For the past few days, I have been trying to set aside a little bit of time to work on the-new-and-improved Blendetta.com. I’ve been migrating it from Blogger to WordPress, adding some new features, cleaning up the code, and making a few overall improvements. Now that most of the labor-intensive tasks are complete, I’m just working on small visual tweaks; like creating a favicon. Nice and simple – it should only take me a minute… or so I thought.

I opened Photoshop, went to File > Open, selected the Blendetta layout PSD file, and got an error message that I had never experienced before:

While I was working on the Blendetta layout in Photoshop the night before, I accidentally allowed my laptop’s battery to die. I was fearful that my new-and-improved layout PSD might have been corrupted.

I tried opening different images and discovered that the error message only appeared when trying to open PSD files. I exited Photoshop, started it again, and tried opening a PSD – same error. I saved everything that I was working on, rebooted, started Photoshop, and tried to open a PSD – same error! I was getting frustrated. What good is Photoshop if you can’t even open a PSD?! That’s when I decided to Google search the web to see what I could find…

After refining my search, I finally found some recommended fixes for my problem pertaining to Vista. Here are a few of them:

• Delete the PS CS3 preference file(s) and reboot. I decided to keep looking for a different solution; I didn’t try this.
• Press “ESC” after attempting to open a file, and then “CTRL-SHIFT-S” (save as…). Sounded a little too simple (and silly), but I tried it – it didn’t work.
• Create a new Vista user account and then run Photoshop. Really? I wasn’t about to even consider creating a separate user account just to run Photoshop.

There were tons of other forum and blog posts about this problem. One said that this error message only appears if you have a “cracked” version of Photoshop – which I don’t. Others claimed that you need to over-write .dll files, edit your registry, or download “cleaning” software to “fix” Photoshop. After a little more hunting I finally found the solution that worked for me – and it was nice and simple:

Go to Control Panel > Printers and set Microsoft XPS Document Printer as your default printer.

After changing my default printer I went into Photoshop and successfully opened a PSD file. If you are experiencing this error, I hope this solution helps!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Graphic Design, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.