There are reports of severe screen flickering when using Adobe Photoshop on some models of the 13-inch 2012 MacBook Air. The problem has been spotted by MacBook owners and reported on online forums.
The problem is said to occur when trying to use some brush tools on Photoshop.
"A number of users experience severe screen flicker in Photoshop CS6 when using any of the larger brush type tools (cloning, eraser, brush, spot healing, burning, and dodging). As many on this thread are experiencing, it is awfull [sic] and unusable! The flicker is screen wide black boxes, sometimes the whole screen goes black. It only seems to happen when we put the cursor over the image to edit," a certain user going by the name GSVAI on the Adobe Forums reported.
Chris Cox, a representative of Adobe, responded on the forum and suspected that it can be a GPU or LCD driver problem.
"I went to the Apple store and brought myself a more recent MacBook Air (13", 4/256 FYI, they were out of the 8/512 model). I can't reproduce *exactly* what you're showing, but got the flicker to happen by resizing the cursor. Also, while painting, the screen seems to stop updating except for the cursor -- not only is Photoshop unable to draw, but other applications stop drawing as well. And a few times it hasn't even updated the cursor (while all other apps seem frozen). That's not normal," Cox added on another post on the same forum.
Meanwhile on the MacRumors Forum, the same issues were reported by 2013 MacBook Air Users. A certain SergioBaschi claimed that the problem was fixed by changing the resolution to the second highest. Updating to the latest Mavericks operating system also resolved the problem.
According to MacRumors that first scooped the flickering screen issues on the new MacBook Air, the new chipsets of the ultrathin device have some issues citing reports earlier this month about Wi-Fi performance.
Adobe meanwhile advises Photoshop users dealing with the screen flickering problem to contact AppleCare so the issues can be properly diagnosed.
Below is a video demonstrating the screen flickering issues with the 2013 MacBook Air:
