How to Install a DDS Plugin for Photoshop CS 6

Tutorials
1 min read

This simple guide will run you through the necessary steps of installing a .dds plugin for Photoshop CS 6.

What is DDS ?

The DirectDraw Surface container file format (uses the filename extension DDS), is a Microsoft formatfor storing data compressed with the proprietary S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) algorithm, which can be decompressed in hardware by GPUs.

Source: wikipedia.com

By default, Photoshop CS 6 is unable to read a .dds file. We need to grab the NVIDIA Texture Tools from here. These set of tools contain the NVIDIA Normal Map filter, the NVIDIA DDS plug-in, Mipster (A mip-map generation script) and the Cube Map Shuffler.

The NVIDIA Texture Tools for Adobe Photoshop are compatible with Adobe Photoshop 5.0, 5.1, 6.0, 7.0, CS, CS2, CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS6.

Hitting the download button will take you to the download page. In my case, I’ll choose Windows [64-bit]. Launch the .exe file you just downloaded. It’ll ask you to register the product by Name and Organization. I choose something random here as all my work is done for personal use.

It should find your installation directory automatically. In my case, it is D:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Photoshop CS6 (64 Bit) and click [Next]

To verify that everything was installed correctly, navigate to Program FilesAdobeAdobe Photoshop CS6 (64 Bit)Plug-insFile Formats and you should see your new .DDS plugin installed.