Why Is This Happening In Photoshop CS4?

I know what your talking about, but no, I’ve never had that happen to me. I have no idea.

Mac or PC? I know the Mac’s are having problems with the brushes window, and I know Vista machines are full of bugs (I mean Photoshop, not just Vista!)
The fact that the marchee is not editable says there is something wrong with the selection tool plug-in. Try reinstalling (I know that is a lengthy processes) if that still doesn’t work, I would say contact Adobe’s Tech support.
I have never had that happen to me, except in version 7, when my computer was to old to run it.

I cant get my CS4 to run right now, but it seems like I’ve seen a button that says select as Path or something… Try searching the help for select as path, it might help you find what you need.

@ jtvoar16:
Mac. And I was designing a custom brush. And gosh, reinstalling… it’s CS Master Collection… That sounds daunting. I’ll try to open in CS3.

@jonfreed
Tell me about it, when I received my CSMC, I had to reinstall it three times (one and a half days worth of time) until it finally worked… well. I was looking at Photoshop, and there is a possibly that PS has decided that your file is ether a “Smart Object” or a 3d file, which drastically changes the way you work with the file.
I don’t have much experiance with PS and 3D files in this version, and I hate smart objects, so I’ll keep looking to see if I can find something that would cause this, but at the moment the only thing I can do to get that effect is convert my JPEG into a Smart Object with a layer below that is still a JPEG or other file type.

@jtvoar16:

Well, I suppose this will be one of those great mysteries, but shutting down Photoshop and a reboot did the trick. It was so odd and definitely a bug; while paths are great (use ‘em all the time) when you can’t select one, it doesn’t show up in the path layers and you can’t turn it into a marquee – well that’s just peculiar. Thanks for the help and time, though!