Posted on December 21, 2008 - by CDS, 5 Comments

Tips & Tricks: Photoshop Stuck on Hand Tool

I’ve heard of this happening, but until recently it had never happened to me. When you use photoshop with large files or with lots of other apps open, your cursor may become stuck on the hand tool, making it impossible to do any work. Shutting down photoshop, restarting, etc. sometimes works, but not everytime. This started happening to me quite often, particularly with Illustrator, itunes, Flash, CuteFTP, and more open. It turns out it’s a memory allocation problem. There are several things you can do to fix the problem, I have learned.

• Quick fix is to hit the space bar, which usually releases the hand tool. If your problem is really bad this might not work
• Next, you can allocate more memory to photoshop. In CS3, click on edit >> preferences >> performance, and increaes the memory usage. This of course could cause problems with other applications run simultaneously, but it’s not a perfect world.
• You may also want to check your paging file. The paging file is a portion of the hard disk that your computer can use like memory, so when setting your paging file base it on the available space you have on your hard disk. Most computers come with 100+ GB, so it can usually be set really high with no problems. This, in addition to increasing photoshop memory usage worked for me.
• If you have an integrated graphics chip, you could have problems with graphic design tools. Unlike graphics cards, integrated chips do not come with their own memory set, and instead use memory resources from your cpu. You could upgrade to a good graphics card to free up this memory. This is especially effective for photoshop, where graphics rendering is causing the graphics chip to “steal” memory from the cpu. Be sure to check that you have an open slot for a new graphics card before you purchase one; not all systems will have the extra PCI ( or PCI express) slot.
• You could upgrade your memory. Unfortunately for me I am running 32-bit Windows Vista and maxed out at 4GB. But if you have the 64-bit version, you can upgrade to 8GB!