Resetting Preferences in Photoshop to Fix Glitches

[Snook]

Since updating to El Capitan more than three months ago, I've been unable to create a selection on my photos and use that that selection to create an adjustment layer because the mask would be completely transparent and there would be no information at all in the histogram on the adjustment layer. It didn't matter which tool or method I used to create the selection, the mask and histogram were blank. I've attached a screen shot of what the histogram would look like, which is the same as if you have a black layer mask in place, and the layer mask instead of being all white or all black, would be filled with grey and white checks like what you see if you create a new file with a transparent background.  As you can imagine, it's been driving me nuts the whole time and significantly increasing how long it takes me to edit. I posted for help on the Adobe help forums and did endless amounts of googling but couldn't find a solution, until tonight. I saw on a forum that someone had suggested resetting the Preferences in Photoshop to see if it fixed some glitches a member was experiencing in PS.  This is the link that was posted https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/preferences.html#Restore%20preference%20files%20to%20default and I used the shortcut Option+Command+Shift and held them down while opening Photoshop. A window will pop up saying 'Delete the Adobe Photoshop Settings File?' and you click 'Yes' and that's it. It's completely fixed the problem although it has set my Preferences to the default option so my window layout was not how I like it and there may be other things I discover that have changed from what I was using but they will be easy enough to change back to how I like things. I would recommend before resetting your Preferences, that you save your current workspace set up by going to Window - Workspace - New Workspace in the menu options and giving it a name like My Workspace (or whatever works for you). Then when you've reset the Preferences, you can just go Window - Workspace - My Workspace and it will all change back to the layout you had before the reset (thanks to Damien for teaching how to do that in his Bridge video).  

[Brian]

Thank You!