Photoshop Uninstalled

[RickHorowitz]

I went to bed, leaving Photoshop open.

When I returned, I tried to do something and got a "program error." I've seen this numerous times in the past, and usually a restart fixes it. So I tried to restart.

Turns out, Photoshop was nowhere to be found.

Photoshop (beta), however, was on the system.

Now when Photoshop opens, it is missing stuff. All my crop presets are gone. The Lasso tool only shows the Brush Selection Tool and the regular Lasso. None of the other Lassos are present (e.g., magnetic, etc.). I don't know what else might be different exactly as this just happened yesterday and I haven't gone through everything.

I noticed when I opened the beta version that my presets are all there, and all settings seem normal.

Is there a way to copy all my settings from the beta version back over to the regular version? Also, should I even care? Should I just continue using the (beta) version? To be frank, I installed it a long time ago, used it once or twice, and went back to the regular version. I don't remember why.

Please advise?

Thank you to anyone who has input on this.

[Ged_Traynor]

@RickHorowitz have a look here

https://helpx.adobe.com/ie/photoshop/using/preset-migration.html

[D Fosse]

Turns out, Photoshop was nowhere to be found.

(...)

Now when Photoshop opens, it is missing stuff.

By @RickHorowitz

Just to clarify here: So Photoshop was there, after all?

You just lost your settings and preferences? All your preferences are stored in your Windows user account, separated from the program files. Here's the thing: the preferences are rewritten on every application exit (to catch all changes). An irregular shutdown, like it seems you had, can either corrupt them or prevent them from being written at all.

Either way, some potentially corrupting event clearly happened to your machine here. The first thing I'd do is uninstall and reinstall Photoshop, and in the uninstall, choose to remove all prefereces. This deletes the whole folder in the user account.

Then take the time to rebuild a fresh setup with fresh preferences. Corrupt preferences can cause erratic and unexpected behavior, often mistaken for "bugs".

If you have irreplaceable things still in your beta installation, actions, brushes, presets - save them out from the beta and reload them in the production version.