RECOMMENDED

VERDICT: Photoshop moves beyond photo editing to conquer completely new territory.

My first reaction to the news that a new enhanced version of Photoshop was being introduced was deeply cynical...

After all, if Photoshop is the state-of-the-art, why wouldn’t any enhancements automatically be rolled into core? After looking at Photoshop Extended I can see why Adobe did what it did. On the other hand I’m not sure how it did it – some of the new power here is jaw-dropping!
So just what new functionality does Photoshop CS3 Extended offer? First up are what look like a couple of esoteric extensions to the existing Vanishing Point dialog. Now you can use the Measure tool within the dialog to take accurate measurements and export the perspective planes that you add to the common CAD and 3D standards - DXF and 3DS. What makes this extraordinary is that the bitmap is exported too as texture maps so you are effectively creating a simple textured 3D model within Photoshop!

Photoshop CS3 Extended can be used to open and composite 3D models and edit their texture maps

Even more powerful and useful is the new ability to open 3D objects in the common 3DS and OBJ formats and composite them within a montage. What’s extraordinary is that these 3D objects aren’t permanently rasterized during opening, but remain live as smart objects within their own 3D Layer. Double-click on the layer and you can reposition, scale and rotate the fully-textured object within 3D space – and all in real time. You can even change lighting and render mode and create a cross sectional view. Even better, if the model uses texture maps these are indicated in the Layer palette and can be opened and edited separately. Import a textured 3DS model of a cylinder, for example, and you can paste on your own label artwork and then rotate your can’s packaging in full 3D. It’s impressive power but again clearly limited as you can’t paint directly onto the model’s surface.

It’s not just 3D users who will be interested in Photoshop CS3 Extended – there’s also plenty of new power for those working with animations and video. Photoshop CS2’s rudimentary system for creating crude animated GIFs by manually adding frames and manipulating layers was a nightmare. Now with Photoshop CS3 Extended the Animation palette offers an optional timeline-based approach in which you can simply set keyframes for layer-based properties such as position, size and opacity and intermediate frames are automatically interpolated. Even better, using the new QuickTime-based Render Video command, you can now export your animation either to a sequence of bitmaps or to a wide range of video formats including MOV, AVI, MPEG-4 and even Flash FLV.

Video files can be loaded, composited, styled and edited directly

This is impressive enough until you realise that you can also now open video files in these formats. As with its 3D handling, supported video files are automatically converted to their own smart object-based layer. This makes it easy to create video compositions simply by adding overlying layers, video or otherwise, which can themselves be animated with the Animation palette. Features such as transparency, layer masks and blend mode are fully supported and you can even apply Photoshop CS3’s new non-destructive smart filters to your video layers to add, say, an artistic or motion blur effect. Hit the Play command on the Animation palette and your new video composition springs to life in as near to real-time as your system’s speed permits.
Like the earlier 3D handling its jaw-dropping stuff but Photoshop CS3’s video handling goes even further. Double-click on any video layer and it opens up into its own window and, using the Animation palette, you can move through frame-by-frame editing as you go! This is ideal for simple retouching through to advanced rotoscoping and Photoshop CS3 Extended even adds the ability to offset the Cloning Stamp tool by a set number of frames to provide what Adobe calls “movie paint” – ideal for example for removing an unwanted object that crosses a scene. To top it all, if you’re working with After Effects or Premiere Pro you won’t even need to export your video, you’ll be able to open the native PSD.
The behind-the-scenes processing involved here, dealing with thousands of frames at a time, is mind-boggling and it’s technology that Photoshop CS3 Extended puts to the best possible use with its new support for the DICOM medical imaging standard. Frames in the DICOM file are automatically converted to layers on import and these can then be quickly converted to an animation for onscreen viewing of medical scans. Alternatively the layers can be converted to a new form of smart object-based layer called an “image stack” which enables unwanted content or noise to be removed in a composite view. With Photoshop CS3 Extended’s new measurement capabilities, users can quickly count objects onscreen and compute the height, width, area, and perimeter of any selection. And for further data visualization and analysis, Photoshop CS3 Extended has been designed to work hand-in-hand with MATLAB.
It’s all amazing stuff made exceptionally straightforward and highlights the extraordinary power of the Photoshop engine, but Adobe is right that this is specialized power - most photographic users can happily stick with the core version. However, if you regularly deal with 3D, video or image analysis, Extended is definitely the way to go.

EASE OF USE 5/6
FEATURES 6/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 4/6
OVERALL 5/6