Last night I set up my Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED film scanner with my Mac Mini. As the Mac already had Adobe Photoshop CS2 installed, I expected Nikon Scan 4 to install a plug-in (as Nikon Scan 3.1.4 had with Adobe Photoshop 7 under Windows XP) but this was not the case (it had worked previously for my Canon CanoScan N656U flatbed scanner).

After contacting the Nikon European customer support desk (who in my experience are always helpful), I copied the Nikon Scan Plugin 4 file from Applications > Nikon Software > Nikon Scan 4 > Plug-ins to Applications > Adobe Photoshop CS2 > Plug-Ins > Import/Export. Now Photoshop CS2 has a Nikon Scan 4 entry under File > Import, allowing me to scan directly to Photoshop.

Back at the end of 2003 I experienced a problem with Adobe Photoshop 7 crashing on a Windows XP machine. Since then, everything has been fine, but tonight the problem re-emerged so I dug out my old notes (which predate this blog) to try and find the answer.

Basically, when starting Photoshop, the splash screen displays as components are loaded and then nothing else appears (not even an error message).

Luckily, when this happened to me a few years back, I found a forum post with the answer to the problem – hold down the Ctrl, Alt and Shift keys whilst launching Photoshop (this will allow the settings file to be deleted and recreated). It’s worked twice for me now, hopefully blogging about it here will help someone else out too.