This is, well, really, really nice. I just got to play around with an actually legitimate copy of CS3 (it’s owner would rather not disclose it’s information) and it’s got anything we could need in the future to keep this program in power. Although I adore Open-Source… Guys, time to eat your heart out. I present you: 3d.
So, this could be anything, right? This could be a render I just opened in any beta of Photoshop. Let’s see about that. While I am at it, a little tutorial to retexture anything in Photoshop Extended.
So, this is a… (yes!) 3d layer. As you can see, it has a property: it’s texture. You can double click it, which results in this.
A beautiful texture. OK, not quite. Let’s invert.
OK, inverted the texture and saved. But hey, let’s push that a bit; let’s go swing the bottle around. Easy. As you can see in the screenshot below, it has video editing facilities for editing over several frames (including appropriate exporting) and it can even do some highly anticipated saving to .obj files and adding textures in a ‘clean’, Alias | Wavefront approved manner. Adobe almost makes it look like the feats have been there all along, making you feel right at home.
Swing swing. Oh, man, I am enjoying myself. I was lyrical when I first did this – I mean, look at this! This is Photoshop! It’s blazing fast.
Okay, there are some disappointing things. I, for one, like the new icons. But the new Help Viewer icon is abominable.
Like that’s not bad enough, this specific application pointed me to the most huge disappointment I have seen in Photoshop to date. WYSIWYG HTML editing is now just declared dead by Adobe, as the ‘seamless integration’ of Photoshop and Dreamweaver consists of, brace yourself, copy and paste. Wow, I mean, it’s not like iWeb does the same thing. Or hell, any app I would just throw together in Cocoa with a Webview. Don’t believe me? Check this (15 minutes of copy-and-paste how-to alert).
So, what are my impressions of PS CS3 Extended? It’s great. The new features act like they have been there all along, although the lack of any new ‘Imageready’ PSD-file-to-website workflow is very, very disappointing. I hope we will see something that will fill the void.