hello i'm robin whalley welcome to lenscraft today i want to explain how you can add photoshop
plugins to affinity photo this is much easier than you might think and you probably won't need
to reinstall plugins to do this the tricky part is knowing where the plugins are installed on
your computer because there are a few possible locations i'll explain where to look on both
the pc and the mac later in this video if you read the affinity photo help documentation it says that
photoshop compatible 64-bit plugins can be used in affinity whilst this is true not every photoshop
plug-in will work this means some of the plugins will fail while some may exhibit odd behavior
we'll look at a few examples later in this video despite there being some problems though it's
still worth checking all your plugins by running them in affinity if we look in affinity photo
under the filters menu you can see the plugins submenu this is where any installed plugins appear
but because the photoshop plugins are installed to my photoshop folder on my computer affinity won't
detect them there we can see what's happening if we open the affinity photo preferences if
you're using a mac like i am you'll find the preferences under the affinity photo menu on
a windows pc they're in the edit menu this opens the preferences dialog where you can select the
photoshop plugins option there are several parts to this dialog that you need to be aware of and
the mac version is slightly different in layout because there's an additional step you need to do
top left is a button to open the default plugin location for affinity photo when i
click this affinity opens a finder window which is the mac equivalent of windows file explorer
this is where to install your plugins if you want affinity to automatically recognize them
currently i don't have any plugins in this folder which is why there aren't any in my plugins menu
when affinity detects plugins they're listed in this table if like me your plugins are installed
to photoshop you probably don't want to reinstall them again to add them to affinity the solution is
to let affinity know where your photoshop plugins are installed using this add button be sure that
you're using the top section to do this and not the lower add button if you're using a windows pc
the layout looks slightly different and you only have the single add button when i click the app
button i can select the folder where the photoshop plugins are installed now before you use this it's
important to understand where your plugins are installed because it's easy to get into a mess
even if you have a windows pc don't skip ahead because you'll miss some important points
the photoshop plugin files you need are held in an adobe folder called plugins and the location
depends on a few things including your version of photoshop in older versions of photoshop you'll
find the plugins folder in the applications area when i look in my macs application folder
i can see four adobe photoshop folders i currently have photoshop 2020 and 2021 installed on this
mac but i still have folders from 2018 and 2019. that's because photoshop leaves behind
third-party assets including plugins when it's uninstalled if we look in the 2018 folder we see
a plugins folder and in there are all the plugin files i had installed to that version of photoshop
now if we look at the plugins folder of 2019 version we don't see the same plugins that's
because adobe changed the structure of where things are stored when they release photoshop 2019
this means you could have your plugins spread across different locations depending on when
they were installed you might also find you have different versions of the same plugin installed
in different locations if we look at the 2018 plugin folder we can see the google version of the
nik collection there but in fact i have the latest version of the nik collection from dxo which
is installed elsewhere what this means is that you need to find the correct version of each plugin
so that you can add the location to affinity if your version of photoshop is 2018 or older
the plugins are probably in your application files but there's something else i want to show you if
we look in my photoshop application folders we see the silverfast 9 import plugin this is the
latest version of the silverfast scanning plugin which was released only a few weeks ago when i
installed silverfast to my computer it installed the plugin to every photoshop plugin folder this
means you may still need to check these folders even if you have a recent version of photoshop
now let's look at the other plugin location on the mac which adobe started to use from photoshop 2019
you'll find this in the library folder where you'll see a folder called application support
in there you'll find an adobe folder and in that you'll see lots of folders for saved assets
including plugins if we look in the plugins folder you'll see a cc folder which is where we find
all the plugin files but notice the silver fast plugin i mentioned earlier isn't installed here if
i want access to that plugin from affinity i need to add the other plugin folder the other point i
want to highlight is that we see my current dxo version of the nik collection installed here
this means that if i add this plugin folder and my plugin folder from photoshop 2018
i can end up with two versions of the plugin which could get very confusing
that's why it's important to do this initial check to find where all your plugins are i'm now going
to add the cc folder from the library section we can see this added to the plugins search folder
affinity will then search this folder as well as its default folder to find any installed plugins
i'll also add the application plugin folder where we saw the silverfast plugin installed
i can now close the plugins preference dialog and i'm prompted to restart affinity if i don't
restart affinity i won't see the photoshop plugins once affinity photo restarts all
the photoshop plugins are listed at this point i want to share the location of the
plugin folder on the windows pc in the windows file explorer find the program files directory
this is the disk where you have the windows operating system installed and it's usually the c
drive in there you'll find an adobe folder which has the photoshop application folder
where you'll find the older plugins folder this is just like the application folder we looked at
on the mac the new plugin folder though is found in the program folder still but in a
folder called common files here you'll find an adobe folder and in that is the plugin folder
if you check that folder you'll find the cc folder with all the plugins now don't worry about writing
all this down i'll include these paths in the youtube video information the other difference i
want to point out on a windows pc is for anyone using the older 32-bit version of photoshop
you'll find those files in the program files x86 folder where the folder structure is very
similar to what we've just discussed the problem you may face though is that these are the older
32-bit plugins and probably aren't compatible with affinity photo now let's get back to the plugin
preferences on my mac because mac owners still have an additional step when i scroll down the
list of plugins i can see that some have requires global support next to them in red what these
plugins need is the ability to access resources in other locations on my computer before they'll work
the way i can do this is using the authorized global button i can now select the root location
of my max hard drive once i've authorized this you can see that the problem plugins no show has been
working i then need to restart affinity photo as i did before having restarted affinity photo i can
close the preferences dialog and we can try some of the plugins i'll start by opening an image and
then duplicating the background to a new layer in order to test the plugins when i look in the
plugins menu i can see all the detected photoshop plugins i'll start by selecting nick vivasa from
the nik collection as this should be a compatible plugin for affinity photo everything looks fine
with this so let's now look at a few other options because not every plugin will work with affinity
if we look at the list of the plugins first notice that the silverfast plugin is missing
in photoshop the silverfast plugin is accessed from the file import menu and is used to capture
an image from a scanner i don't believe there's an equivalent feature to this in affinity so the
plugin is missing let's now test the exposure x6 plugin when i try to launch this nothing happens
this may be the same for other plugins as well some of them may not launch some of them may be
greyed out and some might even cause affinity to crash if that happens don't worry just restart
affinity and try the next plugin now one plugin that behaves rather unusually is on one the plugin
launches but the first time you try it you just see a browser window filled with thumbnails you
don't see the image you're wanting to edit then if you close this and try it a second time it works
and we can edit the image you can then continue to launch the on one plugin with other images and it
seems to work the false start only seems to happen the first time you launch on one after restarting
your computer now this may not be the same on your computer but i wanted to mention this because it
can trick you into thinking that you can't use on1 with affinity photo when in fact you can
we've covered a lot of ground in today's video and some of this has been quite technical as i
mentioned earlier i'll include the paths to the plugin folders in the youtube video description
i'll also be publishing a written tutorial on my lenscraft website with this information once
it's ready i'll also include a link to that tutorial in this youtube video information
i hope you found this video helpful if you have please share it with other affinity photo users
i'm robin whalley you've been watching lenscraft i'll see you soon for another video