Photoshop CS3 OK with Snow Leopard

Stephen Withers
Friday, 28 August 2009 07:02

Opinion and Analysis

A senior Adobe employee has unofficially confirmed that Photoshop CS3 runs on Mac OS X Snow Leopard despite the company's official line that this combination may not work.

Adobe's pronouncement that Creative Suite 4 had been successfully tested (with some minor exceptions) on Snow Leopard but older versions had not sparked controversy.

Owners of CS3 - some had only owned the suite for a year or so - took exception to the news that it would not be updated to work with Snow Leopard.

But, as is often the way, it now looks like the matter may have been a storm in a teacup.

Adobe's John Nack has now revealed that "the Photoshop team has tested Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard, and to the best of our knowledge, PS CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard."

There are only two known issues, and neither of them actually stop anything from working.

"However, because we have not done the level of testing that true certification demands, we need to stand by our statement that we don't officially support CS3 on Snow Leopard," wrote Nack.

While Nack "can't speak for product teams besides Photoshop", it seems  possible that the situation would be similar for the other CS3 components.

Now that Snow Leopard is reaching end users, we'll probably hear more about what does and doesn't work in CS3 on Mac OS X 10.6. One word of warning: just because one person says something doesn't work, don't take it as gospel. They might not be lying, but issues reported after a Mac OS X update/upgrade often turn out to reflect an installation problem rather than a fundamental bug or incompatibility.

The generally well-regarded writer David Pogue reports "frustrating glitches in various programs" including Photoshop CS3 when using Snow Leopard. We'll soon hear whether this was one of those exceptions, or symptomatic of a general problem.