Home

Commercial
Plugins

Freeware
Plugins

Illustrator Plugins

Tutorials

Misc. Things

FAQ

General Q
Technical Q
Troubleshooting

I got a *.8bf file, what do I do with that ?

Look for your Photoshop folder (the one that should contain Photoshop.exe !), there must be a sub folder named "plugins" (in Photoshop 4) or "Plug-Ins" (in Photoshop 5), itself with a number of other sub folders (filters, formats, extensions...).
This is the place to put these *.8bf files, either directly in the "plugins" folder, or in a sub folder of it (which is a better solution if you intend on using many plugins and filters.).
Note that the folders indicated above are standard folders, someone may have customized them...

How do you use them ?

Once you have opened an image in Photoshop, you can find the plugins either in File->Import (for *.8ba), File->Export (for *.8be), Edit->Select (for *.8bs selection plugins), the most common case being in the Filters menu, where each set of plugin will have its own submenu. There is another possibility : in the "Open..." and "Save as..." dialogs for format (*.8bi) plugins. If you use such format plugins as Pegasus Picpress, which saves in *.JPG format, the "Save as..." dialog will let you choose between "JPEG" and "Pegasus JPEG", so that you can know which is which.

Some of the filters and plugins I have installed do not show up in Photoshop !

- Check that they are present either in the Photoshop plugins folder or in one of its subdirectories.
- In the Preferences / Folders menu, check that the correct folder is indicated.
- Also check the number of plugins and filters : you may have installed too many of them, so you will have to get the Plugins Manager and reorganize them.
- Check you have a file named MSVCRT10.dll in your windows/system folder.
- Another problem could be the mere presence of Andromeda's Techture or Shadow plugins, try moving their whole subdirectories out of Photoshop's plugin directory.
- Some plugins look for the "plugin" directory when installing, instead of "Plug-Ins" for Photoshop 5, so check the*.8bf files are in the right directory.
- When installing, some plugins look for Photoshop's registry key, which may have been deleted if you had trouble with your registry, so you will have to reinstall Photoshop 5 ; but first, you may try double-clicking a file named Photoshop.reg in your Photoshop folder.
- If the filter is above or below 56k in size, you will need to check that the plugin.dll file is present in your directory. This file is provided with Photoshop.

When I try to apply a filter, nothing happens !

Once again, there are several possibilities :
- check that your layers are not flattened ; if it happens to be the case, just double-click on the "background" layer to deflatten it, things should get better....
- some filters only work when the "preserve transparency" option for the layer is not checked
- have a look at the manual, maybe the filter only works with specific kinds of layers (for colors for example, check the image is in RGB mode).

When I try to apply a filter, it crashes my machine !

A few things to check :
- if you use Photoshop 4, have you installed the upgrade to PS4.01 ?
- have you also installed the upgraded MMXcore ?
- have you tried deleting the FastCore.8bx file ?
- are you sure you have enough RAM ?
- have you correctly installed the filter ? Vertigo 3D HotText for example needs QuickDraw to work
- is your filter a beta ? It may be a compatibility problem with your machine.
- is the filter installed exactly in the right directory ? 3D Texture Painter for example needs to be installed in the Filters sub directory of the Plugins folder, and nowhere else;
- have you checked the newsgroups ? Try having a look at comp.graphics.apps.photoshop or making a search on dejanews.