Hand Tool stuck in Adobe Photoshop

Recently I was working in Adobe Photoshop CS3 (this also happens sometimes when I swap back into Photoshop 7.0 to work with imageready) for a client’s animated gif advertising campaign, all of a sudden my Photoshop wouldn’t display anything but the “hand” icon. No matter what tool I selected, I would always have the hand tool icon. Not a single tool would work other than the locked hand tool. This happens occasionally to me so I figure a short article is due. I can’t be the only one, right?

Here are a few solutions to the infamous adobe photoshop hand tool stuck or froze problem… (please make a comment as to whether these were helpful)

1. Simply press the Space Bar. (it took me a while to find this one but it seems to resolve the issue frequently)
2. Try restarting Photoshop. Many other sources claim it is a memory problem.
3. If that doesn’t work, try clearing the menus and settings in your windows menu (this is Photoshop CS3 i’m working in).
4. If that fails go for a full system reboot.

Perhaps a corrupted preferences file is the problem – especially if rebooting photoshop and your computer isn’t helping.

In my case I tend to work with several programs running simultaneously since I like to multi-task along with listening to my itunes. Memory is most likely the issue and from what I’ve researched this is commonly solved restarting. If you want to go the extra step you could increase your memory allowance in the Adobe Photoshop preferences. (Edit/Preferences/Memory and Image Cache. Mine is cache level 4 and maximum memory usage 75%. My computer has a modest 2048 MB of system memory which seems to be enough at most times.) Hopefully many people can resolve the hand tool issue by pressing the space bar. It has not failed for me yet.

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