Reset The Preferences When You Start Up Photoshop

Photoshop may be the world's most popular and powerful image editor, but like most things in life, especially computer-related things, it's not perfect. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, Photoshop can start acting funny on you. One common cause has to do with Photoshop's Preferences. Sometimes, they can get messed up. Fortunately, Adobe makes it easy to reset the preferences if we need to.

If Photoshop is already open on your screen, close out of it. Then hold down Shift+Ctrl+Alt (Win) / Shift+Command+Option (Mac) on your keyboard and start Photoshop back up. The very first thing you'll see is a dialog box that pops up asking if you want to delete the existing Preferences file (which it calls the "Settings" file):

To reset Photoshop Preferences to the defaults, click Yes in the dialog box. The existing Preferences file will be scrapped and a brand new one will be created.