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USING PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 8
Photoshop Elements workspace
Last updated 7/26/2011
Redisplay disabled warning messages
In certain situations, messages containing warnings or prompts are displayed. You can disable the display of these
messages by selecting the Don’t Show Again option in the message, and reset the messages you’ve disabled at a later
time.
1 Choose Photoshop Elements > Preferences > General.
2 Click Reset All Warning Dialogs, and click OK.
Scratch disks and plug-ins
About scratch disks
When your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation, Photoshop Elements uses scratch disks. A
scratch disk is any drive or partition of a drive with free memory. By default, Photoshop
Elements uses the hard drive
on which the operating system is installed as its primary scratch disk.
You can change the primary scratch disk or designate a second, third, or fourth scratch disk to be used when the
primary disk is full. Your primary scratch disk should be your fastest hard disk and have plenty of defragmented space
available.
For best performance, use the following guidelines when assigning scratch disks:
• Scratch disks should not be on the same physical drive as Photoshop Elements or any large files you are editing.
• Scratch disks should be not be on the same physical drive as the one used for the operating system’s virtual memory.
• Scratch disks should be on a local drive. That is, they should not be accessed over a network.
• Scratch disks should be conventional (non-removable) media.
• RAID disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes.
• Drives with scratch disks should be defragmented regularly. Or better yet, use an empty drive or a drive with plenty
of unused space to avoid fragmentation issues.
Change scratch disks
Photoshop Elements needs contiguous hard drive space to create a scratch disk. For this reason you should frequently
defragment your hard drive. Adobe recommends that you use a disk tool utility to defragment your hard drive on a
regular basis.
1 Choose Photoshop Elements > Preferences > Performance.
2 Select the desired disks from the Scratch Disks menu (you can assign up to four scratch disks), and click OK.
3 Restart Photoshop Elements for the change to take effect.
About plug-in modules
Plug-in modules are software programs developed by Adobe Systems and other software developers to add
functionality to Photoshop
Elements. A number of importing, exporting, and special-effects plug-ins come with your
program; they are inside the Photoshop
Elements Plug-ins folder. You can select an additional plug-ins folder in which
to load compatible plug-ins stored with another application. You can also create a shortcut for a plug-in stored in
another folder on your system. You can then add the shortcut or alias to the Plug-ins folder to use that plug-in with
Photoshop
Elements. Once installed, plug-in modules appear as options added to the Import or Export menu, as filters
