Photoshop CS4 Extended

By Colin Smith

Video

When you choose Enable Timeline Shortcut Keys, from the Timelines fly-out menu, the left and right arrow keys will advance the video forward/back by a single frame. Holding shift makes it move by 1 second at a time. If there are no animations in the document, the arrows revert to their nudging behavior.

Photoshop now moves on from silent films and supports sound with videos. You can preview and export sound with your videos.

3D

All I can say is 3D is huge in Photoshop CS4. Adobe added 3D layer abilities in CS3 but these were nothing compared to what’s possible now.

Photoshop is not trying to replace your current 3D application. The people at Adobe have recognized the workflow of 3D artists and have made the updates in Photoshop to help them. Most people create their models in high-end programs. They use Photoshop for things like creating textures, environment map and for compositing into mattes etc. Although the features are created to help Professionals, there is also enough to keep a novice happy for hours. If you have GPU support. you'll see the interactive Widget that allows you to rotate, scale and position object s in 3D space.

Model

You can now create some basic shapes in Photoshop. It has the ability to create primitives such as cubes, spheres, pyramids, taurus (donuts), cones and other basic meshes such as hats, rings, bottles and soda cans. These can have textures applied to them.

You can also import 3D models from most 3D apps, or find them free online at places like Google 3D warehouse etc.

Photoshop allows you to position, scale and rotate 3D objects, but does not have any features to allow you to directly manipulate the shapes. If you want to do this, check out the Plugin-ins from Strata,( http://store.strata.com/?Click=4867) that allow that kind of extended functionality.

Texture

Photoshop CS4 has really stepped up to the plate with the texturing features.

3d object painting

You can paint directly onto your 3D surfaces and they will actually be applied to the models. There are different ways of painting. You can do a basic diffuse which is just like painting onto a 3D object. You can use bump, which will actually etch into the surface for a 3D looking texture. There are other things like glossiness, self illumination, reflectivity and shininess which all effect the lighting and the way the shape responds to it. You can also paint on opacity, which allows you to paint on portions of transparency or semi-transparency to your objects. These features are deceivingly powerful. You can still unwrap the textures and apply photos, or your own designs as textures and enviroments.

Lighting

There is a new 3D scene panel that controls features like meshes (shapes), lights and materials (textures) and even environments (used for reflections). There is a lighting widget where you can choose between 3 different types of lights and change properties such as fall-off and shadow.

Render

Photoshop CS4 Extended comes with new render settings including ray tracing for better quality renders.

Animation

We now have the ability to animate the shapes and cameras. This is a huge addition to Photoshop extended. Not only can you animate the shapes themselves, you can animate the textures and even apply video to them. If you want to do 3D animation sin After Effects or Flash, you can create them in Photoshop, import them to After Effects and then output them to Flash. All the render and animation properties are controlled from Photoshop and then updated in After Effects as a Photoshop 3D layer. This makes for some very eye-popping possibilities!

Colin Smith is a best selling author, digital artist, speaker and creates popular training videos. He is founder of PhotoshopCAFE.com.