Does Photoshop CC 2018 work well with High Sierra?

[greyhoundrick]

Hello everyone,

I have a 2013 MBP 15" Retina with dedicated graphics.

Im currently running El Capitan and was wondering what your opinion is with regard to running Photoshop CC 2018 on High Sierra with this MacBook Pro.

I use my MacBook Pro daily and I process quote a few images each day. Im not that knowledgeable with computers and want to try to avoid any issues with this upgrade.

Let me know what you think.

I appreciate it very much and hope to hear from you!

best always,

Rick

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

It should run fine, as your MBP supports High Sierra and CC 2018.

-What version of Adobe /Photoshop/CC are you running with El Capitan?
-Is there a specific need to upgrade to High Sierra or CC 2018?
-How many photos are you processing per day?
-Of course, an iMac is better suited for large workstation-type production.

C

 

[greyhoundrick]

Hello,

It should run fine, as your MBP supports High Sierra and CC 2018.

-What version of Adobe /Photoshop/CC are you running with El Capitan?
-Is there a specific need to upgrade to High Sierra or CC 2018?
-How many photos are you processing per day?
-Of course, an iMac is better suited for large workstation-type production.

C

Hi Cory, Thank you very much for taking the time to answer my question. Appreciate it!

I am experiencing slow downs with my current MBP and Mac OS which are:

Late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina 15"
2.6GHz i7
16 GB RAM DDR3
NVIDIA GT 750M

OSX El Capitan 10.11.6

Latest Version of Photoshop CC 2018

Ive tried all of the usual stuff to see if I could make my MBP run faster without much success so I thought maybe upgrading to High Sierra might help. Getting more of the "beach balls" than Ive ever had before and some stuttering and stammering as well.

What do you think?

Thanks again for your expertise.

best,

Rick

 

[honestone]

If I may "chime in", Rick. Kind of surprised you are experiencing slow downs, as I believe your machine has 512 gig of flash storage, along with plenty of memory. I guess a couple of things to look for/mention:

1. Have you done any "extensive" disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective? You actually can do a good amount of disk cleanup on your own, and there are some excellent programs available (both free and commercial) that can help you out. Two that I use (and have been using for along time) are Onyx, and Tech Tool Pro. I recommend both of them very highly.

2. How much free space is on your internal SSD?

Now, as far as High Sierra is concerned, I have two Macs: a late 2012 Mac Mini with a 256 gig SSD and 8 gig of memory, and a mid 2017 13" MacBook Air, with a 252 gig SSD and 8 gig of memory. I make a concerted effort to keep my Macs "lean, mean, and clean", and in actuality, I am performing disk cleanup on my own just about every day (mainly having deleted EMails permanently removed). Also, I have well over 60% of free space on each of those SSDs (and I do not do much "serious" processing with either machine, especially in comparison to you). I have always updated to the new Mac OS each time, although I wait until all of my third party applications are compatible with the new OS (and I have 6 critical ones that must be compatible). I have also done the upgrade from one Mac OS to another via a clean, fresh, "virgin" installation of the new OS. High Sierra is somewhat slower than Sierra, mainly in booting up, switching start up devices, switching to Tech Tool, Pro's eDrive, and then back from any of those sources to the internal SSD, and shutting down.

I also do not see anything drastically different and/or improved from Sierra, so unless you see a compelling reason to upgrade to High Sierra (like a new feature), it might be wise to upgrade to Sierra. Sierra is definitely a stable OS, and in some ways, I wish I was back on it. But I am getting more and more used to High Sierra, but again (at least for me), it has nothing earth shattering that is different from Sierra.

 

[greyhoundrick]

If I may "chime in", Rick. Kind of surprised you are experiencing slow downs, as I believe your machine has 512 gig of flash storage, along with plenty of memory. I guess a couple of things to look for/mention:

1. Have you done any "extensive" disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective? You actually can do a good amount of disk cleanup on your own, and there are some excellent programs available (both free and commercial) that can help you out. Two that I use (and have been using for along time) are Onyx, and Tech Tool Pro. I recommend both of them very highly.

2. How much free space is on your internal SSD?

Now, as far as High Sierra is concerned, I have two Macs: a late 2012 Mac Mini with a 256 gig SSD and 8 gig of memory, and a mid 2017 13" MacBook Air, with a 252 gig SSD and 8 gig of memory. I make a concerted effort to keep my Macs "lean, mean, and clean", and in actuality, I am performing disk cleanup on my own just about every day (mainly having deleted EMails permanently removed). Also, I have well over 60% of free space on each of those SSDs (and I do not do much "serious" processing with either machine, especially in comparison to you). I have always updated to the new Mac OS each time, although I wait until all of my third party applications are compatible with the new OS (and I have 6 critical ones that must be compatible). I have also done the upgrade from one Mac OS to another via a clean, fresh, "virgin" installation of the new OS. High Sierra is somewhat slower than Sierra, mainly in booting up, switching start up devices, switching to Tech Tool, Pro's eDrive, and then back from any of those sources to the internal SSD, and shutting down.

I also do not see anything drastically different and/or improved from Sierra, so unless you see a compelling reason to upgrade to High Sierra (like a new feature), it might be wise to upgrade to Sierra. Sierra is definitely a stable OS, and in some ways, I wish I was back on it. But I am getting more and more used to High Sierra, but again (at least for me), it has nothing earth shattering that is different from Sierra.

Thank you very much honestone! Great information and very helpful! I will look into the disk cleanup tools you mentioned. I have no reason to upgrade from El Capitan other than my hoping that the upgrade may help my machine's performance.

I do have about 20% of my flash storage still available and so I should be ok there. I have done some minor tasks to try to clean up and improve performance but am looking forward to trying your suggestions.

Thanks again and will keep you posted!

best to you,

Rick

 

[honestone]

You are most welcome! 20% is not bad, although as they say, "more is better". Still surprised, though, that with 512 gig of flash storage, you are experiencing slow downs.. Here is a list (with links) of some very good free software that could help you:

1. Onyx - https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html (as you can see, there is version of Onyx for each specific OS, so you would get V3.1.9)

2. AppCleaner - https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ (very good at finding most files associated with an application that you want to delete)

3. GrandPerspective - http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ (nice graphical way of identifying files/folders of all sizes)

4. Malwarebytes - https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac/ (not saying you have adware/a virus, but still a good product to use, just in case)

If you have an external device, and if it has some room, could you move some larger files off your machine to the external drive?

 

[Cory Cooper]

In addition to honestone's sound advice, I agree that upgrading probably won't solve any of the issues you are having. In addition, High Sierra has several issues that may make things worse, due to its new disk (APFS) format, increased system resources, and some incompatibilities of third-party apps with all of the under the hood changes.

Let us know how it goes, and we'll continue to work on smoothing things out for you.

C

 

[honestone]

To add to what Cory stated, for myself, the new file system, APFS, has been OK. What happens is that if you have any kind of flash storage inside your Mac onto which you are installing High Sierra, High Sierra will automatically format it as APFS. As I mentioned, both of my Macs have internal SSDs, so when I did the clean, fresh installation of High Sierra, it automatically formatted each of them as APFS. Also, I have two external Samsung 850 Pro 512 gig SSDs inside nice, slim Orico enclosures. Each of them contain 3 partitions: two of the partitions are for SuperDuper! backups for each of my Macs, and the third partition contains miscellaneous "stuff" (old tax returns, movies, TV series, Photos, etc.). For the backup partitions I have them formatted as APFS, but the other partition is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). All fo that works well, but the APFS format has not really offered any speed increases like I was hoping for.

And yes, as Cory stated, High Sierra does demand more system resources, and I suspect that is part of the reason why switching start up devices/partitions is slow, as well as starting up and shutting down.

Regarding third party software, this link can help you with that:

https://roaringapps.com/apps

I will say that for myself, except for one minor glitch with Quicken 2007, all my third party software works fine with High Sierra. For High Sierra, as I require a robust disk cleanup/maintenance/repair program, so far only Tech Tool Pro is fully compatible with High Sierra (that is one reason why it took me a while to upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra, as it took Micromat considerable time to finally get the newest version of Tech Tool Pro fully compatible with High Sierra). Disk Warrior and Drive Genius are not there yet, and those are perfect examples of what Cory stated about incompatibilities of some third party apps. But again, I am good to go.

Even if you just upgrade to Sierra (which if you upgrade would be wise, versus going to High Sierra), you'll still need to insure that all your third party software is compatible with Sierra. That link above will help you with that.