Photoshop CS3 Extended Review (3D Compositing)

I bet you know now the system requirements you need. Now lets focus on the application itself. Since this is a review of Photoshop CS3, I will naturally describe how Photoshop works - its new features (lets focus on 3D compositing first). Initially, I want to say that I feel Adobe has taken a tremendous jump ahead in the development of Photoshop CS3.

The UI of Photoshop CS3 is similar to Illustrator CS3, InDesign CS3, as well as Flash CS3 (those 3 applications that was mentioned were other application products of Adobe). I use two monitors, and I was able to bring any palette I wanted onto the second monitor which is where I like to open them. As can be seen from the image below, palettes can now be docked for easy accessibility. They can be expanded or contracted to show just the icon of the palette or the name as well. The palettes can be grouped together or docked singly. Below there are three groups of three palettes. However, I could have had those palettes arranged in any grouping.

In order to describe the new features of Photoshop CS3, I decided to use the help Photoshop splash screen and its list of new features. One of the first new features is Zoomify. It creates an image that allows the user to zoom into it and see details that otherwise would be missed.

The tools for working with 3D models open up a whole new avenue for Photoshop. You can now open 3D models in Photoshop CS3 Extended. The textures of these can be modified and, then, applied to the model. Models can, also, be placed in 2D scenes. Models can be rotated, have lights applied to them, as well as styles.

When working with models, I found that some models worked better than others and, in general, that 3DS models worked better than the OBJ (OBJ is a simple data-format that represents 3D geometry alone) ones that I downloaded from the web. The one I used in the bug picture is an e frontier model from their special download collection of “Poser 3D Content for Use with Adobe Photoshop CS3″. You will notice that I changed the textures from the original. To save the textures to the model, you go into Layer>3d layers>replace textures. You can also paint on the textures as well as just adjust the colors. My original OBJ scarab now has new textures. However, I could have just changed the textures in the 2D image and not modified the original at all.

Referring again to OBJs, I can say that some OBJs acted peculiarly. Some came in sideways, which could be corrected, and some were hard to manipulate. However, I believe that this had more to do with the object than Photoshop because there did not seem to be any correlation between polygon count, file size, or textures.