Brush edges disappearing - NOT a caps lock issue!

[Bonnie...@adobeforums.com]

Hello -

I've upgraded to CS4 and Leopard (10.5.6) within the last month or so (computer is a dual G5). Recently (sometime in the last week) I've started having a problem where my brush edges disappear as soon as I start painting: I click to paint, and the cursor gets replaced with a standard black arrow for the duration of the stroke. When I let up on the mouse button, the arrow is still visible, but as soon as I move the mouse, the normal brush borders come back. My preferences are set correctly to display brush size and this has nothing to do with the caps lock (though I did try other preferences to see if it helped).

The actual painting functions normally, it's just impossible to do any precision work when you can't tell where the stroke is going. This is true of the regular paint brush tool as well as the clone stamp, the healing brush, the blur tool, the eraser, and presumably everything else as well. Hard-edged brushes and well as soft ones, round as well as irregular shapes. I never imported any brushes that might be corrupted - I didn't even add to the brush palette from the included supplemental brush libraries.

Trashing preferences didn't help. I reached the point where I uninstalled the whole application and reinstalled from scratch - no difference, even before I changed any preferences or options.

This is driving me nuts. I know I'm not going crazy, because I've got two Macs with CS4 less than 10 feet away from me (one with identical hardware to my own), and the brushes on them show up as perfectly normal. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,

--Bonnie

[Ann_She...@adobeforums.com]

Could be an issue with your video card and OpenGL?

[Bonnie...@adobeforums.com]

"Could be an issue with your video card and OpenGL?"

You got me there - is that something that could be fine to start with and then one day suddenly stop working? Because that seems to be what happened. And as I said, there's a machine with identical hardware to mine just across the room that seems to be working fine. The hardware is a few years old at this point, but it's still chugging along.

Thanks,

--Bonnie

[Ann_She...@adobeforums.com]

Try turning OpenGL off and see if that makes a difference?

Which card do you have, by the way? And do your colleagues all have the same card?

[Zeno_...@adobeforums.com]

If it suddenly started happening then it could be the settings files getting corrupted, try deleting them by pressing Command+Option+Shift as soon as you start Photoshop. You should get a dialog box, click yes, see if it fixes the problem

[Bonnie...@adobeforums.com]

"try deleting them by pressing Command+Option+Shift as soon as you start Photoshop"

Neat trick - didn't know about that command. I'm afraid it didn't have any effect, though - the problem's still there. :o/

Thanks,

--Bonnie

[Bonnie...@adobeforums.com]

Ann -

I don't have a lot of experience with OpenGL, but if you're referring to the PS preference enabling it, it's not on. My card is an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, which probably explains the prior sentence. :-] And yes, my coworker's card is the same - two identical machines were bought at the same time from the same vendor.

Thanks,

--Bonnie

[Ann_She...@adobeforums.com]

if you're referring to the PS preference enabling it, it's not on. My
card is an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro

That card doesn't support OpenGL anyway so that is not the problem here.

Do you use a third-party mouse or a Wacom tablet perhaps? And have you downloaded and installed the latest drivers?

[Jim_Sm...@adobeforums.com]

I am having the same exact problem on my dual G5 with the 9600 video card. This is a real pain in the butt. So far after spending 20 hours of troubleshooting, still no fix.

Does anyone have a solution?