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n_payne
Participating Frequently
July 11, 2017
Question

PSE14 dialog dropdown boxes not working correctly

  • July 11, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 1002 views

I have PSE 14.1 installed on Windows 10 x64 build 1703. None of the dropdown boxes in PSE dialogs work correctly. If I click on one of them to make a choice, the box darkens in colour but the dropdown list of choices does not appear. I *can* get to the choice I want by clicking on the dropdown box to make it active and then using the up/down arrow keys on the keyboard to cycle through the choices until I find the one I want, though this is an extremely inconvenient way to have to operate. Ordinary buttons in the dialogs - eg OK, Cancel, More Options, etc, work as expected.

Dropdown boxes in other applications on the same machine (eg Lightroom) work correctly without any problem.

Any ideas? It seems from the appearance of the dialogs in PSE - the buttons and dropdown elements don't look like the Windows standard UI elements - that Adobe have rolled their own, and done a not very good job of it.

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    1 reply

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    n_payneAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    July 11, 2017

    Ok, I managed to fix this problem by deleting Photoshop settings file (start the photo editor while you have Ctrl+Alt+Shift pressed and answer "Yes" to the dialog asking if you want to delete the file).

    However, wiping out the settings file has lost me the ability to float image windows and move them to the second monitor. Now, when I have images open in the PSE editor and select Images off the Window menu, the only option I can select is Tile. All the other options (Cascade, Float in Window, Float all in Windows, Consolidate all to Tabs) are grayed out. How do I get back the option to float images in their own window, so that I can have the PSE main window on one monitor and the image in a separate window on its own monitor?

    A
    Adobe Employee
    arshla jindal
    Adobe Employee
    July 12, 2017

    Hi,

    Thanks for reaching out to us.

    Since you have reset preferences, so you need to check the following highlighted option from Preferences (Cmd/ Ctrl + K):

    Please see related article for more information : Viewing images in Photoshop Elements

    Thanks,

    Arshla

    N
    n_payneAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    July 19, 2017

    Ok, what I have found is the following:

    1. I delete the Photoshop settings file, open an image, and the problem with dropdown choices in dialog boxes not displaying has gone away.
    2. I go into Preferences / General and tick the option to allow floating documents in expert mode. The image window is not floating, and dropdown choices in dialogs still work correctly.
    3. I float the image window, leaving it within the main PSE window. Dropdown choices in dialogs still work correctly.
    4. I drag the image window to the 2nd monitor. Dropdown choices in dialogs now cease displaying.
    5. I drag the image window back to the same monitor as the main PSE window, and dropdown choices in dialogs now again work correctly. The image window doesn't have to be within the main PSE window to fix the problem, just on the same monitor.

    So there definitely seems to be some screwup with the PSE code dealing with dropdown boxes and dual monitors. I have the main PSE window on a Dell U3011 80cm monitor running at its native resolution of 2560x1600, and display the images on an Eizo EV3237 80cm monitor running at its native resolution of 3840x2160. The video card is an nVidia Quadro K2200 running the latest nVidia 377.48 video driver.

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