I’ve dragged my feet long enough because I didn’t want to deal with problems like I had read about on here and decided to wait a bit, but now I really need some of the features with CS so I just ordered the upgrade disk. Last time I upgraded (to 7) I didn’t have a bunch of plug-ins and actions, but now I do. Will I have to transfer them from 7 over to CS? Will they magically appear in CS? Will I have to re-install any of them? If there’s anything else I need to know to make the transition as smooth as possible (I don’t have time for headaches!) please let me know.
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Well, first of all, if you leave PS7 installed, you can just place a folder full of shortcuts in the CS plugin folder that point to your PS7 plugins. Or you can try the Alternate Plugins Folder box in the CS preferences. Obviously, if you uninstall PS7, this doesn’t work and you will have to reinstall all your plugins.
Another advantage of leaving a previous version on your computer is that your retain the ability to generate thumbnail icons for PS files. CS has abandoned that feature as you probably already know. There are ways to accomplish this without having an older version of PS around, but it involves hacking the registry which you may or may not care to do. I actually got XP to generate CS thumbs in Windows Explorer just by loading the psicon.dll, but I don’t know if this has worked for anyone else.
CS will require all the memory you have and more. If you aren’t maxed out, go buy some RAM.
There are other issues (hardware) and "programming oversights" that you may not care for, or they may not affect you at all; depends on your system. One "oversight", the ability to tile windows intelligently in CS, will make itself known to you no matter what system you run it on. Also, as you may know by now, CS is what it is. In other words, if you don’t like it or find things you think need to be fixed, you can forget it because, except for a couple of plugin modifications, CS will NOT receive an update or patch. Adobe has decreed that it is so. Those things will be fixed at the next release (CSII, PS9, whatever). Say hello to the Microsoft business model.
Enjoy. For all its maddening shortcomings, I use it 90% of the time. I just mutter under my breath a lot.
Generally, no, you’ll not have to reinstall your plug-ins although doing so is the safest approach to ensuring they work properly. While there are some which seem to require reinstalling (likely due to certain Windows registry entries being created), you can often just copy the plug-ins from the ealier PS version to the new one.
But, here’s the catch…you don’t want to inadvertently copy any native PS plug-ins from an older to newer version, else you run the risk of causing errors to arise when the newer PS is launched.
So, the safest approach – also useful if you maintain your earlier PS installation for a while yet – is to move your third-party plug-ins to a directory outside of the Photoshop Plug-ins path. Typically, I create such a directory under the Adobe directory so it lies at the same level as other Adobe app installations. Then, within your PS preferences, specify the second plug-in path as where you’ve defined the 3rd-party plug-in folder. If you do this for each version of PS you’re keeping on your system, then you’ll only need one installed instance of each plug-in, rather than duplicates installed to each version of PS. Some plug-ins may be uniquely designed for a particular version of Photoshop, in which case you’d install them as usual to that version’s Plug-ins directory.
I suggest you create the 3rd-party plug-ins folder and move all such plug-ins there, then edit your PS preferences to point there. Try launching each plug-in and see if it seems to work correctly. If so, that’s all you need do; if not, then perform a normal reinstall of the plug-in, but specify the 3rd-party folder as the location for it.
Thank you! I’ll save this info and give it a try when I get my disk next week sometime.
I have 768MB of RAM and a 2.52GHz Pentium 4 processor with XP Home. Is that enough? Am I going to have problems? Sounds like I will definately keep the 7 version on there for awhile.
I have the same spec and it is enough for me – but it depends on your image sizes. I find it runs fine for 6 megapixel images, processed as 16-bit TIFFs.
I use CS on a Win-XP Home machine (1.7 GHz AMD and 750 meg ram) with a dedicated 10 gig partition, on a second HD, for Photoshop’s swap file. I have no problems working with 50-60 meg 16 bit TIFF files from 6 or "12" megapixel RAW files. (Fuji S-2)
