I’m often asked what features of the CS3 release are unique to Photoshop Extended. This edition starts with all the capabilities of Photoshop CS3* and extends them (hence the name) with the following:

1. Opening/placing 3D files (specifically .3DS (Max), .OBJ (Maya), .U3D (Acrobat 3D), Collada, and KMZ (Google Earth), then adjusting their view options (rotation, camera parameters, render mode, cross section, etc.).  Animation data in these files is preserved.  Photoshop does not include 3D modeling tools, but it is possible to turn planar geometry from Vanishing Point into a simple 3D model or 3D layer.
2. Painting directly on the textures of 3D files & updating the models.  (I’ll try to post or at least link to a demo of this working as it makes things clearer.)
3. Opening/placing video files (essentially anything that QuickTime supports) and image sequences, treating these as video layers that you can scrub back and forth and on which you can paint, erase, run filters, etc. Some details:
   • PS Extended includes a revised Animation palette, more consistent with what you find in After Effects.
   • Basic GIF-style frame animation is in both Photoshop and Photoshop Extended, as it was in CS2. In Extended you can toggle the mode of the Animation palette between frame mode & timeline mode.
   • PS Extended features new a Render Video dialog that lets you render files in whatever formats QuickTime supports, or as image sequences.  If you have Flash 8 Professional or Flash CS3 Professional, the video export list includes FLV.
   • The “frame offset” option in the new Clone Source palette makes it possible to clone/heal from one point in time to another and is unique to Extended, whereas the rest of the palette is the same in both editions.
   • The ability to import video frames as layers is in both editions of Photoshop CS3, because it was previously in ImageReady.
4. Support for painting and layers in 32-bit/HDR files.  Merge to HDR is enhanced in both editions, as is basic HDR editing (e.g. using Levels).  The rationale for dividing the HDR enhancements is that the photography-centric parts appear in both editions, whereas the aspects geared towards film, 3D, and technical work are in Extended only.
5. MATLAB integration: It’s possible to access Photoshop CS3 Extended directly from the MATLAB
   command prompt in order to grab image data from Photoshop, use
   MATLAB to run different image processing routines, and then return the image data to
   Photoshop to view the results.
6. Measurement & counting tools: Photoshop Extended makes it possible to set a scale for the image (e.g. 512 pixels = 30cm), then take measurements of selections and rulers.
   • This includes tools inside Vanishing Point for taking measurements in perspective.
   • Measurement scale is specified via the Analysis menu, which is unique to Extended.
   • The Count Tool (nothing to do with this guy) is a simple but effective way to annotate an image (e.g. while counting blood cells)
7. DICOM format support, enabling the app to open files from medical imaging devices (CT scans, X-rays, etc.).
8. Image stack analytical filters, which make it possible to stack multiple images into a single Smart Object, then run a filter across the range of images.  For example, an astro photographer might take a range of high-ISO images, then run Mean or Median across the range.  (It also makes for a great “disappearing tourist” demo…)

There’s a great deal more about Photoshop Extended online, and as I say we’ll endeavor to provide some video demos ASAP as they’ll make a number of points clearer.  That said, I hope this list provides a useful summary.  For reference, none of these features were included in the Photoshop public beta.  [Update: I’ve revised the video section in hopes of being a bit clearer.]

* A note about naming: The products are, officially, “Photoshop CS3” and “Photoshop CS3 Extended.”  That is, there’s no “Photoshop Standard” per se.  That’s why you may see us refer to “the regular version,” “the standard version” or something similar, but not “Standard” with a capital S.

With strains of Schoolhouse Rock in my head, I’m delighted that the big day has arrived: Photoshop CS3 and the entire CS3 product line have been announced! 

13 full new applications… six new Suites… a fistful of new technologies (Device Central for mobile authoring, Acrobat Connect for conferencing, and more)… It’s all a bit overwhelming, I know.  There’s so much news coverage this morning that I don’t yet know where to point you.  So, a couple of suggestions:

• The live webcast this afternoon (starts at 3:30pm Eastern/12:30pm Pacific) will feature lots of news and demos.
• Here are PDFs of what’s new in each app, as well as a quick tour of Photoshop CS3.

I’ll of course be posting plenty more in the hours, days, and weeks ahead (when the actual job doesn’t intrude, you know ;-)).

Terry White, one of Adobe’s in-the-field application pros, reports that this week the video-enabled Creative Suite Podcast has reached its 2 millionth download, averaging 16,000 downloads per episode.  With more than 100 episodes now online, the podcast has become a great resource & was named a 2006 iTunes People’s Choice Award winner.  Keep up the great work, guys.

In other video/podcast news:

• A few weeks back I did a little video interview with the folks at 49Sparks, talking for 10 minutes or so about all things Photoshop.  "Why is he wearing a military flight suit?," some may ask. Well, why isn’t everyone?
• My fellow Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes recently spoke with the crew at PhotoWalkthrough.com about the CS3 beta, panorama creation, and more.
• Mike Wong from onOne notes that their set of free Lightroom processing presets are now accompanied by a 25-minute video (broken into chunks) from author Jack Davis.

If haste makes waste, the team motto at Silverbrook Research must be, "Let’s get wasted!!"  Offering "a price/performance ratio that is off the charts" according to Lyra Research, the new Memjet printing technology (video) is many times faster than anything else on the market (60 pages per minute of 1600-dpi, full-color printing).  Somewhere a forest groans; somewhere ink salesmen smile.

These Aussies have apparently been (quietly) going berserk filing patents over the last few years, as described in this profile of the company & founder Kia Silverbrook. The Memjet site has a bit more info on the technology. [Via Jim Pravetz]

//na// Friday logo nerdery for your delectation:

• Even if you don’t have tastes-great/less-filling debates about Paul Rand vs. Saul Bass (and God help you if you do), there’s plenty to enjoy in this Logo design history. Many of the logos are available for download in EPS format.  Too bad there’s nothing about the old Adobe logo–the one that looked like rolls of paper for a printing press. [Via]
• Cutting to the present, Graphic Design USA features a look at recent logo trends (and not just the bloopy "Web 2.0" schtick).
• Logotypes.ru is a carnival of copyright infringement, and I’ve loved it for years, downloading & spoofing many famous designs.  (The first rule of Logotypes is you do not tell your legal department about Logotypes.)
• Speaking of spoofs, Mike Judge’s future-satire Idiocracy features all kinds of logo & brand remixes. [Via]
• Logopond offers a plentiful feed of design inspiration.  Viva Napalm Riot & this little devil-mouse.
• Okay, it’s not logo-related per se, but check out the NYC Transit Authority style guide from 1970.  It’s amazing that if it weren’t for the date stamp on the gallery, it would be hard to know that this isn’t a current design document.  Is that a good thing (viva timeless Helvetica!) or a bad one (when in doubt, we punt and go with clean-n’-unobjectionable)? [Via]

//na// If those mammoth screens get to be too much, rest your scalded eyeballs with the help of some paper:

• Thomas Allen makes dioramas from the covers of old pulp novels. Seems like they’re popping up (er, sorry) everywhere, from the cover of James Ellroy novels to the pages of (I think) GQ. [Via] Turning old images into "2-and-a-half-D" creations reminds me of The Kid Stays in the Picture, a film that achieved a similar effect using old photos plus Photoshop and After Effects (popping characters off their backgrounds, panning across them to introduce a sense of depth).
• The folks at the ni9e blog have fun (and no doubt baffle stewardesses) making paper-based visualizations of SkyMall demographics.
• If you’ve got more time (and skills) than money, thank your waiter with some cash origami. [Via]
• Okay, it’s not cash, but check out this amazing folding chair (the name doesn’t do it justice).  Doesn’t it seem like the Apple campus should be full of these?  (Well, maybe if they were off-white.)
• [For more paper goodness, see previous.]

(Upon hearing this blog entry’s title, my wife remarked, "I know when to walk away…")

The folks organizing Adobe’s presence at Photoshop World (just two weeks away) would like to pass along the following heads-up:

Birds of a Feather Meeting – Medical & Scientific Research Professionals
April 4, 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Hosted by Adobe – Open to Conference Attendees and Medical Professionals and Research Professionals
Attend this session to see the newest features in Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended developed specifically for customers who use Photoshop for image analysis, visualization and communication. You’ll get to meet the team from Adobe that is charged with developing new features for the medical and research communities and hear from some leading customers in the field and how they use Photoshop in their work.

Attendees will be eligible to win Photoshop CS3 plus other great prizes.

Special Guests: Stephen R. Snow, DDS – with Snow Dental Care & Cosmetic Dentistry; Eric Wexler, MBA – Research Scientist with Bristol-Myers Squibb Medical Imaging; Joseph M. Bailey, MD – Montgomery Radiology Associates; and Robert Hurt – Visualization Scientist – Spitzer Science Center.  

Track: Special Event — Room: 207 in the Convention Center

A registration form, plus more info on these guests, is on the Photoshop World site.

//na// Having survived both the Ides & St. Pat’s with toga & liver intact, I feel like celebrating with some assorted design inspiration I’ve uncovered recently:

• Multi-touch might be passé before it even gets here; what we really need are giant, human-powered cursors. [Via]
• Similarly, why do digital photomosaics when there’s Rubik’s cube pixel art?  [Via]  And speaking of cubes, you can put your own photos onto them in Photoshop using the Panos Cube plug-in (10 bucks). [Via]
• In the late 90’s the flat, vectorish Flash aesthetic popped up everywhere (print, TV, etc.).  Now in a retro touch, here’s a Flash-style preloader watch. [Via]  See also the Russian-designed Sand-Time Watch.
• Speaking of preloaders, the one at Coca-Cola’s M5 site adds a fresh touch, running through the years from BC to AD (a small thing, sure, but hey, it’s a preloader).
• Flickr is hosting an excellent collection of laser-cut skateboard decks.  This one in particular grabs me. [Via]  (See also previous: more on laser etching + skating skulls).
• Amka will put your art on a skate deck using vinyl, and they offer large-scale vinyl printing as well. [Via]
• "Octopus" is… well, it’s one thing to do with your flatbed scanner.  On a rather sweeter (and beautifully illustrated) note, see Octonauts [Via] In the real world, scientists have photographed a giant glowing squid — not to mention a six-fingered guy named "El Pulpo."

…but in a good way. John Dowdell discovered that the swoopy, groovy packaging art for Adobe Acrobat 8 was created by tossing cameras into the air, using a long exposure to capture motion.  Check out the story on the Camera Toss blog.  More camera-tossing action is all over Flickr: here’s a slideshow, and images from Jens Ludwig (whose shots are among those to grace Acrobat) are here.

//na//  I’m often inspired by other designers’ work, so I thought I’d pass along some recent Web design finds:

• The Levi’s Copper site makes use of an interesting image & navigation structure, using one huge image as the background.  (Click Male or Female.)  Gotta love the ants. [Via]
• With their ant-sized people, I love the section-intro cards at Baseline Selects.
• Jonathan Yuen’s site gently and beautifully unfolds to reveal his work.  [Via]
• Ferm Living is all about subtle touches–smooth transitions, shifting backgrounds, subtle vignetting. [Via Maria Brenny]
• VIRB is kind of a MySpace, without all the visual suckage. It looks darn nice, even down to individual member pages (like this).

I’m pleased to announce that following a successful public beta period on Adobe Labs, the Adobe Color Management Module (CMM) has been completed & is now available as a free download.  In a nutshell, the CMM turns the color converter part of the Adobe Color Engine (ACE) into a library that can be used by non-Adobe apps. This means you can use a single color management engine across your workflow, enabling more consistent display and output of colors.

Props & thanks to Lars Borg, Peter Constable, Ken Kameda, Manish Kulkarni, Rick Wulff, Daniel Taborga, and everyone else who helped bring the CMM to the community.

My fellow Photoshop PM Ashley Still asked me to pass along the following:

Attention All Photoshop Developers!  

How’s your Mac Intel migration going?
Interested in new APIs for CS3?

Here’s a great opportunity to make sure your plug-ins are ready to go for CS3.  Members of the Photoshop engineering team will be flying out to Photoshop World (in Boston) on April 3rd and hosting a developer workshop to assist with writing CS3 plug-ins.

Details & information on getting signed up.

When: Tuesday,
April 3, 1:00 – 5:00 pm
Where: Room 201 – Convention Center
NDA required: No! This is a non-NDA session
Sign-up: http://www.photoshopworld.com/page-dev-registration.html

If you have questions, email ashley at adobe.com

The Register hosts a Q&A with Photoshop co-architect Russell Williams about how the team changed its ways in the CS3 development cycle, making product quality paramount, improving the team’s work/life balance (i.e. fewer "Photoshop widows/-ers" who never see their loved one), and yet still delivering a rich set of features.  In brief: rather than building all the features up front, then spending the rest of the cycle fixing them, the team moved to a more incremental development model, insisting that bugs be fixed as we went along (not allowing them to build into a late-stage "bugalanche").  The article is a good read if you work in product development, or if you just want some inside geekery on how this stuff gets done.

Russell addressed the engineering side, so I thought I’d add some product management perspective.  Overall I’m pleased with how things have gone, but no approach is perfect, and it’s worth noting some of the challenges we faced. [Continued in this post’s extended entry]

Continue reading →

I wonder if that statement will sound laughably outdated someday.  Until then, the new 416MP scanning back from Better Light is mighty impressive. According to CNET, each 2-minute exposure generates a 794MB file that can provide 300 pixel-per-inch resolution for a poster measuring 34" x 45"–all for a cool 23 grand.  Put that in your Flickr account and smoke it. [See also 160 megapixels or bust.]

I wonder if that statement will sound laughably outdated someday.  Until then, the new 416MP scanning back from Better Light is mighty impressive. According to CNET, each 2-minute exposure generates a 794MB file that can provide 300 pixel-per-inch resolution for a poster measuring 34" x 45"–all for a cool 23 grand.  Put that in your Flickr account and smoke it. [See also 160 megapixels or bust.]

Adobe is announcing today that there will be two editions of Photoshop CS3–Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended. From the press release:

In addition to the highly anticipated Photoshop CS3 software for designers and professional photographers, Adobe will also deliver Photoshop CS3 Extended, a completely new edition of Photoshop which allows cross-media creative professionals to stretch the limits of digital imaging. Photoshop CS3 Extended includes everything in Photoshop CS3 plus a new set of capabilities for integration of 3D and motion graphics, image measurement and analysis. Photoshop CS3 Extended also simplifies the workflow for professionals in architecture, engineering, medical and science.

Now, because the products haven’t been formally introduced yet (that’s what the March 27 event is all about), I can’t get into a lot of details about the features (or price, or Suite configurations).  But I can pass along what’s in the press release:

• Film and video specialists can perform 3D model visualization and texture editing, paint and clone over multiple video frames.
• Animators can now render and incorporate rich 3D content into their 2D compositions.
• Graphic and web designers can create an animation from a series of images – such as time series data – and export it to a wide variety of formats, including QuickTime, MPEG-4 and Adobe Flash® Video*.
• Architects, medical professionals and scientists will enjoy increased support for specialized image formats so they can easily view, annotate, and edit images in their native format.
• Scientific researchers can create animations from medical images for presentation purposes, and architects can make accurate measurements of objects in their 3-D images.

So, in a nutshell, Photoshop CS3 Extended includes everything that’s in Photoshop CS3, plus support for 3D, video, and measurement.  The point is not to turn Photoshop into After Effects, Premiere, Maya, etc.  Rather, the idea is to extend what you can do with the application, being smarter and more flexible about bringing in 3D and video, letting you use Photoshop’s unique painting and compositing tools in new ways.  It allows Adobe to address specialized needs in a way that was never practical in the past, with a one-size-fits-all Photoshop.

About the name:

• The products are called "Photoshop CS3" and "Photoshop CS3 Extended."
• There is no "Photoshop Standard," and there is especially no "Photoshop Pro," "Photoshop Advanced," "Photoshop Premium," or the like.

Why is the name a big deal?  Simply put, we don’t want to express or imply
the message that Photoshop CS3 isn’t advanced or pro, or that "This extended version is the one everyone
would get, if only money were no object."  The standard version of Photoshop will be the right choice for many people.  Extended is there for people with specific needs, who want to push the tools & their skills in new ways. 

What do you think?  I’m extremely excited about this evolution in the history of Photoshop, and I wish we could give you a demo of exactly what’s coming, but we’ll be there soon enough.

–J.

[Update: A bit more info has been posted on Adobe.com.]

* This relies on Flash Professional being installed, as it supplies the FLV codec.

"Step 1: Make a SWF of a box…"

Adobe has posted a little teaser site, complete with a short video (no, not that video)…  [Via] In <cough> completely unrelated news <cough>, the company has announced that we’ll be announcing (not shipping) the CS3 product line on March 27th.  (I’m just relieved that neither Justin Timberlake nor the producers of SE7EN seem to be involved.)

Heh–I enjoyed reading this bit in Scott Adams’s FAQ, passed along by Photoshop engineer John Peterson:

Q. Do you still draw the comic on paper?

A. Most cartoonists still use paper, at least for most of the work. They typically finish it off on Photoshop after scanning the inked work. Photoshop might be used for the lettering (using a font of your own handwriting) or adding shading and effects.

About 2 years ago I had some hand problems (from overuse) and switched to drawing directly to the computer, which is easier on my hand. I have a computer monitor that allows me to draw directly to the screen (as opposed to a tablet on the desk). It’s the 21SX by Wacom. It cut my production time in half. It’s different from drawing on paper, and there’s a learning curve of a few months to get it down. But once you do, it’s amazing. I use Photoshop for the entire process now. Then I hit a few keys and e-mail it
to United Media.

The ability to erase pointy hair in the real world is still pending. 😉

//na//

• This Lego rendering of MC Escher’s Relativity is a grand slam on the geek meter–and just about the coolest thing I’ve seen all week. See also the artists’ treatment of Escher’s Ascending and Descending. [Via]
• Thomas Raschke makes excellent wire frame sculptures–kind of the old Adobe Dimensions come to life.
• Michael Salter is all about styrofoam sculptures, large and small. [Via]
• Dig the bloopy shapes and shifty eyes of Brendan Monroe’s wooden sculptures. [Via]
• I found myself really enjoying the colors & characters in Oliver Jeffers sketchbook (top item, left column). [Via]