What to do if Photoshop doesn't open or work in OS X Mavericks.

Apple’s new Mac operating system OS X 10.9 Mavericks installs like a dream and looks pretty much like Mountain Lion or Lion. It even opens up old files left open when you started the OS X update process. It’s smooth and efficient, but…

When you try to open Adobe Creative Suite 5 programs after installing OS X Mavericks you hit a problem – they won’t launch.

Click the icons in your Dock and nothing. Not even a little bounce.

In an official statement Adobe has said that: “Adobe and Apple have worked closely together to test Adobe Creative Cloud applications and Adobe Creative Suite 6 applications for reliability, performance and user experience when installed on Intel-based systems running Mac OS X Mavericks. (v10.9).

“All Adobe CC and CS6 products are compatible, but a few products require updates to the latest builds to work properly. Adobe Photoshop CS5, CS4 and CS3 were also tested with Mac OS X Mavericks and there are currently no major issues known.”

Well, that’s not what a lot of Mavericks early adopters have found.

Here’s how to get Adobe CS5 Photoshop and InDesign to open in OS X Mavericks.

What you need to do is update the CS5 runtime java.

Luckily this is quite simple.

Go to Apple’s Java for OS X 2013-005 page and download the latest version, which also “improves security, reliability, and compatibility by updating Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_65”.

Once the 77.7MB file has downloaded just install the update and your Adobe programs will start working again.

Mavericks and Adobe Photoshop work together as if nothing had happened.