Regular visitors to rogercavanagh.com may know of the Variations Suite: a set of JavaScripts I wrote that are designed to work with Adobe Photoshop. When Photoshop CS3 was released, I received reports from users that the scripts weren't working correctly. As I was pretty busy with the day job taking me away from home most of the time, I didn't investigate these reports in any detail. Also I thought the upgrade charge that Adobe wanted for CS3 (especially in the UK) was over the top; so I resisted the upgrade for some time. It was only over the last Christmas break that I succumbed. I'm glad I did because otherwise I doubt that I would have started to work with Photoshop Lightroom.

Anyway I tried a few Variations Suite scripts in CS3 and found that they didn't work properly — some worse than others. In the last few days, I've got down to some in-depth investigation and discovered that there is another factor at work: the Windows operating system. I'm using Windows Vista and the UAC (user access control) that Microsoft introduced to provide additional security interferes with reading and writing of settings files. I haven't got to the bottom of all the issues yet, but I'll post information about updates and test versions in this section of the blog.

At present, I can say that Watermark Variations CS2 does not work properly whatever OS you are using.

If you have CS3 and Windows XP, some scripts seem to work fine: for example, B&W Variations, Grain Variations and Tone Variations.

If you have Windows Vista and CS3, I expect problems.

If you are a Mac user, the few comments I have had suggest that most scripts are OK.

My own XP system is hors de combat right now; so if anyone would like to comment on their experience with XP and CS3 that would be great. Mac users, too: please let me know what works.

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