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Photoshop 2026 crashes opening png files created in Creo 8

Forum|Forum|19 hours ago
September 8, 2026
4 replies
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When using Adobe Photoshop 2026 any Version of 27.x up through the latest 27.10 we cannot open .png files that were created by our engineers using Creo 8. As soon as you open them Photoshop crashes to the desktop. We have hundreds of these files saved on a network file share from the past 6 or 7 years.

If we open the file in another tool like MS Paint and save it as a .tiff or other file type it will open in the new version. If we save the same file as a .png file inside photoshop 2026 it will then work fine moving forward. We won’t be able to upgrade to a newer version of Creo and Windchill yet so we either have to open all of these files in another tool and resave them or we can open them in Photoshop 2025 Version 26.XX with no issues.

We have ruled out all graphics card issues by disabling the GPU and using onboard graphics, also disabling it in photoshop as well. We checked all the system files and C++ redistributable files and repaired all of that and ran a full system filescan. Event viewer just shows photoshop.exe as the crashed system app. and reports a generic issue with ntdll.dll.

I found that the issue may be with the PNG file structure. Here is how creo 8 saves these data blocks as a png.

Dimensions: 1732 × 2048
Format: 8-bit RGBA with transparency
Uncompressed memory requirement: about 14 MB
All PNG chunk CRC checks pass
The compressed image stream decompresses to exactly the expected size
No embedded ICC profile, EXIF, text, or suspicious metadata
No trailing or malformed data
ImageMagick, MS Paint, MS Photo Viewer and Photoshop Elements fully decode it successfully
The one unusual characteristic is that the compressed image is divided into approximately 150 small IDAT chunks, mostly 4 KB each. This is legal PNG formatting, but it could expose a bug in a particular Photoshop PNG decoder, plugin, or older Photoshop version. The final image-data chunk is only six bytes long—also legal, but slightly unusual.

Therefore, the most likely causes are:
A Photoshop PNG-decoder bug triggered by the unusually fragmented IDAT stream.
A damaged Photoshop preference/cache file.
A third-party file-format plugin interfering with Photoshop’s built-in PNG support.
GPU acceleration or graphics-driver instability during creation of the transparent document canvas.
A problem specific to the installed Photoshop version rather than general PNG corruption.

D Fosse

Community Expert

I don’t know Creo, but I see it is a 3D/CAD application. Just for testing purposes, can Creo export to other raster formats that can be opened in Photoshop? Or a vector format that can be opened in Illustrator? And PNGs from all other sources open fine?

Have you checked the Creo forum (assuming they have one)?

Just to have it on the table, there is the matter of adherence to the file format specification. This can be a particular problem especially with the PNG format, because it has a lot of specialised use in specialised communities. Applications targeting some of these communities have been known to take liberties with the specs, because it suits those purposes. Photoshop needs to be the industry standard, so it can’t deviate from strict specifications. MS paint can afford to be more liberal.

jane-e

Community Expert

@balanced_worker8369

I have never used any CAD application, but have worked with many folks who do. I did a bit of searching and saw, as expected, that it is a vector application. The people I’ve worked with in the past have brought computer aided designs into Illustrator, which is also vector.

I understand that it worked for you with PS 26, so one option is to reinstall a version that works. You can have multiple versions installed. When Adobe releases 28.x later this fall, 26.x will no longer be available.

I wonder if this would be a workaround until the two companies work together on a fix:

Export to PDF from Creo 8
Export to jpeg, png, or tiff from Acrobat Pro
or
Open the PDF in Illustrator and export to an image file (or even keep it in Illustrator)

I don’t know if any of these ideas will work for you and your team or not.

What are you doing in the CAD file that you need to convert from vector to raster? I’m asking because everyone I’ve worked with before has needed to keep the files in vector. Most were using AutoCad.

Jane

D Fosse

Community Expert

You say "network file" - are opening directly over a network? If so, that's likely the problem. Working directly over a network is unsupported and officially warned against. Network configurations are unpredictable and outside Adobe's control.

Work off local disk, then move the finished files over.

balanced_worker8369Author

Participant

We have attempted this over local disk as well. It happens no matter where the file is saved. I am convinced something has changed in the way photoshop 2026 tries to read or interpret the metadata or the file structure of the metadata from previous versions. I am not a software developer or professional coder but I’ve eliminated almost every other possibility. It affects all of our users not just one.

I opened a ticket with Adobe support and if I send them the original png files that Creo creates, the support techs couldnt open them either. It crashes photoshop every time. I can open them in MS Paint just fine. I can resave the files as another data type like .tiff and then they open fine in photoshop as well. I can also open all these files perfect in photoshop 2025 or older versions. It only affects png files as far as I can tell.

All of this leads me to think now that it is some sort of binary file parsing issue. Either Creo 8 is using a tacked on invisible file extension type in the sub layer like .png.1 or something that you can’t see in windows file explorer or something similar that masks the true file type from photoshop. Or it has some other issue that causes a major memory leak or stack buffer overun inside photoshop based on the metadata or file structure specifically. Supposedly this chnaged in later versions of Creo but I dont have a newer version here to confirm if this is the case.

Sly_Fox

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