Adobe Photoshop ignoring ctrl+alt+print screen

Posted April 24th, 2008 in Applications

I recently installed Windows Vista onto my primary desktop computer (more about this in another post) and installed Adobe Photoshop CS2. I use the Ctrl+Alt+Print Screen shortcut key sequence a lot to grab a screen for pasting into Photoshop. The other day it suddenly stopped working and I intially assumed the problem to be with Windows Vista.

After a bit of searching around on Google, I found the error lay with Photoshop not being able to paste from the clipboad and not a Vista issue with Ctrl+Alt+Print Screen, although I don't recall this ever happening before when I was using Adobe Photoshop on Windows XP.

The solution was to simply shut Photoshop down and start it up and. And hey presto! Pasting into Photoshop worked again.

What is Ctrl+Alt+Print Screen?

There's a key on standard keyboards labelled "PrtScn" and it often has "SysRq" on it as well. This is the "Print Screen" button. In DOS days, pressing this would send the current text screen to the printer. Since at least Windows 95 (and possibly in Windows 3 but I can't recall) pressing the print screen button capture the contents of the screen to the clipboard which then allows pasting into another application, such as Photoshop.

The Ctrl+Alt+Print Screen keystroke combination allows the capture of the currently active window only. This is useful when creating screenshots of an application and you don't want the rest of the screen as well.