Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual

Appendix B. Troubleshooting and Getting Help

Nobody’s perfect, and that includes Photoshop and the folks who created it. Programmers can’t anticipate how every single person who uses a program will push, prod, and poke it—and on what kinds of computers and under what circumstances. So don’t be alarmed if at some point Photoshop acts strangely or just can’t figure out how to make something work. If that happens, there are resources aplenty, both inside Photoshop and elsewhere that can help solve your dilemma.

The Online Help Desk

Nestled snuggly within Photoshop’s Help menu is the program’s own Help system, which gives you access to answers to common questions and links to tons of tutorials. You can take it for a test drive by choosing Help → Photoshop Help. When you do, Photoshop launches your Web browser and takes you to the page shown in Figure B-1. At the top of the page is a handy search field that can help you hunt down the info you seek, and on the left side of the page is a list of help topics. You can enter a choice word or two into the search field (the fewer the words, the better) or scan through the topics. Since this help page pulls its answers from Adobe’s online database, you need an active Internet connection to use it.

Tip

Adobe’s online help is great when you’re somewhere with Internet access, but not so great when you’re on a plane, on location for a photo shoot, or have an unreliable Internet connection. If you know of features you want to bone-up on when you’re offline, ...