problems in painting

[caligula]

Usually when I am painting the opacity can be changed by entering a number with out using the shift key. (ie Press 0 and you have 100% opacity) Sometimes for no apparent reason, I will have to use the shift key plus a number to change the opacity as entering a number without the shift key suddenly changes the flow. Why does photoshop change on me and how can I prevent this from happening. I would much rather not have to use the shift key to change the opacity as I change this alot more than flow. Thanks for your help, Nemesis.

[NEMESIS]

Hey Caligula :D rearranging swatches worked? :D

Basically as you said changing the opacity should be without shift key. And never heard that someone needs Shift key to change opacity. Maybe something is wrong with your preferences in Photoshop. I suggest you to when you starting Photoshop(it means at very start) to press this keyboard shortcut SHIFT+COMMAND+OPTION (MAC) or SHIFT+CTRL+ALT (PC) and you'll get the dialog box which says DELETE THE ADOBE PHOTOSHOP SETTINGS FILE. By all means click YES :D That should solve your problem.
Ohh, yes by the way if you use Brush tool in Option Bar you have SET TO ENABLE AIRBRUSH CAPABILITIES (is airbrush icon, located near flow) if that is pressed when you key number 5 it will change your flow to 50%. Turn off "set to enable airbrush capabilities" by pressing it again.
Tell me what you done, i am interested to hear from you.

See ya

[caligula]

Hi Nemesis, Yes, rearranging the swatches worked and thank you for helping me with that.

I did as you said, relaunched photoshop and pressed shift+command+option as soon as the program opened, but no dialogue box came up. Maybe this means that preferences are very messed up as you said? Is there another way to access this dialogue box and delete the Adobe photoshop settings file without using a keyboard shortcut? Will I loose my brushes and wacom setting preferences by deleting the settings file? Not that this is any big deal.

Another problem I am having is that people are emailing psd file attachments which I can view in the email. I know they are psd files as they have the correct icon for that type of file. When I save them to my desktop, the files will no longer open in photoshop or any other program. I get a message that color sync utility cannot open files of this type. I then changed my preferences to open PSD files in photoshopCS2, but this didnot correct the problem. I have checked with the sender and they were psd files that were created in Photoshop 7 on a windows pc. I called adobe tech support and they were baffled by the problem. I am using a powermac G5, OS 10.4.9 and working in CS2. Thanks for your help, Nemesis.

[caligula]

Ok, I was able to delete the photoshop preferences. I didnot know I had to hold down those keys before launching photoshop. I will keep you posted if this resolves my problems with the shift key.

[NEMESIS]

Ok, in case you wanted to know, do you remember that Preset Manager i talked about last time? Ok, when you select for example brushes from drop down menu you can click on brush than COMMAND+clicking on brushes to select multiple choices and you have SAVE SET button. Save anything custom made on some place on your hard drive so you'll have back up of yours custom made brushes, swatches, gradients, styles, patterns, contours, custom shapes and tools. This is especially great if in some "god forbid" case you need to delete the application so again when you install it you can to load that back up files again.

And concerning to your other problem maybe there is some incompatibility between Windows OS and MAC OSX plus Photoshop versions etc. I use daily Win and MAC OS and never encountered that problem. But you could try this: when you download attachment try to rename the file for example "myfile.psd" so basically you are adding extension prefix to the file.

Let me know what you've done.

See ya

[caligula]

It seems like photoshop is running well now after clearing out my adobe preferences. As far as my other problems, they seem to be resolved for now. I ran disk utility from the startup disk and cleared out the directory and emptied the cache. There were also corrupted preferences in the individual user account that prevented the psd files from opening.

Thanks again. Caligula