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I enjoy writing the "Coffee with Colin" Column because it gives me a place to rant a little about all kinds of things design and (sometimes) Photoshop related. Let me know if you enjoy being on the receiving end of my rants. This month I want to answer the much asked question about deleting Photoshop Preferences.

Q: I have had some problems with Photoshop and I was told to delete my preferences, is this dangerous and where are they?

A: When encountering unusual problems, resetting the prefs is usually the first step in troubleshooting.
The reason this works is because when you delete the preferences file the program is put back to its default state. When Photoshop restarts, new, clean prefs files are built. All the settings and libraries are reset to the factory default and this purges all the added brushes, color swatches, patterns, shapes, styles and gradients. If an item is corrupt in these libraries it can cause Photoshop to hang or crash. Also huge libraries will slow down the loading of Photoshop because all the libraries are loaded at start up. So be forewarned, back 'em up or lose 'em! You can save you libraries from the Preset manager: Edit>Preset manager. Select your items in the main window and choose save set. Do this for each library. (note: Only selected items will be saved)

Resetting the prefs.
I am not even going to tell you how to find the prefs. Why? Because you don't have to dig around and waste your valuable time. Just use this shortcut: While launching Photoshop hold down the Shift+Alt+Ctrl keys. (Shift+Option+Apple keys on Mac) You will now see a message saying "Reset Adobe Photoshop Settings File?" Click yes and its done. Now isn't that easier than going to HDD>Users>Current User>Libraries>Preferences>Adobe>Photoshop or something similar on your computer?

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If you are familiar with the hugely popular Super Tutorial on building a website with Photoshop and Dreamweaver, or my book "From Photoshop to Dreamweaver", you will LOVE this book. This is all the stuff I wish I had put in the previous book such as Expanded explanation of slices and tables, frames and iframes, liquid sites, e-commerce, drop down menus and more. This is a simple to follow guide that will take you through concept to upload of the DreamweaverCAFE site. It is also flexible enough that you can apply the lessons to any site! I wrote this as the book I wish I had when I started designing web sites.

See more here