Dejected

Years ago, at a time when I considered charging for my work and running a little side business, I bit the bullet and purchased Photoshop CS5 for my then-new iMac.

Last night, my wife asked me to put some photos from her recent trip to California up on my website and I fired up CS5 to resize them, change the color-space to sRGB, and then ultimately upload them.

In the middle of this, I ran an action I've run a million times before and it threw up an error. Photoshop hasn't run properly since. I've spent about 3 hours trying to get it working again including clearing out all caches, resetting PS preferences, and rebooting ... but it throws an exception at startup (crashes while the splash screen says "Loading brushes") and appears completely dead in the water.

I've posted in the Adobe forums, and today I tried reaching out to Adobe via chat and phone but I'm so far unable to get any help via any of these avenues.

So the real question is ... what are my options? I'm open to using a different product and I am not ready to spend all the money on Photoshop again. I know that I've never really begun to breach the surface of what PS is capable of, but I loved ACR.

My typical workflow includes exposure/contrast/satu​ration/white-balance correction during the raw conversion process (I shoot in RAW exclusively), also includes leveling the photo, and then I'll often use the healing brush for skin imperfections (I'm mostly a portrait photographer), and a few custom actions I've set up that do general sharpening, some vignettes, change the color-space if I'm uploading to web or certain printers, and save/close.

What other tools out there should I be considering? I downloaded the free trial of LightRoom years ago as well as Capture One I believe, and at the time I justified going with CS5 because of the business side of things ... that was crap and I should have just said to myself, "man up and learn a new piece of software".

I'm not giving up on my current CS5 installation just yet. I'll be trying to get this thing fixed all week, but on my downtime at work, I find myself thinking of alternatives should this go south. I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on my next steps and hear about the features of the software that you're currently using as well as pricing models. Thanks everyone.

Maybe you need to reinstall - you might have a damaged file somewhere.

Maybe someone who knows the program knows if there is a log file somewhere of what the program does during the startup.

Uninstall Adobe, perform a clean reinstall, then use Time Machine to restore your custom actions.

Does a Mac have a Restore Point? If so, can you take your machine back to when PS worked?

kjonnnn wrote in post #16714297
Does a Mac have a Restore Point? If so, can you take your machine back to when PS worked?

But the concept of restore points - whatever OS we might talk about - is basically about new installations overwriting and replacing important files. If an accident happens to destroy a file then restore points normally doesn't help - which is a reason why regular backup is a good thing to consider.

Sorry guys. Not looking for tips on reinstalling photoshop, looking for suggestions on other software products that fit the bill. I suffered a HD crash about a year ago and spent 4 solid days trying to find a copy of CS 5 I could install. When I bought it originally, I opted to save money and dowload my version and then promptly trashed the downloaded file assuming, incorrectly, that I could always redownload later if need be. In the end I had to use my Time Machine to put back all of the CS5 files and miraculously got it working. Not sure I want to do that again.

Was looking at Lightroom a bit today. For my workflow, would it meet my needs? What are peoples thoughts?

pwm2 wrote in post #16714309
But the concept of restore points - whatever OS we might talk about - is basically about new installations overwriting and replacing important files. If an accident happens to destroy a file then restore points normally doesn't help - which is a reason why regular backup is a good thing to consider.

Actually it does. Rescued many a machine with it. But the OP isn't looking a fix at this point, but a different software. Bad habits will at some point recreate the same problem.

kjonnnn wrote in post #16714363
Actually it does. Rescued many a machine with it. But the OP isn't looking a fix at this point, but a different software. Bad habits will at some point recreate the same problem.

Yes, restore points can rescue lots of things - but that doesn't change the fact that it has holes for damaged files unless the machine regularly performs checksumming of all files.

Yes, Lightroom would most likely fit your needs. Its basically the same thing as Camera Raw to the best of my knowledge. I rarely use Camera Raw, as I export to Ps from Lr when needed.

I use LR for most of my processing. Yes, it is essentially ACR, but has quite a few additional features. Where it falls short is when you need to use layers. At that point, I will edit in PS like posted above.

If you are looking for a PS alternative, On One software's Perfect Photo Suite 8 has a layers module that works similar to PS.

Another possibility is Adobe's Creative Cloud for photographers, currently at $9.99 per month, includes LR and PS latest versions with constant updates. Some people have an aversion to "renting" software, but it works for me since I never owned earlier versions of any Adobe software.

Hmm, Lightroom is great for the Camera Raw functions as well as image organization and integrated output tools, but if you have needs\tools in Photoshop that go beyond what Camera Raw can do, then I'd suggest you get Photoshop back up and running! Then, Lightroom could be a good workflow tool alongside of Photoshop, it just won't replace the Photoshop image editor.

see
http://lifehacker.com …p-alternatives-1483312519

Bill Ng wrote in post #16714128
Years ago, at a time when I considered charging for my work and running a little side business, I bit the bullet and purchased Photoshop CS5 for my then-new iMac.

Last night, my wife asked me to put some photos from her recent trip to California up on my website and I fired up CS5 to resize them, change the color-space to sRGB, and then ultimately upload them.

In the middle of this, I ran an action I've run a million times before and it threw up an error. Photoshop hasn't run properly since. I've spent about 3 hours trying to get it working again including clearing out all caches, resetting PS preferences, and rebooting ... but it throws an exception at startup (crashes while the splash screen says "Loading brushes") and appears completely dead in the water.

I've posted in the Adobe forums, and today I tried reaching out to Adobe via chat and phone but I'm so far unable to get any help via any of these avenues.

So the real question is ... what are my options? I'm open to using a different product and I am not ready to spend all the money on Photoshop again. I know that I've never really begun to breach the surface of what PS is capable of, but I loved ACR.

My typical workflow includes exposure/contrast/satu​ration/white-balance correction during the raw conversion process (I shoot in RAW exclusively), also includes leveling the photo, and then I'll often use the healing brush for skin imperfections (I'm mostly a portrait photographer), and a few custom actions I've set up that do general sharpening, some vignettes, change the color-space if I'm uploading to web or certain printers, and save/close.

What other tools out there should I be considering? I downloaded the free trial of LightRoom years ago as well as Capture One I believe, and at the time I justified going with CS5 because of the business side of things ... that was crap and I should have just said to myself, "man up and learn a new piece of software".

I'm not giving up on my current CS5 installation just yet. I'll be trying to get this thing fixed all week, but on my downtime at work, I find myself thinking of alternatives should this go south. I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on my next steps and hear about the features of the software that you're currently using as well as pricing models. Thanks everyone.

I would also recommend Lightroom. Moving to the latest version of LR will also give you access to the latest Process Version 2012 which is a very big improvement over PV2010 as included in ACR 6.x. I am surprised that you could not download a copy of CS5 from Adobe, I thought that they had copies of all of the CS versions from CS2 available on their website for just this reason.

Alan

Usagi wrote in post #16714930
see
http://lifehacker.com …p-alternatives-1483312519

Thank you. Was a good read.

Elements will do just about everything you mentioned except for actions. Lightroom plus Elements would put you back in business for relatively little cost.