Until now, there has only been only 1 version of Photoshop. With the launch of CS3, there are now two - a Photoshop Standard and a Photoshop Extended version. Photoshop Standard has a new interface and some great features such as Camera 4.0, Smart Filters, and the Black and White Commond to go with it. Photoshop CS3 Extended has added support for 3d, video, support for certain medical files, and a great set of analysis and measurement tools for the mathematical guys. When I found out that Photoshop CS3 was going to support 3d and video, I was blown away. It’s a totally different ballgame when Photoshop isn’t just for photos anymore! The first thing I had to play around with was the 3d support:

This is a lion that I modeled in 3d Studio Max. To actually get the model into Photoshop, I exported my model from 3d Studio Max as a 3DS file. You can also import your model into Photoshop with the following 3d formats: .obj, .dae, .kmz, and .u3d files.

Once I’m back in Photoshop, I’ll want to navigate to my 3DS file and open it. Photoshop will ask me what I want my image size to be and I’ll leave it as is.



If I wanted to open the 3d file into a composition that already exist, I would select Layer>3d layers>New layer from 3d file.

PIC(Layer>3d layers>New layer from 3d file.

And wala, my 3d model is inside of Photoshop. 3d objects are similar to vector based graphics. They can be scaled up and down without loss in quality. The materials, however, are not. This is important because if your model is covered in materials and you’re scaling it all around, then it will not look good. The materials are still raster images so be sure to keep that in mind. My lion is gray because I did not put any skin on him before I exported my model, if I had, then it would be here as well.

Almost all 3d editing is done in Photoshop with the Object Tool. To access the tool, just double-click the 3d layer thumbnail in the layers Palette.



Upon double-clicking the thumbnail, the Options bar changes to display all the tools that are available for editing. A simple, but important thing to grasp at this point in time is that when you use this tool Photoshop expects you to make some kind of change. You will already be inside one of Photoshop’s Transform modes, and, similar to when using the Free Transform function or creating text, you will have to “accept” those changes before moving on.



If I go to File>Open, everything is grayed out at this point in time, because I have not accepted anything yet. 



An easy way to accept the changes is to click the green checkmark on the right end of the Options bar(or Enter on numeric keypad.) You can also hit the cancel button to cancel any changes that you’ve made (or Escape key.)

About the Options bar:

The first button is the Edit 3d Object Tool. The second button is for editing a 3d Camera.

The third button has a little home symbol on it, because this returns your object to it’s initial position just in case something goes terribly wrong.

The fourth button allows you to rotate our 3d object. I can twirl my lion around and look at the bottom of his paws or behind his head if I want to – all from right here within Photoshop!

The fifth button allows is the roll tool. This tool allows you to tilt your object along the z axis (the axis pointing directly at you.)

The 6th button is the drag tool. This tool allows you to move the object around.

The 7th tool is known as the slide tool. With this tool, if I click and drag from left to right, my lion moves accordingly. By click and dragging up and down, my lion zooms in and out. By holding down the Ctrl/Option key while dragging up and down, my lion also moves up and down. So with this tool, you can actually do the most movement if you know that shortcut.

To the right of the slide tool is the scale 3d object tool. This tool allows you to actually scale the object instead of just moving it closer or father away.



There is also a dropdown arrow to the right of the tool that opens the object position dialogue box. The box will allow you to manually tell Photoshop exactly where we want our object. You can also adjust the Orientation and Scale attributes as well. Be sure to keep in mind when adjusting Orientaion, that in the world of animation, this essentially means where that particular object exist in 3d space. Orientation is a static property whereas rotation is intended to be dynamic. Orientation is a type of rotation, but t hey are totally different.



After moving them around a little bit, you can really see how this will save so much time when compositing 3d into 2d. If I had rendered it out with a material applied to it, it would really blend it nicely. The concept here is to show you how to save time. Before, we would have to rerender if something didn't match up, but now you can just move it around in Photoshop itself!