Expert: Glen Demers - 3/5/2010

Question
When I open my Adobe Photoshop 7, everything seems to work fine. However, when I open a photo and begin working on it...I'll select a tool or simply try to adjust the image and photoshop (not the cursor) will freeze and show that I'm using the "Select Color Tool, or Eye Dip tool". It will not let me exit out, select anything or do nothing for that matter. I've used it for years, and this problem has come out of nowhere. What do you suggest?

Answer
Hi Brett,

It could be any number of things, depending on your system.

First try to free up some disk space by deleting all .tmp files, emptying trash, recycle bin etc. Make sure your primary scratch disk in preferences has enough disk space to open your image, free space should be at least ten times the image size for optimum performance. Also select second and third scratch disks and notice if these drives "light up" when Photoshop stalls, an indication that Photoshop has run out of room on the primary scratch disk and is taking time to write to another disk.

Other than that, I can suggest you run maintenance on a mac with a program like Onyx that will clean out application cache files. I'm sure there may be similar programs on Windows.

Before re-installing the program you could try deleting the preferences file and relaunching Photoshop, the procedure for doing this varies depending on your system and platform.

Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop 7
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

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