Catalina Photoshop

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Solutions to Adobe Catalina 64-bit Compatibility Problem

The easiest solution to this Adobe Catalina problem is updating all the Adobe apps to their 64-bit compliant versions. However, all the older 32-bit Adobe apps might not be compatible with the 64-bit architecture and in this case. It's best to continue using the macOS versions which are recommended for them.

Photoshop Elements is an up-to-date, “lite” version of Photoshop (see latest price here). If all you need to do with your images are simple tasks such as layers, brushes, or other basic adjustments, this is the most affordable way to still get (most of) the Photoshop environment, with a one-time payment. MacOS 11 Big Sur is listed as a “Recommended” system for Photoshop 2021 (version 22), but not for Photoshop 2020 or earlier. However, there are several known issues, listed in the Adobe document Photoshop and Big Sur. Photoshop system requirements as of November 12, 2020. Question: Q: Catalina & Photoshop. New OS doesn't work with camera downloads to Photoshop (Bridge) More Less. IMac 27' 5K, macOS 10.15 Posted on Apr 30, 2020 8:07 AM. There have been issues with the 2018 version of Photoshop in macOS Mojave, so you may expect the trouble in Catalina as well. If you want to use the app, Adobe recommends to get Photoshop CC 2019. The app is 64-bit, but there have been reported issues related to camera and microphone access in macOS 10.15.

Catalina photoshop cs4

Best Alternatives for Adobe Apps Which Are Compatible With macOS Catalina / Big Sur

Adobe has also revealed that all of its applications have not been tested for compatibility with Catalina. Creative Cloud apps or Acrobat DC are some of the biggest examples of such apps which are hanging from a thin string in the Adobe and Catalina debate.

Some of the other apps which are facing compatibility concerns are Presenter Video Express, Adobe Captivate, Speedgate and Fuse. HOWEVER, the same cannot be said about the rest of the applications mentioned above.

In this case, users can switch over to newer apps which offer similar functionality and are compatible with the changed OS of Apple platform.

  • If your Adobe is not working on Mac, then you can switch over the 32-bit Creative Suite of Apps to Creative Cloud.
  • Users of Adobe Fuse on the other hand can move over with Mixamo.
  • Users of Adobe Presenter Video Express can feel well at ease after switching over to Adobe Captivate.

By now, it seems no problem for Adobe premiere on Catalina, but - if you have installed some 32-bit plug-ins on Premiere, they'll not be able to use. You are still likely in need of alternatives for this video editor or the plug-ins and wait for the Adobe Catalina problem totally gets solved.


Try VideoProc - the Well Compatible and All-purpose Video Software for Mac

VideoProc is an excellent tool of Digiarty which can help users with an easy transition into the macOS Catalina (and even Big Sur, soon). This all-in-one software can be of great assistance in meeting various video conversion, editing, downloading and recording needs on your macOS. Whether you are trying to solve the problem when you can't import MOV file into Adobe Premiere, to merge multiple small clips into the creation of a Facebook story, or to trim a big clip into short and more interesting ones, VideoProc can get it all done for you in a seamless manner.

VideoProc is compatible with all the mainstream macOS versions as well as Catalina (10.15).

Let's now take a look at some of the features which sets VideoProc apart from its peer video editing tools available in the market:

  • It supports level-3 hardware acceleration which guarantees super smooth video transcoding and editing in 4K format without undergoing any quality loss.
  • Shaky footages captured by iPhone and GoPro can be stabilised easily using VideoProc to render a seamless and professional grade finish to the same.
  • Users can protect the authenticity of their documents by watermarking their videos with logos, texts, images as well as timecodes.
  • VideoProc allows its users to add multiple preset visual filters and effects like Mirror, Grayscale, Painting, Edge as well as Sharpen. It also becomes possible to make adjustment of image brightness, colors, hue, contrast, saturation and gamma.
  • It becomes possible for users to enable, disable and even export movie subtitles after making the selection of subtitle language. Users can add external subtitle files to their videos and also search for the subtitles online.
  • VideoProc makes it easy for users to mirror flip their videos both vertically and horizontally. The frames can also be rotated in clockwise and anti-clockwise direction to 90, 180 and 270 degrees.

VideoProc has already gained a massive fan following amongst its users who simply can’t get enough out of its massive potential. Such popularity has led its manufactures to the expansion of this software for covering both video and audio editing pretty soon.

In case you missed it, Flextight scanners have vanished from the Hasselblad website around May 2019 and macOS Catalina doesn’t run FlexColor anymore. No software updates are planned, plus I’ve run into problems dealing with fff files in Photoshop 2020. Heavens!

Flextight scanners

Flextight X1 and X5, the flagship (and only left) models in Hasselblad’s lineup have been discontinued: EOL, kaputt. No official announcement has been published, but a number of users around the world have had the news confirmed either from dealers or servicing shops.

It’s pointless to ask the reason why, scanners have always been a low priority asset to Hasselblad. Flextight know-how and hardware were acquired in 2014 when the company merged with Imacon: reliable sources told me that the engineering team has always been quite small. My best bet is that the 2017 acquisition of Hasselblad by DJI, a Chinese drone-making company, gave scanners the coup de grace.

The good news is that servicing will be available for the foreseeable future, as customer service wrote me:

The Flextight scanners are full service supported in our factory service in Gothenburg, Sweden and a selected number of regional scanner partners are able to perform local service and preventive maintenance. We will continue to perform service for these scanners as long as we will have spare parts, therefore it is difficult to appreciate for how long.

In fact, this is what you can read when logging in the private area of the Hasselblad website.

FlexColor software

Unclear information has been given to users in the past, when many of us pinged Hasselblad about the pressing issue of macOS 10.15 Catalina blocking 32bit applications. Any hope to see a 64bit FlexColor rewrite has been definitely flushed away when customer support eventually started to reply that:

[…] we currently have no plans to release an updated version of Flexcolor.

As expected, the software has been EOLed very much like the hardware. Not that it has ever received much care: the last available versions are 4.8.13 (2011, for Mac) and 4.8.9 (2012, for Windows).

To the best of my knowledge, the Windows version still runs on whatever version is Windows at now, but with macOS you’re capped to 10.14 Mojave.

Neither FlexColor nor the scanners do require a high-performance computer, they’re probably going to work fine with old dedicated hardware for years to come. I think it’s possible to run Catalina and virtualize (with Parallels or VMWare) Mojave so that you can still run 32bit apps. Let’s hope that by the time the whole process becomes impractical or the spare parts are out of stock, the film we want to scan has been eroded away by chemical remains and fungi – checkmate, problem solved1.

Finally, due to legal reasons (very likely the use of some internal libraries that prevent it) FlexColor can’t be open-sourced. There are rumors about VueScan willing (or having been asked) to implement a module that would drive the Flextight hardware, but I couldn’t been able to find any official statement.

So this is the state of affairs for the hardware, what about existing archives?

3F files

Catalina Photoshop Cs6

Here things are getting slightly more complex, please bear with me.

As we all know, FlexColor is used by archivists and photoshoppers alike to browse through, and extract .tif files from, huge collections of .fff (aka 3F) files. You may or may not know that the 3F format is nothing but a .tif file with some proprietary tags: to prove it, try renaming a .fff to .tif and open it in Photoshop. The extra stuff is:

  • the compressed/low-res bitmap preview that FlexColor uses to temporarily display the 3F while waiting to read the actual data from the file (only if the 3F isn’t too large, in which case you’re always only shown the preview)
  • metadata related to the scan acquisition and FlexColor settings (e.g. curves, FlexTouch, saturation, snapshots, etc.)

I have grown accustomed to skip FlexColor altogether for anything but driving the scanner (acquiring the 3F), and browsing (i.e. visualizing the files). That is to say: I do not use FlexColor anymore for any 3F processing nor .tif extraction. I’ve never liked FlexColor rudimental, limited features – they were sort-of OK in the mid-2000s, or for large files batches quick post-processing. My client’s work today is more focused on a smaller selection of scans, to be post-produced very accurately, so I only use Photoshop.

To briefly sum up the way I use to work (which I can expand in a separate blogpost – leave a comment below in case it is of any interest):

  • I open the 3F in Photoshop (thanks to the Imacon3F.plugin or its .8bf Windows version), which in my case is going to appear as a color negative.
  • I apply an Invert adjustment layer and a couple of Curves adjustment layers to make it look more or less correct to my eyes – no need to be precise here.
  • I duplicate the background layer and perform all sorts of retouching voodoo (against dust, scratches, chemicals stains, fingerprints, semen, etc.), saving this intermediate layered file as a separate, temporary .psb.
  • When I’m happy, I flatten all the bitmap layers and discard all the adjustment layers, so that I’m back with a one-layer, color negative file again.
  • I re-open the original .fff file, drag and drop the retouched layer from the .psb, flatten, and save as .CLEAN.fff – this because one never knows what the future brings… I then trash the intermediate .psb.
  • I keep the .CLEAN.fff open: assign the FlexColor Input ICC, convert to Adobe RGB, Invert, and save my working file as a .psb. This is my starting point, to which I apply the usual Curves, and whatever it takes to make the image work.

Enter another stray bullet in the Hasselblad game: Adobe. It turns out that Photoshop 2020 doesn’t want to open 3Fs anymore, popping up this new errors: Adaptec motherboards driver download for windows 10.

In recent versions, you already had to set the Open dialog’s settings to Enable: All Documents (and of course the Format: Imacon 3f) otherwise Adobe Camera Raw kicked in trying to open the file, mistaking it as coming from a digital back.

The last working version (at least on a Mac) is Photoshop CC 2019 – which is a big concern. Why? You may or may not have heard that in the last months Adobe has aggressively restricted the licensed versions range for Photoshop – e.g. you cannot, theoretically, install or run, say, Photoshop CC 2015 anymore. Without entering into yet another rabbit hole, it all boils down to royalties with third-parties, very likely Dolby2.

In the end, Adobe’s versions policy is (and it is fair to expect that it will be their default from now on) to license N-1 versions – in other words: you’ll be allowed to download and install the latest Photoshop, plus the version before it, period. At the time I’m writing this, it is PS 2020 + PS CC 2019. In one year, CC 2019 will be dropped, and it’ll be PS 2021 + PS 2020.

Which means: one year from now, the officially available Photoshop versions won’t open 3F files anymore, and working versions’ installers won’t be available for download either. LMAO.

Mac Os Catalina Photoshop

There is also the tangentially related problem of macOS notarization/digital signature, from macOS Catalina onwards: .plugin files are requested to be at least3 signed by the developer, otherwise macOS GateKeeper will prevent to run them. This is not too much of a big deal, I have an active Apple Developer membership and I can sign the file myself if needed.

TL;DR

Catalina Photoshop Crack

  • Hasselblad Flextight X1 and X5 scanners (previously known as Imacon) are discontinued. Scanner servicing will be provided as usual as long as spare parts will be available.
  • FlexColor is abandonware: it doesn’t run on any macOS > 10.14.
  • 3F files don’t open anymore in Photoshop 2020; very likely the CC 2019 installer is not going to be available one year from now, and even if you have one, it’s definitely possible that macOS Catalina will prevent Imacon3F.plugin from working because it’s not signed/notarized.

Workarounds (if any)

Catalina Photoshop Cs5

The following is partly subjective.

  • Acquiring new scans, for the time being, requires FlexColor; so either you keep dedicated hardware running macOS Mojave, or you switch to Windows.
  • Browsing 3F collections is, and will keep being, a pain in the butt: FlexColor is the lesser evil, Adobe Bridge seems unable to load just the low-res preview that is embedded in .fff files and it takes forever to read the file content to create a thumbnail. The same holds true with Finder. I’m not aware of any other viable options for the Mac.
  • Extracting .tif files for 3F post-processing is not a problem, as long as the Photoshop plugin keeps working 🤞🏻.

Feel free to comment below if you have updated news, workflow suggestions, or you just want to share your point of view as a Hasselblad user. Thanks!

Mac Catalina Photoshop

  1. Please bear with me but I’m right in the middle of the postproduction of a batch of large format, color negative scans from the early 1980, and it’s a mess. Are you nostalgic of the old days of analogic photography? Bloody hell, no. ↩

  2. Read here for more info about the Adobe-Dolby lawsuit. ↩

  3. It is unclear to me, at the moment, whether a digital signature is enough or I would be required to notarize the .plugin as well – not a big deal either, but not running Catalina myself I cannot test it. ↩





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