12 Ways to Fix BRUSH LAG (Photoshop, Krita, Clip Studio Paint and more)

Are you sick of waiting for your paint to catch up to your brush strokes? This tutorial will show you 12 methods for reducing or even eliminating brush lag in any digital art app such as Photoshop, Corel Painter, Krita or Rebelle.

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00:00 - Intro
00:18 - Overview
00:38 - Brush Acceleration
01:33 - What Causes Brush Lag?
03:18 - Incorrect Brush Property Values
05:09 - Stroke Length
05:37 - Stroke Speed
06:00 - Dab Size
06:19 - Demanding Brush Technology
07:16 - Using Too Many Brush Properties
07:36 - Brush Stabilization
07:56 - Demanding Brush Technology
10:40 - Ongoing Simulations
12:06 - Using Too Many Resources
12:37 - Incorrect Software Settings
13:03 - Multi-Tasking
13:29 - Outro

#DigitalArt

[JH-pero]

A very "digital-centric" way around brush lag is to use a mix of lag-free tools, filters and blending to create the desired effect. For example, instead of painting in a layer of lighting one stroke at a time, use the lasso tool to create filled areas, and blend it in from that starting point, which you can do with shorter strokes. If you still need the texture of a complex brush, you can make an outline drawing and trace over it on a new layer; when you're tracing, you can focus just on the process of making the mark from A to B, so you aren't nearly as sensitive to lag. Alternately, many tools let you draw a vector path first, and then apply a brush stroke afterwards, which lets it be simpler and more responsive while you make the marks, and do fine-tuning afterwards. The CSP vector layers even have a set of tools specifically allowing adjustment and redrawing of an existing line's thickness. If you stay in vectors - while not a great option for emulating traditional paints, works very well for ink and pen - the brush itself usually isn't the source of lag, just the density of points, so, rougher paths with more details create a heavier load.

[jordancarlson]

Great video, sir. Thank you very much!

[ToddDolce]

Great video. I wish there was a solution that solved the comprehension lag there is from my lips to my teenager's brain. To your point it usually is a hardware issue where my teenager's processor (brain) just cannot keep up with any seemingly fast demands placed on it. Quite frustrating. I did discover however that a swift kick to the fan motor did seem to speed up the desired results from said teenager.

[jamesbullo]

I get brush lag when I use a particular Bluetooth speaker to listen to spotify whilst drawing. Doesn't happen with my Bluetooth or wired headphones nor with built-in speakers. Best I can think is a firmware or driver update is needed for the device(which I can't find).

[mariapaulamagalhaes]

I usually have lag problems in Photoshop, rather than any Other program, even using a normal hard brush! In medibang, for exemple i dont have any kind of lag.

[yoRRnl]

In the future we dont have Brush lag. The computer is making paintings for us, so we dont use brushes :P

Jokes aside, Thanks Aaron for the video. I am a long time folower from your channel. I am a profesional illustrator too. Using a 6-core i7, 32gb and a GTX1070. Lately, i am kinda interested in the M1 computers on Apple side. With very fast single core's, gpu cores and unifed memory. I think i am going to give the Mac mini M1 16GB a try soon. On paper, this machine runs circles around my custom PC and the crazy part is.. it sips only 30watt from the wall. I really wonder how this machine can hold up with my digital illustrations in Photoshop and (sometimes complex) vector illustrations in Illustrator and Affinity designer. btw, in Photoshop you can also configure the tiles. This means the area around something that changed that will be re-renderd. This can cause lag too because it asks resources.

Have you considerd to give the new ARM cpu's in Apple land a try?

[nauikunart]

Moral lesson: don't wait for your pc to be upgraded, start now. thank you.

[cng]

Multiple monitors also create more lags