidia came out with driver updates.

Another thing you might try is turning off GPU acceleration. If the brushes work without freezing the problem lies with the GPU

 

[SquarePeg]

I use LRC on a fairly new MacBook Pro and have not noticed any issues with the adjustment brush which I use all the time. I run automatic updates.

 

[adamhiram]

I use LRC on a fairly new MacBook Pro and have not noticed any issues with the adjustment brush which I use all the time. I run automatic updates.

Thank you, I appreciate the info. It looks like the OS update may have fixed these issues. I didn't update to Big Sur yet, as every major update seems to break support for a perfectly good piece of hardware that the vendor stopped supporting (printer, monitor calibration tool). However making sure all available updates to Catalina were installed appears to have alleviated the issue. I edited a few more similar photos, intentionally going overboard with adjustment brush edits and excessive brush strokes, and I have not been able to replicate the issue.