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The BIG Reason

Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.

Photoshop CS2 Color Picker Problem

Four months of just gritting my teeth and dealing with it, I finally invented a solution to my Photoshop color picker problem!

The problem was with selecting colors with the color picker or Eye dropper tool outside of a file. This is a feature that I use 400,000 god damn times a day (did I mention that I have been exploding with fury about this problem since the moment I installed CS2). When I would click and drag off the canvas with the eyedropper to select a color in my browser, Photoshop would select the opposite color, and select it as the background color. Unacceptable.

I've searched the entire internet every single day since I encountered the problem and have still found nothing. I tried reinstalling Photoshop and nothing. I asked friends if they had the same problem. All but one of them did, but didn't seem to care at all! Unacceptable.

This color picked trick is just about the only way to accurately match color for the web in Photoshop. I am totally useless without it.

Today I had enough. I tried hunting the internet one more time, reinstalling Photoshop one more time and going through all of the Photoshop preferences one more time, when it occurred to me. Trash your preferences. The single most obvious thing—the only thing I didn't try—was the solution.

The Fix:

  1. Quit Photoshop, use command+q and hit the q key extra hard
  2. Go to ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings/ clicking the mouse with your clenched fist as you navigate your path of destruction
  3. Nuke every last scumbellied mother fucker in there!
  4. Show no mercy and empty your trash and spit on your floor for extra emphasis
  5. Start Photoshop and redo all your workspaces and preferences
  6. Enjoy normal life again

The thing that pissed me off most about this is that no one else on the entire internet cared enough to write about this anywhere where I could find it. So there you go earth! Thanks for nothing! Suck it! All of your bitch are belong to M.e..

Update: So check this out… Turns out it’s a bug with the precice cursors preference. When I nuked all my preferences it reset everything to the defaults, so the paint bucket looks like a paint bucket and the eye dropper like an eyedropper. When I set them back to precise cursors, the select problem came up again. My one friend who did have the issue had his cursors set to the defaults. I’m reporting the bug to Adobe. I’ll try to use better language.