The upcoming CS3 version of Adobe Photoshop will not include 64-bit version of this popular image-editing software. According to Photoshop co-architect Scott Byer, “at some point it will make sense to do a 64-bit version”.
“It’s definitely a ‘when’ question, not an ‘if’, and there are a lot of factors involved,” Byer said in his blog.
But, he reminded that a 64-bit version of Photoshop would have to be a completely separate binary from the 32-bit version, causing an extra cost.
“A separate binary has a huge cost associated with it (in terms of features we can’t do because we have to spend resources elsewhere). Quality assurance is a big part of that - you essentially have to dive in and test every corner of the app for each binary, across the matrix of supported operating systems - but there are also many ancillary pieces that add to that cost as well. And given that a Universal Binary application really is two separate binaries smashed together (and accounting for the kinds of issues that an application can have going from big endian (PPC) to little endian) we already had a lot of extra cost going through this cycle. Adding the cost of adding a 64-bit version to the mix of things that were already on the have-to-do list - especially in light of the very limited benefits - and doing a 64-bit version this cycle really became an unreasonable thing to think about it,” Byer explained.
He assumes that number of Photoshop customers running the 64-bit Windows Vista will be very small over the next couple of years. Also, since Macintosh OS X 10.4 isn’t fully 64-bit - many of the libraries an application would need to be fully 64-bit aren’t available, so Mac users currently could not run a 64-bit version of Photoshop, even if it is available.
