[Mike Gondek]

Have you tried opening this file on another system. If you post the file, will be glad to try on mine (or whomever else on this baord can get to it first).

You may have a corrupted font or preference on your system. It cannot hurt to reset you ilustrator prefs, (Boot illustrator and immediately afterwards holding down Shift, Ctrl Alt, then choose reset prefs).

I try to never embed but link images in my illustrator files and turn off pdf compatible. This makes your files much smaller therfore reducing the chance of your file not saving properly.

[Mike Gondek]

Rest assured that CS2 is very stable and has been beta tested on many XP Pro configurations. Is there anything similar about all your systems that is not part of the common install (a plug-in, network, malignant virus, corrupted preference.

My post would be very long to give you all the tricks to try (I wrote an entire troubleshooting chapter in my book on this), but start with these:

1) Reset your Photoshop Prefs (Shift Ctrl Alt immediately after booting Photoshop)
2) Uninstall any extra fonts (it only takes one corrupt font)
3) Run speed disk or defragment your drive
4) Free up extra space on your drive
5) Run all the virus stuff you can (Norton, Spydoctor, Windows Defender, WF Shredder, Sbybot)
6) Update any wacom driver, screen saver or other common leemnt element fo the crashing machines
7) Turn OFF automatic updates for Windows XP

There has to be something common about all your systems that is causing this. If you reformatted your machine and only installed Photoshop, most likely it would work. Don’t want you to do that, unless that is easily possible.

What puzzles me most is that you have this problem on three machines, there must be some driver or common font or preference/application causing this.

If a bridge window open in the background can crash your system once i begins to preview a corrutp image.

Good luck and have faith that your problem can be fixed, sorry to hear this has went on for 7 months.

[Mike Gondek]

I have used Andreas, the quality of the resulting mosaic is astounding. I res my images down with a photoshop action as you do not need many pixels from your source images (speeds processing up quite a bit).

[Mike Gondek]

If you are printing this, then you may want vector qulaity logos and type. You also may find this a quicker method.

1) Open the PDF in Illustrator (in most PDFses Ilusrator editing capability is ON)
2) Do all you edits in Illustrator
3) If you have images to edit you will have to unembed them from the CS2 links palette, or copy and paste into photoshop, and set dpi to 300.
4) Send the .ai file to your printer.

[Mike Gondek]

Deboss the sand
Choose a simple fonts such as tekton bold, set you message.
Add a bevel and emboss layer effect. Chaneg the shadow blend mode to color burn, and the highlight mode to soft light.
Change the fill opactiy to 0% leaving the effect opacity at 100%.

(these next 2 steps are optional for an even more convincing look if you have the time, and are looking for a quality high res image)
Displace the sand
Save a flattened .psd file of just the bevel layer on a white background. Run a filter >>distort>> displace and use the .spd file you made.

Raise the sand higher on the outer edges
Make a layer over the entire image of a repeating pattern of the sand all disturbed.
Add a layer mask that hides all.
Paint on the layer mask over the edges of the type with a rough brush to reveal the higher up sand layer on the outer edges of the type.

[Mike Gondek]

Whomever placed these files should know the location of where they are at, or have copied them to a location closer to the illustrator file.

No fear though, you can go to the links palette and choose get info from the flyout menu.

[Mike Gondek]

I have a feeling your problem is not in the scanner software but with your Photoshop settings being corrupt.

As a test, try taking the image that you scanned on the bad machine, and opening taht in Phtohsop on the good machine. If it comes out correct, than Phtohsop is the problem.

Most likely you can easily fix this by resetting your Photoshop preferences (hold your fingers over SHIFT CTRL ALT, boot photoshop, immediately depress the 3 keys, choose the option from the pop up to reset preferences).

[Mike Gondek]

Change the live trace settings to render a grayscale file using total range as the amount of colors in your swatches palette, and the use select similar and change your fills to you swatches. I would enable all the swatches in your pallette as global colors, for easy tweaking later.

[Mike Gondek]

Save a grayscale psd file of your bump texture. Then on your leather colored document use filter>>texture>>texturizer and rather than sandstone load the texture of your bumpmap. You may want to put add some monchromatic noise into this for realism, if your leather texture is a flat color.

[Mike Gondek]

You should use a layer mask in Photoshop to knockout the background and then save this image as a .psd file. Use file>>Place>>(link should be checked) and choose the .psd image you just saved.

This should also answer you next post about how to work with both programs.