Easily migrate your Actions, Tool Presets and Workspaces to CS5

I have a highly customized Photoshop configuration, including a lot of custom actions, tool presets and workspaces to streamline getting my work done, not to mention a special workspace that facilitates programming and debugging. And so the thought of migrating all that to CS5 was not a pleasant one.

Happily, it’s pretty easy The key is that all the custom settings for Photoshop are stored in individual files, in a special folder. The trick is to copy these special files from the CS4 folder to the CS5 folder. The exact steps are as follows:

1. Shut down Photoshop
2. Locate the CS4 preferences folder. In OS X, this folder is <your home folder>/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CS4 Settings. On a PC, I can’t keep track since it seems to vary with what version of Windows you are running. So search for “Actions Palette.psp” and you’ll find it.
3. Select the files you want to copy:
   • to migrate actions, copy “Actions Palette.psp”
   • to migrate tool presets, copy “ToolPresets.psp”
   • to migrate your workspaces, copy the contents of “Workspaces”
   • to migrate your keyboard shortcuts, copy “Keyboard Shortcuts.psp”
   • etc. the files are named in a straightforward way
4. The target is the CS5 configuration folder. The CS5 folder is next to the CS4 folder, so there should be no problem finding it if you found the CS4 folder. Simply copy the settings files from the CS4 folder to the CS5 folder, and you’re all done. Note: I always rename the file that is already there by adding “stock” to the end, so make sure I can go back to the original version if I need to.

Start up Photoshop CS5, and behold: your actions, presets and workspaces are ready and waiting.

…Mike

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 and is filed under General Tip, How-To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.