HELP!! Issue with Wacom Intuos Pro Freezing My Mac

Hi, I have been having this issue for a long while and it is just getting worst. When working in Photoshop with my wacom tablet my tablet will end up freezing my entire Imac and everytime I have to restart my system.

I have called Adobe and wacom, installed and reinstalled software, drivers and preferences, installed the OS X white window work around pluggin, deselect the ink function in my Mac settings, nothing works.

When the freeze happens, the only thing that functions is right click on the mouse and enter to select whatever option a pop-up window will give me.

Does anyone know a workaround or fix to this?
A very desperate photographer/digital Retoucher

Thanks
Annie

Welcome to our forums Annie.

Please provide us with the year and model of your Mac, how much memory you have installed, remaining hard drive space, and which version of OS X it's running. We will probably recommend checking your hard disk to start but we would need to know which version of OS X you have because the method of checking the drive varies with the version.

Oh yes! I meant to add, sorry! I have an iMac retina 4k late 2015, 3.1ghz Intel core i5, memory 16gb 1867mhz ddr3, graphic Intel iris pro 6200 1536mb.

I run only my programs on my Mac and I work from external drives. I have 1tb of storage on my Mac, and 754.34gb free.

I run on the latest version of El Capitain 10.11.6.

Try to bring the media you are working on to the internal drive and see if the problem still persists. What connection are the external drives, USB 2 or 3, firewire/thunderbolt? The firewire/thunderbolt drives are a better connection because they work bidirectional, as with USB is only unidirectional.

As a troubleshooting procedure, start up from Recovery and run Disk Utility > First Aid on all connected drives.

Annie_Carrier said:

Hi, I have been having this issue for a long while and it is just getting worst. When working in Photoshop with my wacom tablet my tablet will end up freezing my entire Imac and everytime I have to restart my system.

Click to expand...

Just to be sure...is this Wacom tablet compatible with El Capitan?

- Nick

Thanks Bob and Nick. I will try to move my image folders back into my Mac to see if this makes a difference. Now that I think of it, I think it happened before I transferred to my external drives, but definitely not as much as what is happening now.

As far as the compatibility issue between El Capitan and Wacom, I can't seem to find a definite answer to that. Only that I am not the only one having issues with Wacom Intuos and that it is very frustrating.... :/

Annie_Carrier said:

As far as the compatibility issue between El Capitan and Wacom, I can't seem to find a definite answer to that. Only that I am not the only one having issues with Wacom Intuos and that it is very frustrating.... :/

Click to expand...

Are you saying that you know other folks using the exact same Wacom tablet & El Capitan...and they have issues too?

Also...there are 9 different Wacom Intuos tablets. Which one do you have?

- Nick

I have the Wacom Intuos Pro 4.

I don't know other users personally, but by doing research to try and find fixes or information I found out that there seems to be a concesnus that there is an issue, however Wacom doesn't seem to have a fix for it. Even when I called them this week it didn't resolve anything.

My tablet is connected directly into my Mac via USB3, so there is no middle man involved there. But I also noticed that when my tablet fails and freezes my Mac, often it will say that the tablet driver was not found. Windows had a similar issue, and you could apparently restart your driver by going into services and restart the Wacom driver from there or use kill command prompts, However I can't find anything that would be similar for Mac.... It's not from lack of trying!

Annie_Carrier said:

I have the Wacom Intuos Pro 4.

Click to expand...

I couldn't seem to find that exact model on the Wacom website. They just have a series called "Wacom Intuos Pro".

I saw that you have a 2015 iMac. How long have you owned this Wacom tablet?...and if you had & used it before this 2015 iMac...what model Mac was it and what OS version was it running?

Annie_Carrier said:

I don't know other users personally, but by doing research to try and find fixes or information I found out that there seems to be a concesnus that there is an issue, however Wacom doesn't seem to have a fix for it.

Click to expand...

Give me an issue (any issue)...and I can search the internet and find folks that have that issue too! Sometimes internet searches need to be "taken with a grain of salt". Not saying there couldn't be a widespread issue.

- Nick

Thanks Nick! I know, internet searches are a bit frustrating when you are trying to find something specific lolll I have had my Wacom tablet for a little over 2.5 years I think and I have been a Mac user since January of this year. So my Mac came with El Capitan. I was on Windows pc before that and never had issues beforehand.

The issues I am getting is that my brush strokes in photoshop are jiggery instead of being smooth, and when sizing my brush with the setting I have on my pen it will freeze everything. My tablet becomes unresponsive and the driver seems to be not found, if I switch to using my mouse I am unable to do anything, except right click and press enter. Those are my only two options to manage to shut everything down and restart my Mac. And sometimes I can't even do anything because I cannot change the options to select in the popup windows (like save, discard, cancel for example). It will be stuck on the default choice and the only thing I can do is press enter to accept and try move on until I get to my restart menu, or perform a hard shut down..... I was finishing a contract 2 days ago and I had to restart my Mac 8 times that day due to that stupid freeze...... It's beyond ridiculous...... I have made so many searches now I don't know where and under what keywords to look for anymore! lolll

Annie_Carrier said:

I have had my Wacom tablet for a little over 2.5 years I think and I have been a Mac user since January of this year. So my Mac came with El Capitan. I was on Windows pc before that and never had issues beforehand.

...... I have made so many searches now I don't know where and under what keywords to look for anymore! lolll

Click to expand...

Ok thanks again for all the info. With all of my questions...I was trying to gather info that might (or might not) support my initial theory when I read your original post.

If you visit the Wacom website...they currently have about 9 Wacom Intuos tablets. With your tablet being about 2.5 years old...I don't know if it's one of the tablets currently listed on the Wacom website...or if it's a discontinued model. Also, all 9 of the tablets are supposed to be both Windows & Mac OS compatible.

Of the 9 Intuos tablets listed (in regards to OS requirements for Apple computers)...about half of them say OS 10.6.8 and newer...and the other half say OS 10.8.5 and newer.

Here's the deal. El Capitan (the OS version your iMac is running) is OS 10.11. This is 5 OS version's newer than OS 10.6.8...and 3 OS version's newer than OS 10.8.5. Unless Wacom has done a VERY good job confirming that their products are compatible with each new Mac OS release...it's very possible that your Wacom Intuos Pro 4 tablet is partially or fully incompatible with El Capitan.

If your tablet happens to be one of the OS 10.6.8 and newer Wacom models...it's not uncommon for a piece of 3rd party hardware to have issues with a fairly current Mac OS version like El Capitan. Especially if that piece of hardware was originally released when OS 10.6.8 was the newest Mac OS.

Just so you know. Mac OS 10.6.x was released in 2009 (7 years ago)...and Mac OS 10.8.x was released in 2012 (4 years ago). Again. Unless Wacom has done a good job confirming the products they sell are compatible with each new Mac OS release...and if not provided a software patch to make them compatible. It's possible the OS compatability info on thier website is out of date...and...possible your Wacom tablet is at least partially incompatible with El Capitan.

This is my best guess/theory with given the info in the thread & from the Wacom website.

- Nick

Annie_Carrier said:

Thanks Nick! I know, internet searches are a bit frustrating when you are trying to find something specific lolll I have had my Wacom tablet for a little over 2.5 years I think and I have been a Mac user since January of this year. So my Mac came with El Capitan. I was on Windows pc before that and never had issues beforehand.

The issues I am getting is that my brush strokes in photoshop are jiggery instead of being smooth, and when sizing my brush with the setting I have on my pen it will freeze everything. My tablet becomes unresponsive and the driver seems to be not found, if I switch to using my mouse I am unable to do anything, except right click and press enter. Those are my only two options to manage to shut everything down and restart my Mac. And sometimes I can't even do anything because I cannot change the options to select in the popup windows (like save, discard, cancel for example). It will be stuck on the default choice and the only thing I can do is press enter to accept and try move on until I get to my restart menu, or perform a hard shut down..... I was finishing a contract 2 days ago and I had to restart my Mac 8 times that day due to that stupid freeze...... It's beyond ridiculous...... I have made so many searches now I don't know where and under what keywords to look for anymore! lolll

Click to expand...

If these issues presented themselves to me, here is what I would do:

Shut down the Mac,

do an NVRAM reset, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063,
then do an SMC reset, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295,
then start up into Recovery, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314. Select Disk Utility, and run First Aid on all drives connected.

Also, are you positive the issue is with the tablet? Have you tried the same steps while using a regular USB/bluetooth mouse, not the mouse that works with the tablet?

Thank you Nick. It would not be cool to have a product that becomes partly useless due to drivers not keeping up with OS x ....

Thank you Bob for the information about the testing of the system, I have bookmarked the links and will definitely be trying the SMC reset tips next time I have a freeze, then move on to the other tests if I have to. To answer your question, I am 98% certain the issue is with the tablet and as I mentioned in my initial post, the behaviour always happens in Photoshop. I don't think the issue would happen with the regular Mac mouse, but it is nearly impossible for me to do my work with a regular mouse, so testing with that would be quite difficult.

I will continue to test and see if I find a way to make the behaviour stop. I will let you know if something ends up working!