The developers of the startup tweaker have now released an updated version of their software program. This version is – finally – compatible with all Adobe Photoshop versions from Adobe Photoshop 3 to Photoshop CS4.

The program interface on the other hand remained the same. Adobe Photoshop Speedup will scan the computer system for installed Photoshop installations and display versions that it discovers at the bottom of the interface.

Adobe Photoshop SpeedUp significantly decreases the time it takes to load Adobe Photoshop by disabling the plug-ins that you may not need. There are several options such as whether to load the Adobe fonts, load the presets, and set the memory usage. You may restore to the original settings at any time.

The program offers four options to speed up and optimize Photoshop. It can limit the memory usage of the image editor, prevent that Adobe Presets, CMAP and Base are loaded and remove certain plugins from the list of available ones so that these are not loaded during startup.

Adobe Photoshop Speedup is available at the developer’s website. The portable software program is freeware and compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2000, XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Update: The program has not been updated for a while. It does not support the latest version of Adobe Photoshop (that is CS5) at the time of writing.

Sadly, there is no publicly available codec for the Photoshop PSD format but the newly released Microsoft Expression Blend 3 design tool (which, by the way, is nothing short of amazing for WPF and Silverlight design) includes such a codec so installing Blend 3 automatically installs the PSD codec. For those who don’t have a need for Blend and don’t want to install it, here is a little hacking guide to extract the codec (a 256KB dll) and use it separately:

Get the codec and its dependencies:

Download Microsoft Expression Blend 3.0 (3.0.1927.0 7/20/2009) Trial: Link
Using 7-Zip, open ‘Blend_Trial_en.exe’ from step (1) and in the ‘Setup’ subfolder, open ‘BlImp.cab’ then extract ‘PSDCodec.dll’
Download the Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86): Link

Codec installation:

Install the VC++ Runtime by running vcredist_x86.exe from step (3) above.
Copy PSDCodec.dll from step (2) to some location on the harddisk, e.g. “C:\Program Files\PSDCodec”
Register the codec from an administrator’s command prompt by running the following command: regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\PSDCodec\PSDCodec.dll”

That’s it, Windows Vista Explorer should soon begin to display thumbnails for all PSD files that were saved from Photoshop with the “Maximum Compatibility” option. As a side effect, WIC-aware image viewers such as FastPictureViewer Professional (http://www.fastpictureviewer.com) automatically benefit from the codec installation and uses it to open and display the same PSD files with full fidelity.

The software program has been designed to speed up the start of Adobe Photoshop. It supports all Photoshop versions from Photoshop 3 to 8 and tries to identify the installed version automatically upon start. Adobe Photoshop Speedup is a portable software which means it can be run from any location. It asks the user to enter information about the installed Adobe Photoshop version manually if it cannot be located automatically.

Adobe Photoshop Speedup will display a basic interface afterwards that allows the user to remove items from the Adobe Photoshop startup including plugins, Cmap and Base and Photoshop Presets.

Specific plugins can be removed from the startup process which afterwards will usually be noticeably faster. The settings can also be restored at a later time in case some of the plugins or features should be loaded at startup again.

Paint.net is not compatible with Adobe Photoshop psd files by default which can be quite troublesome if you need to work with psd files occasionally. The psd plugin for paint.net adds support for Adobe Photoshop psd files to paint.net. It does not implement all features of the psd file though, only those that are needed to convert the image in the image editor and those that have a paint.net counterpart. Below is the list of support features:

• Layers
• Masks (only loading see To do list)
• RAW or RLE compressed files
• The following color modes are supported for loading an image: Gray scale, Indexed, 32 Bit-RGBA, CMYK (lossy conversation), Multichannel CMY (lossy conversation), Duotone (as gray scale), Lab (lossy conversation)
• For saving an image only 32-Bit RGBA is supported

The psd plugin comes as a single dll file that has to be placed into the filetypes folder of the Paint.net installation. The association of psd files with paint.net has to be created manually. This can be done by right-clicking a psd file on the computer system and selecting Open With > Choose Program from the context menu. Paint.net has to be selected as the program to open psd files and the checkbox “always use the selected program to open this kind of file” has to be ticked.

Bonjour enables automatic discovery of network devices and services on IP networks. The service is usually not needed on most Windows installations and remains installed even if the application that installed it gets uninstalled on the system. Other means of identifying the service is the Bonjour folder in the program files folder of the Windows installation.

Bonjour can be uninstalled manually which is explained in the link above or by running Au Revoir, Bonjour.
The small application for Windows stops and uninstalls the Bonjour service and removes the winsock namespace layer provider as well.

The program can be executed directly. It scans the system for traces of the Bonjour service and uninstalls them if found. The software program is compatible to Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista.

You need to create an account before you can start uploading photos. Only the United States can be picked as the country at the moment but there does not seem to be an IP check that prevents users from other countries to signup for an account. Once the account is verified the fun begins.

Adobe Photoshop Express has two main functions. The first is to function as a photo album and the second to edit the photos that you have uploaded. Each user gets 2 Gigabytes of storage space for his images which can be sorted into different albums. Images can be uploaded from the computer or imported from Facebook, Picasa or Photobucket.

Images can be shared with the outside world by dragging them into an album that is shared. Everyone can then access the images by loading the username.photoshop.com url of the user. The shared albums of other members of the website can be browsed as well.

I’m a bit disappointed about the image editing capabilities of Adobe Photoshop Express. Only 17 different tools are available to edit the image from rotation the image to changing the hue. This function of the website will be neglected by the majority of users in my opinion. Community features are missing, there is no way to comment on images for instance and no private messaging system.

This leaves us with another image hosting service with a slick interface, nothing more, nothing less.