Category Archives: Photoshop

Adobe Error 150:30 (and how to fix it) a.k.a. I Hate Adobe – Reason 34

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NOTE Check out the bottom of this post for some updates to possible solutions, including how to fix this problem under OS X 10.7 Lion

I fired up Photoshop today and was greeted by this message:

Same thing when I started Flash. Awesome… Keep in mind my Mac has been on for days and hasn’t had any other problems. I really hadn’t done anything strange to break something. And I’m sure I’d used an Adobe product yesterday.

Rebooting, of course, didn’t fix anything.

Looking for help on Adobe’s forum didn’t help.

But Google did.

I found a page that basically explained how to hack around Adobe’s activation. I didn’t need to go that far, since I actually have a legal license. But part of the “how to steal CS4″ post did help. All I had to do was get Adobe’s Licensing Repair tool here.

I ran that and it worked immediately. No reboot needed. I’m thinking I got lucky.

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I just noticed that this process dumped a folder named “AdobeLicensingFilesBackup” into my Home folder. So, be aware of that.

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UPDATE: Saturday, August 1, 2009

I see that this simply isn’t working for some people, but it looks like it still works for others. I don’t have an explanation for this. All I know is that it worked for me so I thought I’d share it with the world.

I know that a fair number of people are landing on this page every day and would love to hear from those who it does work for, so I know that this tip is still useful.

UPDATE: Monday, August 31, 2009 – Try deleting the FLEXnet Publisher folder

One of the replies below, from Simon, pointed out that you might need to delete the following folder for things to work again:

/Library/Preferences/FLEXnet Publisher

That’s worked for a few people out there, so give it a shot before you throw in the towel.

UPDATE: Wednesday, September 9, 2009

From Rob B. in the comments below:

The Flexnet Publisher folder must be deleted. Not JUST the flexnet folder inside. ALONG WITH THIS the Adobe PCD.cache file must be deleted also. It is located in library/application support/adobe/adobe PCD/ cache/ cache.db

UPDATE: Monday, May 16, 2011 – Works with CS5 and CS5.5, too

Based on some comments below, this fix works for CS5 and the newly released CS5.5 as well.

UPDATE: Friday, October 7, 2011 – The Lion Fix

In the comments, codeman38 was the first to explain how to run the License Recovery app under Lion:

  1. Mount the .dmg for the license recovery app.
  2. Open Terminal.

  3. Run the following two commands:

    cd /Volumes/LicenseRecovery\ 11.6.1/LicenseRecovery/
sudo python LicenseRecover.py

I Can’t See The Crop Tool!

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I ran into this issue a while ago and wanted to post the fix. On my white MacBook, I was having the hardest time in the world seeing the outline of the Photoshop CS4 crop tool. It made it a huuuge pain in the butt to make precise, to-the-pixel, crops. I thought it was just the screen, since it isn’t the great screen in the world, even for a laptop. But I quickly realized it really wasn’t the screen. Take a look at what my crop tool was looking like on my MacBook:

Crop Light

Compare that very subtle outline to the nice contrasty outline of the crop tool on my iMac (notice how the outline is white when it’s over a dark area and black when it’s over a light area):

Crop Dark

Nice… now that’s a tool that I can work with!

Sure, I could turn on the “shielding” option of the crop tool so I could better see what it’s cropping. But that doesn’t solve the problem because when you drag the crop tool handles, the outline doesn’t update in real time. So, getting that to-the-pixel crop is still hard.

Well, the problem is with the GPU acceleration in Photoshop CS4. I had to turn it off.

Menu

Gpu

Uncheck that check box!!

I’m guessing that the GPU on my MacBook (the Intel GMA X3100 chip) isn’t really supported by CS4, even though it lets you select it. At any rate, if you disable OpenGL Drawing, the crop tool reverts back to the “marching ants” outline that we’ve known for years. Problem solved.