Photoshop CS4 Freezes when opening PDFs

Question

When I drag two, 2-page PDFs onto Photoshop CS4 to open them, PS opens one page of one PDF and then freezes. I can replicate this every time I try.
Once PS freezes it takes a little patience to get it to force quit.
Any advice?

Answer 1

Not to dig up the past, but I've been having this problem since a couple of months ago, and I have an idea about what might be causing the bug. It IS a bug.
My workflow involves taking hundreds of PSD and PDF files for product packaging and converting them to 3D and 2D product shots. We have to supply retailers with high-res JPGs of our distributed products. Most of the original files have crop marks, color bars, etc.
In the past, all I had to do was drag my files, whatever they were, to the dock. I would typically work in batches, pulling up 10 or so files at once, cropping them, and then running an action, depending on the general format. Pretty much every layout is a different size, or using a different template, or what have you, so using an action to do the actual cropping is completely out of the question. Cropping in Acrobat is horribly implemented, so that's out of the question.
One day I started doing some image processing as normal, and photoshop opened the first PDF, rasterized it, and then became completely unresponsive. Well, let me specifically qualify that. It lets me continue using any application other than photoshop, and it will let me click on the menus, which will drop down from the menu bar, but you can't select any commands at all. They aren't grayed out, they just don't respond. The behavior is exactly what you would get if you had a dialog box open, but there isn't an open dialog box. There SHOULD be (for the next PDF), but it isn't there.
You can't "quit" or close that first PDF or anything. Some commands will try to function (scripts) but fail and say "Sorry, something major happened, and I can't continue" (yes, that's really the error message).
OS X doesn't think that PS is locked up. PS doesn't think it is locked up, but it won't do anything at all. It only happens with multiple PDFs being dragged to the dock or opened through "file/open." In fact, if you select 30 PSD files, 10 JPGs, 5 EPS files, 1 PDF and 10 Illustrator files, it will work just fine. 2 PDFs? locks up.
I've found one way to get around this bug, and it might work for those of you with this problem. Use the File/Scripts/Image Processor tool to rasterize your PDFs to PSD files as an intermediate step, and then you can open them in Photoshop. If you need something other than pg 1 of a multipage document, you'll have to edit in acrobat first to get rid of unwanted leading pages.
That's been my work-around for a few months.
I just recently moved from my Mac Pro to a new MacBook Pro. I did a clean install, and then ran migration assistant to move my stuff over to a new account.
Everything went well, but the photoshop bug appeared to follow me to a new machine. I was very frustrated.
Then I realized what had changed around the time of this bug originally showing up: I'd added a second monitor!
So, thinking I'd figured out the bug and how to get around it for real, I just disconnected my external monitor and force-quit Photoshop. Opened it back up, and the bug is still there in force, even with one display active.
Here's my info, to clarify:
Original machine with the bug:
Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 ghz (4 core 2007 model)
8GB RAM
320 GB velociraptor (system drive)
1.5TB RAID 0, 900 GB free (scratch)
10.5.7-10.6.6 (bug never went away)
2 NEC 20" LCDs
CS5 Design Premium, fully updated
New machine, also with bug:
2011 15" MacBook Pro, 2.0ghz 4 core
8 GB RAM
120GB SATA6 SSD (system drive, primary scratch), 70 GB free
500 GB stock HDD (in the optical bay, storage drive, secondary scratch), 250 GB free
10.6.7
1 NEC 20" LCD + built-in hi-res display