1. I get a message that tells me that my scratch disk is full & I cannot open another file into Photoshop. What can I do?
2. When I try to move an item it tells me that the layer is locked. Why does that happen & how can I unlock it?
Thanks in advance for the help - I'm having a blast so far!

The Scratch Disk means that PS is using your Hard Drive space as RAM to make it run faster. It's called Virtual Memory. When that extra hard drive space is full, you're stuck. The only thing to do is exit the program, there's no way to clear it without exiting. Maybe some future version will have a Clean Scratch option, but not yet.

You can choose which drive or drive partition your Scratch is on in the Edit>Preferences. It's not easy, even I have a hard time deciding. I've read lots of tutorials on it, just Google Photoshop Scratch Disk and see what you can find. If your setting fills up too quickly, you'll be constantly having to save and close/reopen PS to clear those.

If you try to move something on your Background Layer, it'll say it's locked. The other layers have a little padlock icon in the lyaers palette you just click to unlock them. hth!

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Emma the Pal
GALLERY Web Page

This is a VERY common issue with Photoshop and Elements. Both use a 'scratch disk' aka empty hard drive space, to place files while you are working. Basically the rule of thumb is....Photoshop need 3-5 times the filesize in scratchdisk. Sooooo, that means if you are working on a 30mb file, you need 150 mb in EMPTY hard drive space.

Even with 1.5GB of RAM, I was still having scratch disk problems (listen to your hard drive churning away)...so I installed an extra 80GB hard drive which is soley dedicated to Photoshop. Of course, the filesize of my average layout is well over 150mb with all my layers.
To set your scratch disk location: Go to....Edit>Preferences>Plugins & Scratchdisks.

It will also help to DEFRAG your hard drive to make it easier for Photoshop to grab a chunk of diskspace.

HTH-

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Roseanne

232 digi layouts so far in 2005 Avatar by Hunibuni!!
"Creative expression is at the root of one's physical and emotional well-being"

I have Photoshop installed on my C: drive, and I designate my H: drive as the scratch disk.

Under Edit >Preferences, you can set the scratch disk location to another drive, or another partition (although my IT buddies say just making another partition on your drive doesn't really do much for speeding things up).

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Roseanne

232 digi layouts so far in 2005 Avatar by Hunibuni!!
"Creative expression is at the root of one's physical and emotional well-being"

Thanks a bunch!

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wow Roseanne- thanks for the hard drive info!
Could you clarify the above? I'm getting a 40GB hard drive- and I want to know how best to configure photoshop, scratch disk, elements, LO's, etc.

BTW Momlid- from what I understand you can empty the scratch disk like this:
Edit>Purge>All
It's just a short term fix- but it beats closing down ps every time it fills up

Momlid- Do you have "Auto Select Layer" selected? (It's under "images" at the top) if you do- it's easy to accidentally select the background when you're trying to select a tiny object. I only use that when I'm working with big-easy to select items. Otherwise, I just make sure that the layer I want to work on is selected before I do anything.

Which reminds me, does anyone know how to make it so that you cannot select the background (or any other layer that you don't want to select). In Illustrator if you lock a layer, you are unable to select it- I like that a lot!

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~Laurie Garza~

Laurie,

Are you getting an additional 40GB hard drive, or is that your primary drive in your computer?

My configuration:
My c: drive is 160GB and 90% full of photos, elements, and software apps. So I purchased an additional 80GB internal drive to dedicate to Photoshop's scratch disk. 80GB is probably overkill, but 80GB was the 'sweet spot' in value for my money. I think 40 GB would be ample. I do NOT store any other files or apps on this drive. This helps the scratch disk run most efficiently (and quickly).

So I installed the additional hard drive, and designated it H:. Then, open Photoshop, and go to Edit>prefs>plugins and scratchdisk. I selected H: as my "primary scratch disk". Close Pshop and re-open, now it will place all temporary scratch files on H; rather than c:. This has GREATLY improved my speed performance in Pshop. I no longer hear my c: drive grinding away as it was swapping files around.

Basically adding an additional drive dedicated to Pshop, allows me to store my zillions of files on my c: drive and not worry about keeping plenty of empty space for scratch disk.

Does that help?

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Roseanne

232 digi layouts so far in 2005 Avatar by Hunibuni!!
"Creative expression is at the root of one's physical and emotional well-being"

Yes Roseanne- I appreciate your expertise!

I have a 40GB hard drive on my computer right now of which only 7 GB is free. All of our photos (40 GB's worth) are on DH's computer so that helps a lot! I just make copies of those I want to use.
I'm going to get an 80 GB hard drive (instead of 40 GB - cuz it's not much more ).

So I need more advice.
Should I just use my C: drive for the scratch disk and move all of my C: drive stuff to the new 80 GB hard drive?
Beings your an expert did you happen to know the answer to the above?

Thanks so much Roseanne!

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~Laurie Garza~