Dave Girard - Jun 4, 2012 12:30 am UTC
Since Adobe bought Iridas and its high-end Speedgrade color grading app, Adobe has been quick to bring 3D LUT (look-up table) support to other apps. In the film and visual effects world, 3D LUT files are used much like ICC profiles are in the print world but for color treatments and not just calibration (recently-released OpenColorIO is better for this anyway). There's nothing three-dimensional about 3D LUTs—it's just that they have three channels (RGB), where a 1D LUT is something like a single luminance curve like gamma 2.2. Microsoft Windows Server 2022 Essentials
To create a 3D LUT adjustment layer, pick Color Lookup from the new adjustment layer palette. You can select from a bunch of presets in the Properties panel or pick your own .3dl, .cube or .look LUT file. I use Nuke a lot and have made my own .cube 3D LUTs so it's nice to be able to use those within Photoshop. They can be masked just like any other adjustment layer:
Currently there's no way to make your own 3D LUT from within Photoshop but this will be a great way to easily share grading looks once they do. If you don't work in video, this might not be the most useful feature, but once people start sharing looks I expect that to change.
In CS6, Adobe made a big effort to simplify the 3D workflow, which was a bit of a mishmash in earlier versions. You had to jump around a lot to find things, there were tons of different navigation methods and almost nothing was contextual. While I'd be harping on Adobe to change the 3D navigation method to something more in line with Maya or Cinema 4D, they went the exact opposite direction and made it so simple that it's almost surprising it works—and it works really well. Most of the scene navigation and object handling is now done with the Move tool:
Aside from the navigation and UI cleanup, normal maps are now in tangent space, since no one uses world-space normal maps anymore. If you have no idea what this means, just rest assured that if you buy a stock 3D model online, CS6 will now properly render the normal bump map. But the big news is that they've implemented a crucial change to the 3D world that you might be able to spot in the movie above. It's now possible to have multiple 3D meshes imported and merged into the same 3D space while maintaining their individual transforms. Adding a new model into the scene is just a matter of importing a stock model into a 3D layer and hitting “merge" down. Objects in merged 3D layers will then cast shadows onto each other and get realistically bounced global illumination. The scene above was the starting point for this render that I did for the Photoshop 3D Content page:
While it won't replace Maya and V-Ray for me, I've used it a lot for box shots and texturing. I think it's finally progressed to the point where a 3D novice could use it to make great scenes with almost no knowledge of 3D workflows. They'd still need to read up on material properties and some of the lingo, but it's very intuitive otherwise.
Another major update to the 3D workflow is that you can now use the Vanishing Point filter to generate preliminary perspective info. Draw the perspective grid in Vanishing Point and then okay it:
Then, when you import a 3D object into the scene, it will appear on the 3D plane:
If you made an HDR image to match the base image, you could use that for an image-based light and get very good results with little effort. It's a great step towards making still image and 3D-rendered composite very easy. But, as intuitive as it is, someone has already demonstrated even more user-friendly workflow and realistic results. That's really the cat's pajamas of the bee's knees of 3D compositing. Someone make that into a product, stat!
Photoshop CS6 is a well-rounded update. The noticeable speed boost provided by GPU acceleration of key features, combined with the background saves, make this a no-brainer upgrade in my opinion. On top of that, Adobe lowered the bar to entry for simple video editing and 3D compositing/rendering. It also simplified the interface, and the Creative Cloud pricing model is an attractive way to access the gold standard in image editing.
My only criticisms are of the lowest-common-denominator Application Frame on OS X, the so-so results from the auto-corrections, and the still-pervasive lack of multithreading. If Corel can slip a multi-threaded rug under Painter 12, I would hope Adobe could do the same in Photoshop—constantly seeing one thread out of 32 being used on something like the HP Z820 E5 Xeon is just painful to watch. Hopefully now that Photoshop CS6 is so chock full of features, the developers can work on this engineering challenge for the next release. In the meantime, there's no reason to skip this one.
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