If Dirty Pictures is causing you problems by crashing Photoshop CS5, stopping in the middle of operations, freezing, or any other such shenannigans, the solution seems to be to re-install Photoshop CS5. While we don’t have any official confirmation of exactly what’s happening, my gut is that there’s something goofy with CS5′s Javascript implementation, which is what Dirty Pictures runs on. Several users have reported instability and errors with Dirty Pictures and CS5, and in most cases, re-installing Photoshop CS5 seems to magically fix it. Seems like voodoo to me, but it also seems to work.
The bottom line is that, in computer-geek terms, Dirty Pictures is interpreted, rather than compiled code. It’s technically a Photoshop script, not a plugin, even though it appears in the Filter menu along with other plugins. It doesn’t actually have any direct access to the machine’s hardware, and so it really should be theoretically possible to crash Photoshop from Dirty Pictures. If crashes are happening, it must BY DEFINITION be due to some bug in Adobe’s Javascript interpreter. Since CS5 was a major re-write (at least for the Mac, moving from Carbon to Cocoa and 32-bit to 64-bit), this isn’t completely surprising, and we’ll cut them some slack, since it seems to be pretty intermittent :)
Long story short, though – re-install CS5 if you’re having issues. And please let us know if you’re having problems, and if re-installation fixes the issue. Thanks!
PS – this seems to only be a CS5 issue. CS3 and CS4 should be pretty rock solid with Dirty Pictures at this point, and if you’re having issues with either of those, then we want to know so we can fix it!