If by the "plugin window" you mean the dialog an automation or a filter plugin from the SDK sample code opens for you, you have to write platform-specific code using either Cocoa on Mac or regular WinAPI on Windows (e.g. by hooking GetOpenFileName()/GetSaveFileName() functions to a button you will add to the resource file or create dynamically). Take a look at any plugin that has a GUI (e.g. the Dissolve plugin) and you'll see that the GUI code is entirely platform-specific as there is no platform-independed GUI framework bundled with Photoshop anymore. Another option is to use some third-party cross-platform library such as Qt, but if you just need a couple of buttons and file selection dialogs it's probably not worth the trouble,. ... View more

Well, you can simply have a Flex panel floating around (check the Extension bullder SDK), with text input, buttons, lists and whatever else Flex lets you do, talking to your extental app to your heart's content. No problems with Photoshop shortcuts, no "dark force" and what not. The thing with PS API is that its indeed dated and quite limitied in terms of what you can and cannot do, however if you do know its capabilities there is a lot you can achieve. There is a need for hackery if you want to overcome these limitations, however from the description of the problem, you may be able to get away without resorting to it by using the right approach. ... View more

Run a persistent automation plugin Install a winows hook on keyboard events on startup (and don't forget to uninstall on shutdown...) On any even check whether the window in focus is the one that belongs to your plugin If it is, eat the event; otherwise pass it forward to PS. This is the dark side of the force however apparently you are trying to have a semi-modal GUI in PS which is explicitly unsupported (outside of the Flex panel framework), so don't expect out-of-the-box Jedi solutions here ... View more

NP. It is "/Applications/Adobe\ Photoshop\ CC" just as you've assumed. ... View more

Maxim, Yes, the "32bit windows version" still very much exists and CC seems to support Win7 and Win8 in both modes (see http://www.adobe.com/ca/products/creativecloud/tech-specs.html for more details). Note however that WinXP support has been discontinued ... View more

Hi Bartek, Yeah, you are right, I'm a bit rusty on our Mac installers. Indeed, the user may specify a custom location there as well. Our solution for this is a "custom Photoshop install" option - if the user knows how to install their Photoshop into a custom location, they will also know how to navigate to it from our installer ... nobody has ever complained about it in the last decade. This being said, I'm also curious if there is a way to detect it automatically. ... View more

Yes, its HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Photoshop\70.0\PluginPath for CC (please note it's 70, not 80). ... View more

PC: On x64 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Photoshop\<version>\ApplicationPath and PluginPath usually points you to the right direction (ditto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Adobe\Photoshop for i86). On Mac the install location is preset so its pretty straightforward. On PC PS CC is both x64 and i86, so its present in both folders by default. On Mac PS is x64 only. ... View more

The panels were introduced for CS4 which was also the first x64 release. It is odd indeed... well, may be its yet another bug with non-persistent plugins. We long learned (the hard way) to keep all ours persistent to avoid a whole host of issues. ... View more

I'm glad it worked. I would actually suggest you to mark the plugin as Persistent on both platforms if your scripting API expects to find it available at all times. PS makes no guarantees about keeping plugins loaded unless they are explicitly marked as such (using "Persistent{}"), so the fact your 32-bit instance keeped it in memory is no guarantee it will always be there (e.g. when PS gets low on memory/loads other plugins etc) ... View more

Not a problem. I guess my main point here is that if Automation works as a hidden plugin on your platform, yours should as well and if it doesn't more often than not the propblem is in the PIPL (even though it could also be dependent libraries, your plugin entry points or simply an in-code plugin initialization failure which should also be ruled out one-by-one). If you are stuck, you can still ran a 'diff' between your plugin's PIPL and the Automation one - it may give you some additional ideas, or run the precompiler on the resource is and see if the precompilation output still makes sense. Good luck! ... View more

First, I would suggest using the sample Automation plugin as your base - if you change the category there to "hidden", it most certainly loads and works (I suggest you to try it yourself - it takes just a mniute). Its always easy to work your way up from a working example. Second, there are a lot of reasons why the plugin may fail to load on a specific platform. Have you specified you plugin as persistent ("Persistent {},") in the PIPL and is it not in the #if !defined(_WIN64) section somehow? Are you sure your x64 entry point exists? are all the dependencies properly satisfied on this platform? etc ... View more

Heh, we also seem to run into the same issue with our Geographic Imager plugin, when exporting georeferenced files that exceed in either height or width the 30000 pixel limit (yeah, a common case for aerial or satellite data). PS indeed disables the menu and I'm unaware about any workaround for it (I'd also love to know if there is one). What's more important though, is that Photoshop doesn't actually disable the export plugin in this case - you can still run it through scripts or actions. And this is why for us specifically this is not really a big deal, because we do provide access to all our functinality including Export via our own panel. Here http://forums.adobe.com/thread/745904 Chris mentioned a PIPL property that was supposed to exist that limits the exported file size, but I think the overall conclusion was that it didn't make it to the release, so unless he or Tom enlighten us here about another magic property, there may be no better soultion to it. ivar ... View more

I'm not too clear as to what exactly you are trying to achieve. If you run, say, an automation plugin's GUI, it should be modal, in which case there is no advantage to have a separate process. If you are trying to create something semi-modal where the user can interact with Photoshop AND with your GUI simultaneously, the only official supported way to do it is to use CSXS and have your GUI in an extension panel. Everything else (i.e. some sort of fake semi-modal dialogs ran by a separate thread or another process) is a hack, they are explicitly unsupported by Adobe and will require tinkering with Photoshop's internal event look, explicit maintenance of Z-order, substituion of windows callbacks etc. While its doable, maintaining this sort of semi-modality is not a trivial task, it will likely to break from one release to another and you will be more or less on your own with it, since there is no simple solution for it. Just something to consider. ... View more

PC/Mac? On PC chances are you are not parenting your dialog correctly - it must be parented off the main Photoshop application windiow. ... View more

If your plugin properly defines parameters in its PIPL (see the SDK examples) it can be triggered from Javascript or from an action or from another plugin etc. Its not going to be as cool as extending Photoshop's DOM could have been, i.e. no app.MyPLuginMethod() style of invocation, but you can invoke your plugin by calling Photoshop.app.executeAction() with the plugin's unique ID and optionally pass some parameters in the descriptor parameter. There is an utility plugin called ScriptListener (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/photoshop/scripting.html) which you probably want to take a look at. ... View more

I'm unaware of any such function (which of course doesn't mean it doesn't exist somewhere ), but having an idle event it should be easy to perform your job when PS has nothing else to do by simply scheduling your plugin to be triggered on the next idle. ... View more

idle even is your best friend here: when you received it you can be sure PS is indeed idle. Just register a notifier on it (sPSActionControl->AddNotify(GetPluginRef(), CPSActionControl::StringIDToTypeID(kidleStr), yourHandler, 0) and you will start receiving them en masse when PS has nothing to do. NB: Adobe folks warned us not to do anything particularly heavy (e.g. showing GUI) directly on idle as it may cause all sorts of weird things to happen. Just FYI. ... View more

There are a lot of things that Carbon has and Cocoa doesn't, and vice versa. Going Cocoa is more or less a GUI re-write, so if you can simply skip Carbon altogether and stick to CS5/6 x64 it would make your life easier. Carbon is dead, so unless you have a compelling reason to support CS5x32 (or earlier, of course) why bother. Just a suggestion. ... View more

The answer is NO. There is no Undo notifier in PS. ... View more

In this case you should get a Close event, with a saved path & format, if necessary. You have to handle these too. ... View more

You have to check your PIPL settings; for what you are trying to do the plugin should be persistent. I would suggest copying the Listener's PIPL as is and go from there. ... View more

For the mouse position, the general answer is no. The API to get the mouse cursor position has been requested by third-party developers like ourselves for quite some time and you are welcome to add your voice to it, since it hasn't been implemented. As for the rest, you can register your automation plugin to receive notifications on various events and retreive the selection upon them. Note that there are a lot of different events that may affect your selection info, starting from switching to a different document, to actual selection change etc, and you'd have to perform the update on all of them to keep the displayed information current. Ditto for the color mode. But it IS certainly doable. ... View more

Rong, You definitely want to heed Tom's warning. While you _may_ get the ADM palette up and running, from our experience you'd be looking at A BIG PILE of work to resolve all the issues associated with it, since just as Tom said PS is not really designed for this task. And then again, ADM is dead, so why bother? I know that probably 99% of C++ programmers do not want to go to the Flash land willingly, but this seems to be the only practical way. ... View more

Qt distribution is shipped with an extensive collection of examples; you'll have to look at these that use QPainter  and QImage to provide an image preview and viewport management. I would also suggest using API provided by Photoshop to generate the base image at the required resolution, since it obviously does it way better than Qt  in terms of performance, especially for large images. ... View more

We've chosen to use Trolltech's Qt quite a few years ago and have absolutely no regrets so far. YMMV, of course. ... View more

You _may_ actually be able to do what you want by using ActionScript  without even going to the Automation plugin. I'd really explore this  possibility first, since to do your task in C++ you'll have to write  quite a substantial amount of code. If you have to go though  Automation, start with the Getter plugin from the SDK - it will provide  you with the information about the layers within a document. The rest  depends on how you'd like your plugin to work: if, for instance, you  want a GUI with a layer selection functionality, you probably will have  to write a bunch of functions that use the document descriptor to count  the layers, retrieve their properties and then display them to the user  with some third-party toolkit or native GUI API that will supply you  back with the selected layer's ID or index. You may also simplify your  task and always export the current layer, in which case you need no GUI /  layer enumeration etc I hope that provides you with enough info to start ... View more