I had a colleague call me the other day… turns out that he and his wife couldn’t get Lightroom to develop any pictures.  After several steps of troubleshooting (including reinstall) he gave in and called Adobe.  A week later Adobe published details that their machine was not alone.

What’s the Bug?

Several Adobe customers report that they can’t use the Develop module.  Either Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop just crashes whenever they attempt to develop an image.  Turns out there’s an issue if the GPU acceleration is enabled.  Normally the GPU (graphics processing unit) speeds things up, but if you have a card from AMD (which many do)…  then there’s a bug.

If you have the AMD graphics card using driver Version 17.4.4 (released 4/23/2017) on Windows, then problems lie ahead.

  • Lightroom crashes when switching to Develop module.
  • Photoshop and Bridge crash when opening raw files through Camera Raw plug-in.

What’s the Solution?

Adobe suggested two potential workarounds until they can sort things out with AMD.

Workaround 1: Disable Use Graphics Processor

  • Lightroom – Select Preferences > Performance and deselect Use Graphics Processor.
  • Camera Raw – Adobe Camera Raw automatically disables Use Graphics Processor if it encounters a crash due to a graphics card/driver issue.

Workaround 2: Rollback your AMD driver to a prior version (v368.81)

See Rolling back a device driver for instructions.Note: The ‘Rollback Driver’ button may be greyed out if you performed a ‘Clean Installation’ during your last Graphics driver update. If you did a Clean Installation:

 

Adobe promises that they are working on a solution, but in the meantime, follow the instructions above to get around the problem.