Creative Toolbox

Happy birthday, Photoshop and Lightroom! “Is today, February 19th, ‘The Most Important Date In Digital Imaging History (Via John Nack on Adobe.)

It’s funny on Photoshop’s birthday, I find myself struggling to get mine to run. You see I just swapped out my original MacBook for a MacBook Pro. Since then, I first couldn’t get Save for Web to come up in Photoshop. I finally figured out it was a possibly corrupted preference file. Then in debugging this, I reinstalled Photoshop and a few other apps in the suite. They worked fine until I decided to run the updater. Now when I try to open a document in any app, it crashes spectacularly. Now I’m deleting, reinstalling everything, and now trying to reinstall again to see if I can get everything working for me. Ugh.

Update: So it turned out to be a comedy of errors (but not really funny). I swapped out my original MacBook for an extra MacBook Pro someone traded out at work. So I did a Time Machine brain transplant to the new (old) MacBook Pro.

The migration seemed to go okay until I tried to do some work over the weekend and realized the Save for Web window wouldn’t open up. The UI would dim like it was going to work but then nothing. I tried to reinstall Photoshop but that didn’t help. I reinstalled all of my apps again but that didn’t help either. I did some poking around and stumbled upon a post where someone suggests removing the Save for Web 3.0 preferences. I thought I had done this already but apparently I didn’t because as soon as I did, Save for Web worked again, yay!

So now with fresh copies of everything and Save for Web working, I thought I might as well run Adobe Updater and get everything up-to-date. That’s when things went from bad to worse. After updating everything, I couldn’t get any Adobe app to stay up. Calling up the Open dialog in Illustrator… crash, Photoshop… crash. Open Bridge… crash. I wiped all my Adobe apps off and tried a full reinstall but that didn’t help. I started to suspect Version Cue since it wasn’t happening on apps that didn’t natively support Version Cue, like Fireworks. Finally, I asked the internet for some help again and found a post about removing the Version Cue 3.1.0 component in Application Support and running the updater again. I did this and wouldn’t you know it, I was back in action.

See our UE design team may be in the select few in that we actually use Version Cue and find it really useful. Since there’s now about five of us that have to access shared creative assets, Version Cue seemed like a no-brainer for us to adopt last year. I have this feeling a lot of design teams don’t even know Version Cue is available to them, which is sad to me. Or if they do know, they think it will be too much trouble to set up.

If anyone’s interested, here’s the link to the page the ultimately offered me up the fix: http://joemaller.com/2007/08/10/fixing-cs3-all-apps-crash-when-saving/

So looking back on it all, I think trying to do the reinstalls inadvertently caused more problems for me. Yeah, it’s frustrating but that’s technology for you. Fortunately, this kind of stuff doesn’t happen a lot to me and I’m resourceful enough to find a solution. Thank you internet community.