CS2 – CanonBlogger

Over the past three years or so, I’ve had several people ask me about what’s involved in migrating from one installation of Photoshop to another, or what’s involved in moving from an old system to a new system. With Photoshop, it’s just not as easy as it is with other applications for a number of reasons:

1. Dependencies – While Photoshop is insanely popular, this popularity has spawned an entire industry of third party applications called plug-ins that get installed into Photoshop. If you simply remove Photoshop without considering these 3rd party “apps”, you could lose their functionality. There are also other things that become part of your work flow in Photoshop that you may want to save too, including actions, scripts, font folders, brushes, and much more.

2. Licensing – Because it’s not a cheap application, Adobe has to carefully manage licensing, which means that any serial number can only be activated twice before it gets “locked”. This allows you to have an installation on a desktop and a laptop, or a work computer and a home computer. Well, if you go an just un-install or delete the files for Photoshop, you may find yourself unable to activate again should you re-install on a new computer. The way to avoid this is to ensure you de-authorize (or deactivate) before uninstalling. This will free up the license for use again.

3. Other add-ons – Photoshop also has other add-in elements like automation tasks you may have added over time. I have a few from On One, Topaz Labs, and a few others that I’ve gathered over time. Make sure you check to make sure these don’t have installers with licensing too, because that can also be problematic for a software migration.

4. System settings – Unlike e-mail, some settings and preferences don’t stay with you during the course of a migration. So, it’s often helpful to grab screen captures of various setup windows so that you can get things configured just right once you get in your new digs! Here are the 11 screens you may want to capture before un-installing off any computer:

As you can tell, there’s a lot to consider. And, given the length of this post already with the included screen captures, to make things easier in terms of reference information, I’ve put together a step-by-step procedure to migrate Photoshop from one computer to another that you can download for free! Enjoy!

Migrating Photoshop

Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!

As promised earlier this week, I finally have some photos to share. In the middle of the drive across country from SC to CO, I stopped a few times and saw some possibilities for panorama shots. Keeping in mind a couple tips, I switched my camera from landscape mode to vertical (a.k.a. portrait) mode, and captured several scenes on my 40D. Here is the first installment of my attempts at panoramas:

So, you’ll notice that the color on these is a little off, and the exposure is a little dark. I realized that I would have issues though, if I tried to expose for such a wide scene and range of colors across the entire panorama, most especially when trying to use the Photomerge function of Photoshop. So I set my White Balance to cloudy, my exposure to one frame, and just snapped across the image.

Here’s where it gets fun…I am running CS2 on my Mac laptop which cannot read my 40D files. My CS3 was set up on my Windows desktop. The Dell only has a 2.3 Ghz Celeron processor with 1.5 GB of RAM (I never got around to adding that last 512 before the move…). Needless to say, without being set up right, I really couldn’t process 8 shots each at 10MP (that’s a grand total of 80 MP in the final pano)! Even now with the portable AC on the Dell, it was screaming along as I ran the Photomerge utility through Bridge. Once I got the photomerge done, I stamped the layers (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E) and converted to a smart object.

I then double-clicked the smart object to edit in it’s own window. This image file was now at 480 MB! Needless to say, I did some layer adjustments for exposure, and curves, then saved the file. I was now back in the full pano composite. I saved the full pano as a PSD file, then flattened before making some downsizing. For the curious, the full size pano is over 8000px on the long side. For the purposes of the web, I did have to downsize it a little. Clearly downsizing to allow the blog to show it would be out of the question, so here’s links to a large sized version (1600px long side), and a xl sized (3200px long side).

Large Pano

Extra-Large Pano

So, here’s the question: was it worth it? 🙂

Tag: CS2

Migrating Photoshop to a New Computer

Some Friday Photos