The Plugin Site

Greetings:

Have been using Photoshop (Macintosh) since v1. Have had a collection of plug-ins which have worked since appx. 1994, in all versions of Photoshop thru version 7.0.1.

As of now, they not only *do not* work in the CS OS X v10.3.4 version of Photoshop, they don't even appear in the filters list.

This is really "putting the hurt on me". I need for a few of these ancient filters to continue working. Seems that if they were gonna "break," they'd have done so in version 7.0.1, but they ALL worked beautifully in 7.0.1.

Before asking what these filters are, know that NO filter I tried from 7.0.1 seems to be happy in the OS X/CS environment.

So...in other words, my question REALLY becomes, "Are older Photoshop filters able to be used in the CS environment, and if so, how?"

Many thanks.

It was possible to run Photoshop 7 in Classic Mode under OS X to use plugins that were created for MacOS 9 and earlier. Photoshop CS on the other hand is a pure OS X application, so you can't run it in Classic Mode. This means that it can't use the plugins that were not built for OS X.

So if you need to use these old plugins, you can try to get OS X versions of these plugins to run them in Photoshop CS. If such versions are not available, you can only use them by running Photoshop 7 in Classic Mode.

This is certainly a bad situation, because some plugins won't ever be upated to OSX, e.g. because the company that created them doesn't exist anymore or doesn't sell the product anymore.

Luckily this problem didn't occur under Windows, because the system architecture of Windows wasn't fundamentally changed since 1995 when only very few plugins were available. So there are a lot of old plugins that are stuill running under Windows XP without a problem.

So it's not possibe, then, to "port" these older plug-ins? Take the guts out and make them compatibe with Photoshop CS?

Seems like there's got to be SOME way to do this. Some conversion tool, or some method for making them available/visibe in CS.

Thanx.

Only the companies who developed these plugins can do that. They have to rewrite their plugins to make them work under OS X.

I do not have any experience with Photoshop CS, but I am running Photoshop 7.1 in OSX 10.3.4 (latest Panther Update) and all of the plugs I collected had to be updated for 10.2.8 and up. Some companies provided free updates, and others required an upgrade purchase. Alien Skin for example, updated Eye Candy but required an upgrade to Xenofex 2. Extensis mostly requires upgrades, although I am using an older version of intellihance which they updated. Many older free plugs do not translate at all (various reasons-most H.H. already told you about). The point is, it is not all just Mac OS, Adobe also made changes with CS. You may want to go to the Adobe site for more info. Upgrading is becoming more complex everytime Apple does it, and increasingly expensive too. Good luck!