PS CS3 Lens Correction filter in hiding, help!

For years I postponed the inevitable, sizeable investment in Photoshop. Last Christmas my wife put CS3

under the tree, and I was happy. Finally I'd be able to correct perspective, a function I'd missed with

iPhoto. I went straight to Filters>Distort>Lens Correction and went to work.

 

Now there's trouble, though. When I open the Distort submenu, only three filters are listed, not the dozen

or so originally provided. Lens Correction is nowhere to be found, under any of the filter options.

 

I'm not aware of amy action I've take to simplify the available menus (but I probably would have if I could:

CS3 throws so many irrelevant illustrator's tricks on my screen that it's hard to find the few features I

really need). I've found Adobe's support to be hard to access and expensive. Do I really have to pay $40 to

ask one question? Or should I simply buy another program, PS Elements 5 (now available for the mac) to

regain this lost feature? This is frustrating. like dealing with Windows. I'm sorry now that I got into this

bundle of bloatware, but can anyone offer guidance to where my Lens Correction Filter went hiding?

Tell me more about what filters are missing. Also tell me about your images: for example what bit depth? What type of file format ?

 

Wha tare you doign to a photo when the filters go missing?

 

Yes Photoshop is a jumbo size tool box. Lots of people what it to do lots of things.

I've noticed that too. I'm using CS2 but it has also been "blocking" me out of the Lens Correction filters completely when on scanned images. Works fine on digital ones, which makes me think it has something to do with the exif data. Could be a file format issue too, though.

Scans work with lens correction for me, when I had CS2 and now CS3 on a Mac.

 

Some things are greyed out if you are in 16 bit, some need to have a duplicate layer active. Try that first. Apple+J is keyboard shortcut for a dup layer.

 

Perspective correction is another one that requires a separate layer to open. You can not do it on a background layer.

 

I bet it is missplaced inside photoshop along with the other missing plug-ins. Use the search function to find it. Then move it back where it belongs under Applications- photoshop CS3-plug-ins- filters- . You should find a list of about twenty there. If that does not locate it, start taking PS apart manually to find them, then look in the rest of the application folders. It moved somewhere. Check the trash. In fact look in the above proper location just to make sure they are not there

 

If that does not work, deactivate photoshop, remove it, and reinstall it. You have to do this right, not just move the program to the trash or you are left with pieces that do not come out that makes reinstalation difficult.

 

Call Adobe customer service and they will help. Do the deactivation step as that gets you back to zero and you still have two legal instalations to make. It is a free call.

 

If you screw up and leave bits in, you need to download something called clean script from Adobe to get them out. Then the new one will reinstall.

 

I had the whole CS3 move out of alphabetic order on one machine. I did not do it, but Bridge, photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, all moved to the near bottom of the list in applications. After a few weeks, they went back in order.

 

CS3 has a few bugs.

 

The full list of distort filters are Diff glow-displace glass-ocean ripple pinch polar cordinates ripple spherise twirl wave and zig zag.

Find one, find them all I bet. Drag and drop to get them back where they belong. All are plug ins with blue wall plug icon

The first step to troubleshooting Photoshop is to reset the preferences:

Resetting Preferences at Launch Time

If you would like to reset all of your Photoshop preferences, simultaneously hold down the

Control+Alt+Shift (Windows), Command+Option+Shift (Mac) keys as you launch the

application.

 

The Lens correction filter works with 8 or 16 bit images, but is not available for grayscale,

bitmapped or indexed color files.