Is CS4 compatible with OS 10.7(Lion)?

[Legauche]

Will I lose CS4 if I upgrade to OS 10.7 Lion?

I use CS4 in conjunction with LR3.

[Guest]

I speak only reality. Not sure how many others in this thread operated a busy advertising with hundreds of Macs filled with Adobe, Macromedia and other software. I have many years of excellent dealing with Adobe...until recent years. Is it possible for Adobe and Apple, the two leading firms in the design world to NOT anticipate the impact....or profit potential of Lion on current software? For years, I have never experienced complete obsolescence as this latest handling, and Adobe bent over backwards for the design community. Beginning with the abandonment of Freehand, which the design community still favors, it has been torture to be customer. That said, I'm willing to bet cs4 will work with Lion.

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[Guest]

Lion developer previews were only released in 2011. CS4 was released in 2008. Your logic is difficult to follow. Are you suggesting that Adobe should stop current support of CS5 and development of CS6 to fix old software that it does not sell anymore? Should Adobe also go back to update CS2 to work natively on Intel Macs?

[valwha]

I am afraid you missed the point. Of course the issue is with Lion. With windows most relatively new programmes are backwardly compatible with each new os. If Apple and Adobe stopped behaving like children fighting over how they want to play a football game and actually collaborated at times like this those of us who handed over our money might be a lot happier.

However, To imply that I am insane to expect an expensive program that I bought a little over two years ago to work today is quite offensive.. Had you read my comment properly you would have noticed that I was not expecting it to work with Lion, I was merely asking if it would work if I upgraded to Lion. 

My point was that Adobe support was woefully lacking.

Two yeas ago the support I had after buying this and other CS4 software was excellent. Today  I had a request for money just to answer a simple question.

Thank you for your link to the Dreamweaver threads, I shall certainly look at it, however I thought this thread was about CS4. When I last looked Dreamweaver was a component of CS4 -as was Photoshop, which others have mentioned.

[SG...]

Hi,

You can find Adobe's stated support policy here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/programs/customer/gss.html

• Unlimited installation support by phone or via a chat session for the current and previous version of the software product, including trials. For two versions back, installation support is provided for 90 days after the current version has been released. For example, installation support for CS3 is available up to 90 days after the release of CS5.
• How-to and product usage support for the current shipping version. This type of support is also provided for the previous version for 90 days after a new full version has been released.

Just on the surface it seems the phone support for an installation question regarding your CS4 version and Lion should be covered. If you have a case number I can follow up with the call center.

This post is in the Photoshop Mac forum, so asking a question about DreamWeaver is a bit off. The topic only has CS4 but Photoshop specific is implied.

That said, nominally we haven't found major problems with CS4 versioned applications running under 10.7. You can see Adobe's FAQ regarding 10.7 support here:

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/faq.html#lion-os

regards,

steve

[Guest]

valwha wrote:

...However, To imply that I am insane...

The topic of sanity was raised with this in a Photoshop forum:

valwha wrote:

...is ther anyone out there who can tell me if my Dreamweaver CS4 will work if I upgrade?

If you clicked on the link I provided, you would see someone confirm that DW CS4 works in Lion. I can't do anything but wonder what kind of looking you shall certainly do. It is not a difficult discussion thread to follow. There were only 2 posts.

My head hurts.

[James Husted Design]

I have Lion installed on a MBP (2.66 Ghz i7 with 8GB RAM) installed as an update on top of a working system. My copy of Photoshop CS4 fully updated with all the java updates etc. Things worked fine until I tried to move the order of a layer, moving a layer below another. Every time I did this PS crashed. Every time. I have to admit that It was a fast session and I haven't done extensive testing (my main machine has not been updated - and won't now) but this crashed it every time I did it.

-James

[tellitmultimedia]

I didn't do any updates to my CS4 after installing on my 2.2 Ghz Intel Core i7 MBP. Just tried to move the layers around using Apple key + [ and ] and didn't have any issues. While I was at it, also tested whether I could change the opacity of a layer and apply some blending options like drop shadow without problems.

[James Husted Design]

I just tried it with the key commands and it indeed workswith them. Dragging layers does not though. Opacity and Fx and every other thing I've done seems to work in the layer pallette except for draging layers around.

-James

[Guest]

I have a MBP with 10.5.8 and recently downloaded Lion. I was disappointed when I could no longer open PS (CS4). Illustrator is fine but I need PS for work. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling PS a couple times, and installed JAVA, like I was told. Eventually I just had to uninstall Lion, even though I liked many of its features. From what I am reading it seems that I will have to wait to reinstall Lion once I can upgrade to CS5. I am just wondering why it would work on a new MBP,with Lion preinstalled, and not on a download. And why Adobe would not update CS4 to work on Lion? It's a money thing I'm sure.

Ugh! I was hoping it would go so smoothly.:(

[Chris Cox]

In our testing, Photoshop CS4 worked on Lion.

Some specific system configutations seem to have bugs in the video card drivers, and some third party plugins need to be updated - but that's it.

If Photoshop CS4 wasn't even launching on your system, then something else was wrong on your system.

[Guest]

How can I find out why PS wouldn't open?  I kept getting an error

saying it is not compatible with Power PC or something like that.

Illustrator worked fine, or at least opened. Are actions that I

downloaded and installed in PS considered third party apps? I even

tried uninstalling PS and reinstalling and it still wouldn't work.

What do you suggest? I would love to install Lion and have PS work

with it so I don't have to upgrade to CS5. Help!

Pamela Prussel

[SG...]

Hi Pamela,

It sounds like you had Ps CS4 set to open using Rosetta before upgrading to 10.7. I don't understand why, but 10.7 imports the preference to open applications into a mode it no longer supports. There's a near term workaround, and hopefully a fix from Apple is on the 10.7.1 list.

I need to see if we have a KB doc published on the workaround. It involves deleting or modifying a .plist file. I'll send you a quick outline directly, and reply back to this thread when I find out about the KB doc status.

regards,

steve

[Guest]

Thanks Steve- I'm not exactly sure what all that means but I will wait

to see if you find our how to solve this problem for me. BTW_

Illustrator opened just fine. Is Rosetta specific to PS? Either way if

you can help I will be eternally grateful!

Pamela Prussel

pureandsimpledesign@yahoo.com

pamela@kidsguidemagazine.com

[Tai_Lao]

pamelaprussel wrote:

… Is Rosetta specific to PS?…

No.  Rosetta is emulation software provided by Apple so Mac-Intel users can run any programs that were written to run on PPC machines only, i.e. pre-Intel Macs.

What Rosetta does is emulate or fake the presence of a PPC, pre-Intel chip in modern Macs that have an Intel chip.  Rosetta was abandoned by Apple in Lion, OS 10.7.

[Guest]

Thanks for the explanation!

If that is the case then it's strange that I never received that

message when I open Illustrator. Hmmm...

I am hoping that someone can figure out how I can get PS to work on

Lion so I can reinstall it.

Pam

[SG...]

Hi Pam,

It is likely that you had Ps set to use Rosetta emulation because older 3rd party plug-ins for Ps were not built for Intel chipsets. I take it you didn't get my direct email? I used your Yahoo account; should I use the other instead?

Adobe's working on a method to easily remove the problematic key, while leaving other application's launch settings alone. I'm not sure when we'll finish the testing and be able to braodly post this though. Short term, I can send you steps to workaround this problem.

regards,

steve

[Guest]

Thanks Steve-

I am not sure why the yahoo address didn't work but you can reach me

at either one. One is my work address but I can access it from home. I

will wait to get your instructions to work around the problem. Should

I install Lion before or after I make the changes to PS? I am hoping

Adobe will be able to get me up and  running with Lion and CS4. Yay!

Thanks so much for helping me deal with this situation.:)

Pam

[Tai_Lao]

pamelaprussel wrote:

…I am not sure why the yahoo address didn't work…

Check your spam folder at the Yahoo mail site.  They have a tendency to stick emails from business in the spam category routinely.

[SG...]

Hi Pam,

I just now noticed this detail.

pamelaprussel wrote:

Should I install Lion before or after I make the changes to PS?

I replied to you directly, and just wanted to add here for future readers that if you have an earlier working OS then you should be able to change things to work in Lion, without ucking with a .plist file. What you need to do is launch in the earlier OS, and browse with Finder to the Ps application. Select the application and go to File> Get Info. Here you should see "Open using Rosetta" at the bottom of the 'General' section; You want to make sure that is unchecked.

The underlying problem is that with that checked, a .plist file gets set with information to launch in PPC emulation (Rosetta). Since Lion doesn't include/support Rosetta, you can't change that in the Get Info dialog under 10.7, but 10.7 still tries to launch in this mode resulting in the error message.

If you only have 10.7, then you need to resort to modifying the .plist file which stores this information. Since the .plist might contain more information then just the launch mode pref., we're trying to put together something that's very targeted to just the Ps application and Rosetta.

regards,

steve

[Guest]

Steve I am still in 10.5.8 and I went into PS like you said. The box

regarding Rosetta was not checked. I followed your instructions to put

the  com.apple.LaunchSerices.plist onto the desktop. Should I put it

back or leave it there before reinstalling Lion?

  I have an email into Apple to access the Lion App that I previously

downloaded and then had to uninstall. Ugh.

Thanks for all your help with this!

Pam

[Guest]

BTW- I downgraded to 10.5.8. Basically reinstalled from the original

disk that came with my MBP. Like I said the Rosetta box was not

checked in the PS Get Info pane and I have already moved the plist

file to my desktop. Where do I go from here?

Pam

[SG...]

Hi Pam,

When you reinstalled 10.5.8 did it wipe your existing application directory? SInce you don't see the 'Open using Rosetta' checked on, I think you should be OK either way with the .plist location.

Go ahead and install 10.7 at this point. I haven't gone the App Store route for getting 10.7 so I can't help you there. I used developer drops to get 10.7 on my testing machines.

regards,

steve

[Guest]

steve, this is the most informative post i have found after days of looking for a workaround to my lost scanner capabilities after losing hp driver support for 10.7. would the same principle apply to all rosetta reliant apps?...such as my scanner software...and allow me to scan from photoshop? in theory?

[SG...]

Hi,

I don't quite understand what you are running into. If your HP scanner doesn't have driver support for 10.7 and the software required Rosetta (PPC emulation) then you won't be able to use 10.7 for scanning. You'll need to check with HP on their plans to update. However, if the software was packaged to run under either Intel or PPC than the above info might be helpful.

Ps CS4 was distributed as a universal package with both PPC and Intel supported versions. At that time there were still many 3rd party plug-in developers that only had PPC supported plug-ins, and we wanted to provide some backward compatibility. With 10.7, the ability to run in Rosetta has been removed so Ps CS4 can only be launched in the Intel chipset supported version. Any software that was distributed as universal PPC/Intel will have the same restriction.

What needs to be modified is to remove the Rosetta preference for launching the application. The rub is that you need to change this while running 10.6/10.5 via Get Info, or by modifying a plist file. Modifying the .plist file can be done with a jack hammer, or with some understanding, a jeweler's hammer.

If you have more question, ask and I'll try to help out.

regards,

steve

[Guest]

thanks for your response. sorry for my lack of clarity hp is not going to support my 3055 scanner for 10.7. i'm already in 10.7 so i cannot remove the rosetta preference. i have attempted to work with the plist, based on info from another site (which simply had me go into time machine and copy plist from there), but that was unsuccessful. based on what you are saying i can see why that did not work. i'm be happy to give that another shot if the jackhammer instructions are available?!?