Expert: Scott Valentine - 2/13/2008

Question
Hey Scott-
Here's what is most likely a simple problem yet I can't seem to find the
answer. I'm using CS and want to make a contact sheet of some of my
illustrations. Under automate/contact sheet II I get a prompt where I can
section the contact sheet and select a source folder. When I go to the source
folder the art files are greyed out. I've saved them as psd, eps, tiff, and gif.
Everything I can think of. Yet they are still grayed out. Any idea what the
problem is?

Thanks.


Answer
Thanks for your question, Rich. I believe the problem is that you need to select the folder itself, rather than the individual images. You should be able to produce a contact sheet from PSD, TIFF and JPG images quite easily, but for photographs GIF is not recommended. Also, EPS may cause errors on some machines when using contact sheet. If you are creating a contact sheet only from photographs, consider saving your PSD files out as High Quality JPGs to help things run quickly and smoothly.

If this doesn't solve your problem, try resetting your preferences file; while Photoshop is launching, before the splash screen appears, hold down CTRL+ALT+SHIFT (CMD+OPT+SHIFT for Mac). You will be presented with an option to delete your preferences, which you should accept.

Before you do this, you should make sure you've saved any modifications you can, including actions, textures, brushes, custom swatches, shortcuts, etc. This is so you can reload them after you get PS running properly again.

Please let me know if you have further questions, or if the two solutions above don't work.

-Scott