[Mike Gondek]

Mine works fine on white vector artowrk, can you describe in more detail what type of elements you are trying to live trace?

[Mike Gondek]

There are many things that can casue this such as opening the file. SOme common fixes are

purge your cache
copy the file to your hard drive
run norton disk doctor or some disk utility
check that your ram is proerly installed
make sure your drive has plenty of free hard drive space
close unnecessary fonts
close all other open applications
create a new user in OSX and log in as that, then try to open the file

[Mike Gondek]

try resetting your prefs. Boot phothsop, immediately dpress shift command option and click yes to reset prefs.

Sound though like you are missing some components of photoshop, like no filters menu. In this case you will have to reinstall yet again.

Run disk first aid (fix permisssions) prior to install as you may have folders that are locked, and disk first aid fixes this returning problem to Mac OSX.

[Mike Gondek]

The crop tool by default uses the untis you have in your rulers. Right click in your ruler and choose picels, then you can type 500 tab 500 and you will be set for cropping to 500 x 500 pixels.

You can always force the units used by typing “500 in” or “500 px”. You can also create a tool presets for your favorite crop sizes like 720px x 480px, or 8.5″ x 11″, whcih are quite useful.

[Mike Gondek]

Cannot do what you are asking. Best advice I can give is if you have many windows open on your screen:

1)Choose zoom tool, enable “Zoom All Windows” in optiosn bar on top
2) Double click magnifyinmg glass. This will give you 100% or actual pixels view. (Sorry, but fit on screen does not work on all windows)

[Mike Gondek]

You can also alt drag the word effect to copy all the effects from one layer to another.

[Mike Gondek]

To get shots out of a digital cmaera you either

1) plug the camera into your computer with USB or firewire
2) remove your data card (e.g. Compact Flash) and insert that into a card reader

Soem cameras come with software with an import commadn, and I don’t like using those utilisites as thsi is more software to update/install. Phtohsop can read almost any type3 of raw format from most all cameras and you shodl just have to use the open command to get to your digital camera images, not import.

[Mike Gondek]

Since this is happening in all your programs, your mouse might be dirty or damaged.

If you are using a wacom tablet, your control panel setings might need to be tweened.

Depending on if you are on mac or pc you may have a control panel setting to adjust.

Try swapping and cleaning your mouse. If you still have troubel let us knwo what platform you are on and what type of input device you are using (mouse, wacom, trackball, etc)

[Mike Gondek]

If batch has worked on this machine before:
1) hold you fingers over Shift Ctrl Alt.
2) Boto Photoshop
3) Immediately depress these 3 keys and when asked reset your prefs.

Otherwise you may be missing or have a corrupted plug-in for batch. Tehre are otehr reasons it may not work, but you have eliminated thsoe possibiliiteis by restarting Photoshop.

[Mike Gondek]

The reason is that cropping, changing the canvase size or using trim will get rid of the pixels outside the new canvas size. What you need to do is:
METHOD A
1) create a new document to the final size you need.
2) Link all the layers together in the dopucmetn with the artwork
3) hold down shift and drag all these layers to your new document

METHOD B
An alternative method you would put a vector layer mask on a set containing your artwork, but this method would leave a larger image with tranparent background when you place in lets say InDesign or AE. You would also have to turn on the blending option for Vector mask hides effcts

I think it is great that Phothsop crops and gets rid of extra pixels, but would be nice to have an option to retain the pixels in a floating layer, so that effect such as Bevel Emboss don’t look differetn after cropping.