Photoshop CS5 64-bit and 32-bit Plugin Issues

Like the program itself, plugins must be 32-bit or 64-bit, to work with a 32-bit or 64-bit Photoshop CS5.

Many 3rd-party plugins are not yet 64-bit, which means they won’t run at all in CS5 in 64-bit mode.

The workaround is to use CS5 in 32-bit mode (see below), but there is a downside: unlike Photoshop CS4 which could use up to 3072MB memory, CS5 limits itself to 2100MB. This limitation is fine for moderate size files, but will be a performance hit for large files.

If you’re a 3rd-party plugin user, stick with Photoshop CS4 until the plugin issue resolves (by vendors releasing 64-bit version).

You can run both Photoshop CS4 and CS5.

CS5 can be forced to run in 32-bit mode, but won’t use more than 2100MB memory