Thanks for the quick and detailed feedback on whether to drop support for PICT files in Photoshop. Going forward our plan (at least for the foreseeable future) is to keep reading these files, but not to keep writing them.
For the sake of completeness, I’ll mention that I don’t think Photoshop will continue to read QuickDraw-based PICT files (as QuickDraw is unsupported in Cocoa/64-bit). I don’t expect that to matter, thought: Photoshop CS4 dropped QuickDraw PICT support on Windows & no one has mentioned it. Additionally, no one who commented in response to my query talked about using this flavor of PICT; rather, people talked about using raster PICTs, and Photoshop will still support opening those.
Okay, that last comment was ridiculous. It is sort of like saying Jaguar stopped making cars with left-side steering wheels and nobody in England complained.
[Well, the lack of complaint suggests these files aren’t widely used, which we already knew. In any case, I updated the post to be clearer. –J.]
Hi John
What about the Softimage.pic file format?
After Effects can read it (I believe since CS2 or earlier) but not Photoshop.
PICT isn’t widely used on Windows, at least. Don’t judge the overall usage of any type of PICT by Windows usage only.
[Right; as noted, I don’t. –J.]
Sounds like a good way to ease PICT into retirement.
Photoshop has had SoftImage .pic support as an optional plugin for many years.