A. Troubleshoot at Startup

It takes a lot of code to run an application capable of complex image manipulation, so there are bound to be some rough areas. If Elements seems just a little off to you, there are several key combinations you can press while starting the program to weed out data corruption or possible troublesome plug-ins.

From the Photoshop Elements welcome screen, do any of the following:

• Hold the Shift key and click the Photo Editor button. A dialog appears asking if you’d like to skip loading optional and third-party plug-ins. Click Yes to start the Editor with just the Elements default plug-ins enabled. This technique can help you determine if a third-party plug-in might be interfering with the Editor.

• Hold Shift and click the Organizer button to bring up the Catalog Manager dialog for managing catalogs (see Chapter 3).

• Hold Ctrl+Shift/Command-Shift and click the Photo Editor button to specify a folder to load new third-party plug-ins.

• Hold Ctrl+Alt+Shift/Command-Option-Shift and click either the Organizer or the Photo Editor button to be asked if you want to delete the program’s settings file. If a preference becomes corrupted, this combination starts the application from a blank slate.

• Hold Ctrl+Alt/Command-Option and click the Photo Editor button to specify which drives to use for scratch disks (temporary storage for data that Elements uses while processing images).