One of the best features of Photoshop in its early days has been two programmable capabilities: Actions for Photoshop users and plugins for software developers. Plugins over the years have anticipated many image processing features that eventually became incorporated with the Adobe design flair into Photoshop or Photoshop Elements commands. Look at some of the current smart commands for blurs, masking, sharpening and image adjustments and there are one or two plugins which influenced these capabilities.
For example, onOne Software’s Perfect Mask 5 [born as Mask Pro] has sported masking features over the years that have inspired Photoshop refinements:
So both parties have benefitted from the complimentary relationship. And lets not underestimate the importance of plugins – open iPhone apps originally rejected by Steve Jobs were included and the rest is business history. Here is what Mac Tech’s Kas Thomas has tellingly said about the concept of plugins and the benefit to Adobe Photoshop:
Over the years, Adobe Photoshop has become such a staple of desktop graphics that people tend to lose sight of what may well be this program’s most significant contribution to the world of desktop computing: namely, the popularization of plug-ins. External code resources were nothing new in Photoshop’s early days, of course; Silicon Beach already had a plug-in service in SuperPaint, for example (and before that, HyperCard developers championed XCMDs). But Photoshop was the first bonafide “killer app” to make extensive use of third-party plug-ins, leveraging the efforts of outside programmers to expand the host program’s core functionality. It was a brilliant maneuver, ensuring Photoshop’s hegemony in the graphics-software market. Thanks to Photoshop, user expectations have been raised to the point where, today, no developer of a major software title – of any kind – can afford to neglect to provide a plug-in architecture. It’s hard to find a compiler, web browser, data-compression utility, page-layout program, video editing suite, or 3D modelling or animation program that doesn’t rely on a plug-in architecture for much (if not most) of its functionality.
The .8xx plugin file have been the graphics “apps” of of the past 12 years with Kai Krause’ KPT plugin leading the parade of many great Photoshop plugins starting in 1992. But for the past 10 years, the various .8xx open file formats have seen a stormy history. For example
The support for plugins was more uniform up until 2002, when Adobe restricted access to the Photoshop SDK containing the specifications for Photoshop plugins, and made the developer license more prohibitive. Since then, developers of other image applications have had limited or no access to it anymore, so they can’t support newer host features. Therefore, plugin developers face a dilemma: either support the new host features that appeared in Photoshop 7 and later versions, like the access to layers, and lose the compatibility with other image applications, or use the old SDK version which already includes all important specifications and make sure the plugin will be supported by all hosts. [1]
Since then plugins have become more proprietary as the following has taken place:
1)the move to the Adobe restricted Automate command;
2)the move to 64bit computing has left .8xx filters and plugins stranded on the Photoshop CS5 32 bit island;
3)the consolidation of the plugins industry into a few superpowers that write now primarily for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, Adobe Lightroom, and Apple Aperture.
Where Goes Adobe Plugins?
It appears the open Adobe plugins market is going to consolidate. Inevitably the open .8bf file format will be left behind. Adobe will do what Apple has done in force – made sure its apps/plugins cannot be easily created in cross platform form or code. And so an era of great graphic plugins and creativity tools are going to be left behind. The French have a great pithy phrase for this – C’est dommage – it is a pity.