Hey! Where's My Plug-in? First Words of a Photoshop CS5 User
By Peter Kotsinadelis
"Hey! Where's my plug-in?" These are the first words for many photographers who upgraded to Photoshop CS5. The reason? Many of the popular third-party Photoshop plug-ins were not designed for use with the newer 64-bit architecture of Photoshop CS5. Whether you are using a Mac or a Windows PC makes no difference. Once you have installed Photoshop CS5, you may soon find yourself running into plug-in issues. Additionally, many of the Adobe plug-ins that were in previous versions of Photoshop are not included in Photoshop CS5.
For example, Adobe no longer supports the Filmstrip format and Texture Fill plug-ins, and previous versions will simply not work in Photoshop CS5. Other plug-ins such as Send Video Preview to Device and Video Preview are only supported in 32-bit Windows and Mac OS, while 11 other plug-ins are supported in 32- and 64-bit Windows, but only in 32-bit Mac OS. These include the following:
Lighting Effects
Extract (Use Refine Mask under the Selection menu)
Variations
Web Contact Sheet II (Web Photo Gallery)
Layer Comps to WPG
PatternMaker
PhotoMergerUI
Picture Package
Embed / Read Digimarc Watermark
Firewire
Firewire DLL
See http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/828/cpsid_82824.html for details on specific Adobe plug-ins that will and will not work with your Photoshop CS5.
Third Party Plug-in Compatibility
On a Mac running OS 10.5.7 and later, Photoshop CS5 installs as a 64-bit application. Once installed, if you copy your plug-ins from a previous version of Photoshop into your newly installed Photoshop CS5's Plug-in folder, you may experience problems. This may be an error message, or in some cases CS5 may crash when loading.
On a Windows PC running Vista or Windows 7, when you install Photoshop CS5 you may actually see two versions on your PC. These are installed and may be run as two separate programs, but not concurrently. If you copy your plug-ins from a previous version of Photoshop to your newly installed CS5, you need to decide if you want to use them with either or both the 32- or 64-bit CS5. There are folders on your PC where installed 32-bit programs reside, C:\Program Files (x86), and a separate folder for 64-bit programs, C:\Program Files.
As with CS5 on a Mac, if you run Photoshop CS5 64-bit on your Windows PC that has plug-ins you copied over from a previous version of Photoshop, you may see an error or CS5 may crash when loading. If this happens, try running Photoshop CS5 32-bit. In most cases the application will come up and your plug-ins will be there and work as they did before.
Mac users can do the same if they run into any issues with plug-ins by simply running Photoshop CS5 as a 32-bit application. To do this simply select the Adobe Photoshop CS5 application file in the Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS5 folder. Then choose File > Get Info and select “Open In 32 Bit Mode.” Just bear in mind you will need to deselect this option should you want to run Photoshop CS5 in
64-bit mode.
So now the $64 question: How do I determine which third-party plug-ins will work in the Photoshop 64-bit and which will not? The easiest way is to go into the plug-ins folder and rename each plug-in folder name with a tilde (~) as the first character. For example, rename the folder "NoiseNinjaPlugin" to "~NoiseNinjaPlugin." Then remove the tilde from the folders one by one and run Photoshop CS5 after each to see which will load properly and which
will not.
Now What? Finding Compatible 64-bit Plug-ins
Now that you have gone through this and found a couple of plug-ins that simply will not work in Photoshop 64-bit, what can you do about it? The best thing to do is contact the company that made that plug-in and see if there is an updated version that supports 64-bit Photoshop CS5. For plug-ins that do not have an updated 64-bit available yet, you can still use them by running Photoshop CS5 as a 32-bit application. Granted it may take a few seconds longer than it would in 64-bit Photoshop CS5, but using the 32-bit until an update is available will get the job done.
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CS5 vs. CS4: Benchmark Tests
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| Running Photoshop in 64-bit mode produces some big improvements when using large data sets (scenarios where you'd otherwise run out of RAM and have to hit virtual memory). Here are benchmarks from a 2 x 2.66GHz quad-core Nehalem Mac Pro with 12GB of RAM (OS X 10.6.3): |
Running the Retouch Artists Speed Test:
CS4: 36.09 secs
CS5: 14.78 secs
2.4 times faster |
diglloydMedium
CS4: 120.15 secs
CS5: 83.85 secs
1.4 times faster |
Running the diglloyd benchmark
Actions for Photoshop:
diglloydSpeed1
CS4: 38.05 secs
CS5: 23.1 secs
1.7 times faster |
diglloydSmall
CS4: 56.01 secs
CS5: 26.48 secs
2.1 times faster |
Opening a large (3.75GB) PSB file
CS4: 80.33 secs
CS5: 52.43 secs
1.5 times faster |
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| Obviously these are big, big wins for any Photoshop users working with large images. I do, however, want to be careful not to oversell the benefits of 64-bit. As I've said from the start, 64-bit is a really big deal when you're using large amounts of memory. Otherwise it's not likely to make a very noticeable difference (e.g., your Web design tasks won't run twice as fast). What about other Creative Suite apps? As I've mentioned, After Effects & Premiere Pro are both 64-bit native on both Mac & Windows (64-bit only, in fact, unlike Photoshop). I haven't seen benchmarks yet, but given the data-intensive nature of video, the wins should be huge. Meanwhile, Illustrator has raised the limits on RAM usage, from 2GB in CS4 to 3–4GB (depending on system configuration) in CS5. |
Peter Kotsinadelis is a writer/photographer living in Pleasanton, CA. He may be reached at peterk727@gmail.com.