Last week, I was Photoshopping and I noticed that (screenshot below) all of my brushes looked pixelated. not only did they looked pixelated in the Brushes palette, but even when I used the brushes, they even drew like the document was in bitmap mode, but of course it wasn’t. I tried everything under the sun to fix it, and I even called a few good designer friends of mine and they had never heard of such a thing. This is a recreation of what my brushes palette looked like:

When it should have looked like this:

And this is what the brush looked like when I used it:

When it should have looked like this:

After some discussion with colleagues, we decided that it wouldn’t hurt to try and delete the Photoshop Preferences file from my system and see if that works. Well I’m not exactly sure where to even find that file or if it’s a hidden file or not, so I did some searching. I came across a thread in the Adobe forums that was a godsend.

(*Works for Photoshop 6x and newer!) All you have to do to delete your settings and start fresh is 1) Close Photoshop, and 2) Hold Command + Option + Shift (Control + Alt + Shift, PC) while you restart Photoshop. This brings up a dialogue box where you can choose to delete your settings file, no need to search through your system folders to find it.

After I did this, my Brushes palette was back to normal. Who woulda thunk it! Now, this little shortcut may not fix every glitch you run into, but it’s a butload faster than re-installing, so It’s worth a shot if Photoshop is acting up on you :)