Noiseware Plugin Not Working (M1, Big Sur, 1.8.6)

[Wawsax]

I can't get the Imagenomic Noiseware plugin to work using AP 1.8.6 or the latest beta, on my new M1 Mac mini running Big Sur. It gets recognised, but nothing happens when I select the filter. On the first attempt AP beach-ball locked up. Haven't gotten it to do that again though, it just does nothing. I have a license, but haven't been able to get the plugin to load in order to activate it. No longer have an Adobe subscription to test with Photoshop. I'm using the trial version provided for download on the Imagenomic website.

The plugin did work just fine using a previous version of AP on an Intel Mac running Catalina. Any ideas? Has anyone got Noiseware working on Big Sur? Could it be a Rosetta/ARM problem?

[Chris B]

Hey AlekT,

Remember that PS isn't available on ARM yet so this would be down to the Photoshop plugin developer to optimise eventually.

You can try forcing Rosetta via Get Info in Finder to run the app that doesn't yet support the ARM64 architecture.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/about_the_rosetta_translation_environment

[Wawsax]

Thanks Chris, wasn't aware you could force Rosetta in Get Info. This does solve the problem, and Noiseware works with AP running under Rosetta, but I was hoping that AP could run natively in ARM and just use Rosetta to run x86 plugins. Is this not possible? Rosetta is not able to be called/used in this way?

There is a beta of Photoshop for ARM, so hopefully the plugin will get updated before too long. In the meantime and for older plugins, it would be good to know if there is a better solution than just running everything through Rosetta.

[MEB]

Hi AlekT,
The Noiseware plugin is provided as a .plugin file on macOS - it's not "seen" as an app by the OS. I believe it's not possible to run the plugin under Rosetta alone.

[Wawsax]

If Rosetta can only be run on .app 'files' then that is really a shame, because at first glance there doesn't seem to be that much difference between plugin and app formats. They're both just folders containing executables. To the point where I'd wonder if you couldn't 'trick' Rosetta into running plugins as apps, but perhaps that breaches some Apple licensing agreement or something.

Anyway, in case anyone is interested, I contacted Imagenomic and asked if they had any plans to support ARM. They said:

Quote

We will more than likely bring all of our software into the apple ARM system but have no hurry or timeframe on it. The system is too new to devote resources to as apple's track record of hardware and software is less than stellar in the business world.

 

[MEB]

Hi AlekT,
Yes, the plugin and standalone versions are most likely basically the same. It's possible there may be some obscure way to force this, but i have no idea how to do it. The OS urself doesn't seem to provide interface/option to do it.