Is there any way to get Adobe Photoshop CS5.1. to work with Mac 10.15 Catalina

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
March 3, 2020
1 reply
6518 views

Hi, I was just wondering if anyone out there has had the same problem getting “Adobe Photoshop CS5.1." to work with the Catalina operating system and figured out an end-around to the installation impediment?

Conrad_C

Community Expert

There is no way to get Photoshop CS 5.1 to work in Catalina. The 10-year-old application includes code that is now blocked by Apple as of macOS 10.15 Catalina. According to Adobe, the versions compatible with Catalina are Photoshop 21.0 & Photoshop 20.0.7, which are the last two major versions.

If you want more background info on this, you can read these articles:

Why macOS Catalina is breaking so many apps, and what to do about it (The Verge)

Do my Adobe apps work in macOS Catalina 10.15? (Adobe)

Apple’s New MacOS Catalina Changes Will Cause Confusion (Forbes)

You may have read that Apple requires 64-bit applications on Catalina and blocks 32-bit apps. Photoshop CS5.1 partially meets this requirement, but not completely. In addition, Photoshop CS5.1 does not meet all of the new security requirements mentioned in the last article. That combination of reasons means Apple blocks Photoshop CS5.1 in Catalina, with no way around it except to upgrade.

R

RazCity

Participant

hating apple more and more because of stuff like this, forcing you to uprade to new computer when you shouldn't have to

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Those specific restrictions are because Apple was trying to complete the huge push away from the limitations of the old Intel architecture and onto a higher performance, higher efficiency, more secure Apple Silicon architecture.

Now that this transition is complete, Macs are back to lasting a long time. The first M1 Macs still run Adobe software well enough after 4 years. I think mine can go at least a couple years more.

If you are angry enough at Apple that you might switch…good luck with Microsoft Windows. They also want to achieve some of the same improvements in security and such. So if you go on Windows forums today, you can find lots of posts from Windows users complaining about how Microsoft will not allow Windows 11 to install on their PC that was fine for years, due to more stringent requirements. Examples:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/windows11/why-my-pc-is-not-eligible-for-windows-11/4185279

Published last week:

Microsoft would really like you to replace your old Windows 10 PCs this year - The carrot of "new features" and the stick of "no more updates for your old PC."

One way out is to use another OS such as free Linux, instead of macOS or Windows. But Photoshop doesn’t run on Linux…

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