Daily Archives: 20 December 2008

WARNING!! Adobe Photoshop CS3 to CS4 on OS X

20 Saturday Dec 2008

Posted by in apple mac, mac, Software

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I just wasted much of my Saturday morning fighting with the brain damaged Adobe CS4 installer. Perhaps this post will save others some aggravation. I had Adobe Photoshop CS3 installed on my OS X 10.5 MacBook Pro. I got the CS4 update. Please be aware this is for Mac OS X only. I don’t know the traps the CS4 installer sets on windows.

  • I did the install from the DVD. All seemed OK, except the installation process did not have the option to simply upgrade CS3 to CS4 – which is what I wanted to do. I did not want 2 versions of Photoshop on my system.
  • After installing CS4, I tried it and it ran OK.  I ran the updater and it downloaded some new files OK. Next step, remove CS3
  • On the older CS3, the readme pdf file gave these instructions for uninstalling: DO NOT drag applications to the trash to uninstall them. To safely uninstall on Mac OS X, double-click the product installer in Applications\Utilities\Adobe Installers. Authenticate as an administrator, then select Remove Components and follow the on-screen instructions.
  • I did the above. It took a long, long time but finished OK.
  • Next, I ran Photoshop again and got this message:
    adobe cs4 error

    adobe cs4 error

    Here’s the message in text so that a search might reveal this post. “One or more files in the Adobe Application Support folder, necessary for running Photoshop, are missing. Please run the Photoshop installer re-install Photoshop.” Not good. I followed the instructions an reinstalled from the DVD.

  • After reinstalling, I got the same message. Very NOT GOOD.
  • A search on Adobe’s web site returned no useful information.
  • A web search gave some hints: The error message is referring to directory /Library/Application Support/Adobe    Note this is different from ~/Library
  • There were over 17 thousand files in various folders inside /Library/Application Support/Adobe  Uh Oh
  • After taking a break to eat, I decided to use Apple’s Time Machine to restore /Library/Application Support/Adobe  to what it was yesterday. There was 650 megabytes in 17,700 files. Time Machine did this easily. You are using Time Machine, aren’t you?
  • Once this completed, I reinstalled CS4 Photoshop from the DVD. It worked!! No errors.

I hope this is of use to others.

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