Will Photoline ever be able to run PS-ONLY plugins?

[Koyaanis]

I know all about how Photoshop-ONLY plugins can't be run with other editors. Not with newer versions of photoshop. But in the distant past we only needed to copy a couple of DLL files from Photoshop to make PS-ONLY plugins work with other editors.

I have a few favorite plugins that I wish I could get to work with Photoline, but sadly, they are of the PS-ONLY variety and can no longer be made to work using the old PS v5.0 methods (copying a couple PS-dll's).

In particular, I just got the new Tiffen Dfx v2 Plugin and Standalone. It includes thousands of effects, one of my favorites being the variable-star filter to spruce-up those glinting highlights on water and metal surfaces. Plus its Chromatic Aberration filter is far better than the one in Photoline. The Fringing filter is also nice to use to touch up digital camera photos. It also has some really nice mask creation tools, but unfortunately you can't use the mask it creates outside of the program itself.

So far I've been using the Photoline browser option of using an external application to load the stand-alone version of this Tiffen filter utility, but it would be nice if I could use the plugin version too. Then there wouldn't have to be any intermediate saving of the file, reloading it into Photoline to continue with my normal editing.

So ... can or will Photoline ever be able to support these PS-ONLY plugins? Ever? Sure would be nice.

[lutz]

AFAIK, no other software is able to use/emulate the advanced features provided by the newest photoshop plugin architecture. In part because the "hooks" for the interactions between the plugin architecture and the host program were kept secret.
I do not know anything about programming, but as Adobe is obviously no longer interested to keep the plugins compatible to other software, a newly created open plugin architecture architecture would be the only hope to remedy this situation. Unlikely to happen, perhaps?

[Gerhard Huber]

First of all, there are no PS-Only plugins beside the plugins from A*.
Since the third party manufactorer of plugins have to use the API, A* has to document it. To avoid other applications of getting plugins to run, A* made the API so complex, that no program is able to build all the functions that are available.
This way, you have to know, that if a plugin doesn't work on many other hosts, it's a problem of the plugin!
The plugin designer could avoid using such functions and there plugin would work on every host!
But some of them are not interested in this. For example your mentioned plugin manufactorer even doesn't answer my questions about his plugin.

Gerhard

[Koyaanis]

Thanks for the answer and explanation. It makes my frustration with PS-only plugins easier to tolerate. I don't like keeping PS installed on my system, but for those rare few plugins that require it, I'm forced to use it at times. Unfortunately.

Too bad that those plugin authors fail to realize how much of the world is not dependent on using PS, they are missing a huge part of the $ market. I have even written to some of them in the past letting them know this. Like you experienced, they fail to answer or just don't care. Very strange. Their loss.