Lion is 10.7. CS5 should be okay but I make no promises as for CS3.

I won’t even guess about 10.8.

Bob

The only way to know would be to try. The further the distance between when the software was released and when the operating system software was released, the greater the chance of problems.

Time to think about upgrading your software.

Bob writes:

I would also say that it would be best to do a clean install of Mountain Lion if you’re not buying a new machine with it preinstalled. O/S upgrades are a crapshoot and if you’ve already done one or two upgrade installs you have a lot of left over crap on that drive.

It's worth a reminder that reasonable people disagree on this point.

In my considered opinion, the immense hassle of attempting to preserve all your customizations and to reinstall all of your 3rd party software is huge, and and generally that administrative pain (and risk) is not offset by the potential elimination of potentially unknown and poorly-understood problems.

Further, unlike in the Windows world, the general expectation in the Mac community (that is, among users, among developers, and from the Vendor--Apple) is that you will do the migration. This means the migration is that path that is tested and it tends to work pretty well. This is not to say that migrating is expected to be more reliable than a clean installation (though when we start to talk about the reliability of "getting work done," which involves the reliability of applications and availability of your data, that is very different question than the reliability of the base operting system, with no additional software).

So choose carefully, and whatever you do, keep a backup.

I tend to agree with John on this one. I've also read widely among the technical gurus of the Mac (like the folks at TidBITS) and they tend to agree.

If you choose to do the in place upgrade in recent reversions of the Mac, everyone agrees that it's essential to do a complete backup. It's very easy to do this with great products like Carbon Copy Cloner and an external drive.

The in place upgrade (which I've done the past three or four times) works well for 98% of people. For the cases where it does not work well, you can use your backup to "roll back" and then you can do a clean install.

I think Apple has greatly improved the process in recent years so for most people it's trustworthy. But MAKE A BACKUP first.

AdobeAGM in Apple's CFURLCreateStringWithFileSystemPath(). This sounds a lot like the problem people reported with CS3 under 10.7, though I don't have them in front of me. (There was some rather strange solution involving deleting some printing-related settings files, I think?). "Huh." Thanks, Rob.

Was that the one where users had to delete the Acrobat PPD or some such?

Yes, that was it. And several instances from several language/locale-specific folders.

We'll agree to disagree on that. O/S upgrades are nothing but a crapshoot.

In the mean time to answer the final question. Right click on a file that opens in preview (jpg perhaps) and choose get info. Change the file associate there to open it in Photoshop.

Bob