Using our old plug-ins with Photoshop CS5 on the Mac
Photoshop CS5 was the first 64 bit capable version of Photoshop for Mac OS X. At the same time it was Intel only - dropping all support for the old Power PC platform. ColorPerfect has since been released in an updated version that can be used with Photoshop and PhotoLine in their 64 bit modes but our old plug-ins will not be updated.
When using Photoshop CS5 on the Mac in its 32 bit mode all of our plug-ins including the old ones can be used in their XC UNI versions. Photoshop's default configuration is set to running in 64 bit mode on compatible Macs though.
So to use the old plug-ins with Photoshop CS5 on such systems you will have to configure Photoshop to run in 32 bit mode. First locate the Photoshop CS5 executable using the Finder. It should be in the Applications/Photoshop CS5 folder on your HD unless you installed it elsewhere. Select the executable and right click to bring up the info dialogue. Alternatively press cmd+i after selecting the file. On the info panel check the option that tells OS X to run Photoshop CS5 in 32 bit mode. The screenshots used here were taken on a German copy of OS X but the locations of the respective items will be the same for other languages.
Note that the 32 bit ColorPerfect plug-in can reside alongside the 64 bit plug-in in your Filters folder. If it does the correct plug-in will be chosen depending on the current mode Photoshop CS5 is being used in.
Photoshop CS6 & PSE 12 for Mac OS X no longer feature a 32 bit mode
After dropping support for the Power PC platform with version CS5 Adobe decided to also stop supporting the 32 bit Intel Mac platform starting with Photoshop CS6. The current and future versions of Adobe Photoshop will thus only work on 64 bit compatible Intel Macs. This step also renders all plug-ins authored for previous versions of Adobe Photoshop incompatible. That means that our old generation of plug-ins will not work here while ColorPerfect does because we added a 64 bit version for it. The same transition to a 64 bit only host took place for Adobe Photoshop Elements (PSE) on the Mac in version 12.
On October 20th 2012 we released ColorPerfect as a 64 bit Plug-in for Mac OS X
Like all previous upgrades since before 2007 the new version is being provided free of charge for existing users of our Mac OS X plug-ins. There are no plans for adding 64 bit support to our old generation of plug-ins - that is for ColorNeg, ColorPos and GamSat.
What took us so long to release the 64 bit Plug-in for Mac OS X?
We added 64 bit support to the PC version of ColorPerfect quite a while before doing the same on the Mac so you might wonder what took us so long. The delay was because of another major change in the software's architecture that is exclusive to the 64 bit version. You might have read about that before. It was on the media when CS4 turned out not to be 64 bit enabled on the Mac. The architecture used by Adobe for all 32 bit versions of Photoshop on the Intel Mac platform is called Carbon while the one mandatory for 64 bit software on the Mac is called Cocoa.
As you know we do support all OS X Photoshop versions back to 7.0 with three different plug-in versions developed on different systems. The 64 bit compatible version is the fourth for which it turned out to be inevitable to rewrite the entire user interface from scratch and we gave the development of ColorPerfect 2.0 and PerfectRAW precedence. On the upside doing that allowed us to finally eliminate all the differences between Mac OS X and Windows for this newest plug-in version and in addition to implement a resizable dialogue for it.