Xdw11cI.jpg?fit=500%2C1332' alt='Adobe Photoshop Color Lookup' title='Adobe Photoshop Color Lookup' />Solving Common Photoshop ProblemsGreyed out Filters. In my role as moderator of the member forums over at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals Website, I routinely help struggling users to come to grips with the powerful, yet temperamental program we all love. Some of the most common problems are the easiest to solve, but like many technical problems, the answer often lies in knowing how to ask the question. But, over on the forums, we get the questions asked almost every way you can imagine, and over the next few weeks Ill be bringing you a series of problem solving tips aimed at overcoming the most bothersome and common Photoshop annoyances. If youve got a problem thats stumped you, or an annoyance youd like to see resolved, add a comment at the end of this article, and well see if we can work it in Thats what we do here at Tip. ColorLUTAdjLayerExamp.jpg' alt='Adobe Photoshop Color Lookup' title='Adobe Photoshop Color Lookup' />Squirrel So lets start with that all too common ailment Problem I want to use the Photoshop Filter XXXXX, but its greyed out Is there something wrong Do I need to reinstall PhotoshopThe good news is, there most likely isnt anything wrong we just need to make a few adjustments to the file with which were working. Is the Export As just a grey box that takes ages to appear In Photoshop select Help Update and you will be. The Pretty Photoshop Actions 500 biannual scholarship awarded twice per year provides college and university an opportunity to further their education. November 3, 2017 in Tutorial Adding Decal to an Object in Adobe Dimension September 4, 2017 in Tutorial A Simple Magazine Cover Mock Up in Photoshop. Julieanne Kost. Principal Digital Imaging Evangelist, Adobe Systems, Inc. Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials. Master Photoshop skills like retouching, dodge burn, layers, masks, color corrections, and much more in this online photoshop training course. Lifetime access with. Weve curated the best collection of Video Elements and After Effects templates from the worlds leading designers. Get the perfect assets for your next video projectIn fact, the answer most likely is staring us in the face, right beside the menu Yes indeed, we are working with a file that has 1. RGB1. 6 in the caption bar of the image. ColorLookup_04.jpg' alt='Adobe Photoshop Color Lookup' title='Adobe Photoshop Color Lookup' />This is the single most common reason for the filters to be greyed out. You see, a great number of filters are from an old batch of filter effects Adobe acquired many versions back, and those filters havent been updated to modern standards. So, while they will work with 8 bit files, they wont work with 1. Another related problem shows itself with the Clouds filter Filter Render Clouds. The Hoosiers The Trick To Life on this page. Normally you would expect the clouds to be rendered in the foreground and background colors, but with a 1. Heres how to solve both of these problems very quickly change the bit depth of your file from 1. Image Mode 8 BitsChannel. Once youve made this change, all the filters become available Problem solved, right Well, maybe not exactly. Changing a file from 1. You may notice a degradation if the image, especially in subtle gradients such as skies, skin and clothing. So, is there a workaround You bet there is. There are several workarounds, in fact. Make a copy of your document, and convert the copy to 8 bits per channel. Run the filter there, and copy and paste the result back into your 1. Convert your critical layer or layers to a Smart Object select the layer or multiple layers, and choose Layer Smart Objects Convert to Smart Object. Then, change the bit depth of your file by choosing Image Mode 8 BitsChannel as we saw above. In this case, two important things happen The contents of the smart object remain at 1. Channel All the filters now work, and as a benefit, they are applied as Smart Filters see below. We covered Smart Filters and Smart Objects in some detail awhile back if you need a refresher, please see my earlier tutorials Smarter Editing with Smart Objects. Smart Objects, Raw Flexibility. Smart Objects, Smarter Filters his tutorial describes Smart Filters and how they workAnd, for even more in depth studies of Smart Objects Picture Package with Smart Objects. Exposure Blending with Smart Objects. Nested Smart Objects Part 1 Part 2Max Stacks with Photoshop. Noise Reduction with Smart Object Stack Modes. Creative Stacking Diversions. Stay tuned next week as we continue to attack common problems in Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop CS6 Review. Home  Donate  New  Search  Gallery  Reviews  How To  Books  Links  Workshops  About  Contact. Adobe Photoshop CS6April 2. Ken. Rockwell. com. All rights reserved. Adobe Photoshop CS6. Id get it from Adorama or from Amazon. This free websites biggest source of support is when you use those, or any of these links, when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live. Thank you Ken. July 2. Better Pictures   Adobe   Nikon   Canon    Fuji    LEICA   All Reviews. How to Use Photoshop Previous version Photoshop CS5 review Previous previous version Photoshop CS4 review Apple Aperture review and usage Introduction         top. Photoshop has been the worlds top computer program for editing and optimizing images for over twenty years. Photoshop has been around since 1. Photoshop CS6 is really Photoshop 1. Adobe changed the name to CS, Creative Suite, back at version 8 to make it seem bright and new, as opposed just to a perennial update. Photoshop is one of the longest running franchises in consumer software. First there was Photoshop 1. Photoshop 2 1. 99. Photoshop 3 1. 99. Francis Francis X4 Manual more. Photoshop 4 1. 99. Photoshop 5 1. 99. Photoshop 6 1. 99. Photoshop 7 2. 00. Photoshop CS v. 8, 2. Photoshop CS2 v. Photoshop CS3 v. Photoshop CS4 v. Photoshop CS5 v. Photoshop CS6 v. CS4 was very buggy, and otherwise, every version of Photoshop has been the world standard for image editing. I earn my living using Photoshop about six days a week. I live in Photoshop. Sometimes Ive even dreamt in Photoshop, which scared the heck out of me when I woke up and realized how much of my life is spent in Photoshop, instead of outdoors. While Photoshop CS6 has 6. Photoshop CS5, what really maters to professionals are the simple improvements that let us get more done faster. We dont want to be using Photoshop at all we want to be out shooting, delivering final product and making money, not playing on a computer. These ergonomic improvements, like the new Crop Tool, let us make more pictures faster, so we make more money, which makes the price of this software irrelevant to the full time professional. If youre a casual photographer, theres nothing about Photoshop CS6 a. Photoshop 5. 5 of the late 1. Photoshop CS minus 2. If you dont need color management, I started using Photoshop 3 CS minus 4 in 1. If you do this for fun, theres no reason you need to update to CS6, and in fact, Aperture or Lightroom are probably better programs for you. See Is It Worth It. Speed has nothing to do with how fast it can crunch big files. To a pro user, speed is how fast we can tell Photoshop what to do with as few clicks as possible how fast we can get the commands out of our imagination and into Photoshop. We have a lot of images to work, and they each need different work. The more images we can complete faster, the more money we make. As far as crunching big files, thats never been a problem. Back in 2. 00. 0 in Photoshop 6 a. CS minus 2 on my Dual 4. MHz G4 Power. Mac, I had no problem working on 1. Emory Radiologic Technology Program. MB 4x. 5 film scans, so 3. MP cameras today are a piece of cake. I havent seen a progress bar in Photoshop for years. Savvy pro users have always known how to work on an optimally sized file so that theyre never slowed down, while casual users often tried to work with oversized files. Anyway, number crunching speed hasnt been a problem for anyone sane for years. Photoshop originally was designed and sold to professional graphic artists, printers and publishers in the early 1. By the middle 1. 99. Photoshop. Photoshop became the standard because it was in the right place at the right time, and because it got better and better. Photoshop was always, and still is, bigger and more complex than the much simpler needs of photographers, so simpler programs better suited to photographers are more popular today in 2. Today I use Photoshop CS6 every day not so much for its basic adjustment and cropping ability, but more for its perspective transformations for my studio photography and its mechanical abilities to let me format my images for publication like resizing, sharpening, adding layers of specialized text, changes of color spaces, file and image formats and much more. For the great majority of photographers, simpler, broader programs like Aperture and Lightroom are far more popular. Even when I use Aperture to make global corrections to my LEICA M9 DNG raw files, I still use Photoshop for final formatting for publication. Any of these programs can work on one image in detail at a time, or process many images at once, however Aperture and Lightroom are best for running through many images at a time, while Photoshop is better for working over one image at a time in extremely careful detail. Personally, I use Phase One Media Pro to view my images and sort good from bad, then I drag the good ones into Photoshop CS6 to format them for their intended use. If Im shooting raw, which I only do with my LEICA M9 because its internal image processing is so bad that it cant make good JPGs on its own as do Nikon and Canon, Ill use Aperture to make most of my image adjustments on the DNG files, export the results as JPGs, catalog and sort in Phase One Media Pro, and finish each file in Photoshop CS6. Performance         top. I just got my copy of CS6 at the end of May, 2. The great news is that its a no brainer it was easy to move to it and just keep using it exactly as before. Operating System Photoshop CS6 runs great on my 2. GHz Apple Mac. Pro on OS 1. Apples previous OS. Ive got 8 GB RAM. I use Apples previous OS because I use Dreamweaver 8 from 2. Dreamweaver 8 wont run on OS 1. I still need to review Dreamweaver CS6, and if it does what I need, I can update my OS and drop Dreamweaver 8. Installation. A key differentiator between well designed and carelessly designed software is how fast and easily it installs. The great news is that Photoshop CS6 is trivially easy to install. Older Versions. After installing the new CS6, all my older versions are still all up and running. I no longer use CS5 or buggy CS4 which are all still on my computer, but I do still use Photoshop CS2 in Rosetta mode to scan from my 1. Rosetta. For those of us still using 1. Photoshop CS4 was the last version that could Open Using Rosetta. Licenses and Adobe Accounts When you buy CS6, you may install it on two machines and use it on only one at a time. I installed it on my studio machine, and if I wanted to install it on my laptop for use in the field, that would be OK, too. If you need your assistant to work on your images back at the studio while youre out using Photoshop on your laptop, youll need to buy a second copy. The only gotcha is that you need an Adobe Account, without which you cant run the software, much less install it. No big deal we all have Adobe Accounts already from previous software installations. If you need to operate in secrecy, you need different software. Even back around CS2 or maybe it was Photoshop 7, Photoshop recognized if you were scanning money, showed you a warning box, and refused to open it. Since Adobe knows who you are, its trivial for Adobe to send the Secret Service your personal information and physical location in real time if they choose to. Adobe knows what youre doing because Photoshop is talking to Adobe over the Internet in the background thats how activation works. Run many days offline, and the program will stop running until you go online again for it to validate and swap data.