{"id":12872,"date":"2008-09-12T09:32:49","date_gmt":"2008-09-12T09:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2008\/09\/photoshop-3d-is-not-about-3d.html"},"modified":"2008-09-12T09:32:49","modified_gmt":"2008-09-12T09:32:49","slug":"photoshop_3d_is_not_about_3d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/12\/photoshop_3d_is_not_about_3d\/","title":{"rendered":"Photoshop 3D is not about 3D"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or rather, it’s not just<\/em> about 3D.  But let me back up a second. <\/p>\n

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Remember the Newton<\/a>?  My first week at Adobe, I attended an outside "how to be a product manager" seminar at which the Newton was held up as a cautionary tale.  The speaker pointed out that the product’s one critical feature–the thing on which everything else depended–was a handwriting recognition system that sucked at recognizing handwriting.  Among many other things, the Newton also featured a thermometer.  Customers, according to the speaker, had a conniption: what the hell were the product designers thinking, getting distracted with stuff like a thermometer when they couldn’t get the foundation right?<\/p>\n

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The moral, obviously, is that if you’re going to branch into new territory, you’d better have made your core offering rock solid.  And even if it is<\/em> solid, some customers may perceive any new work as coming at their expense.<\/p>\n

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I worry a bit about Photoshop users seeing the app branch into 3D and thinking we’ve taken our eye off the ball. Earlier this week reader Jon Padilla commented<\/a>, "Some of my disgruntled co-workers grumbled ‘oh great! a bunch of cool features we’ll never learn to use…’"  No matter what Photoshop adds specifically for your needs, the presence of other features can make it easy to say, "That looks like a great product… for someone else<\/em>."<\/p>\n

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Obviously we care about improving the way Photoshop gets used in 3D workflows, especially around compositing and texture painting.  If that’s all we had in mind<\/u>, however, I think we would<\/em> be overdoing our investment in 3D features relative to others.  As it happens, our roadmap is broad and ambitious, so let me try to give some perspective: <\/p>\n

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