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Photoshop CS5 Extended One-on-One: 3D Scenes Goes Live @ lynda.com

Submitted by deke on 27 May 2011 - 9:15am.

Although Photoshop has the word "photo" in its title, a remarkably small percentage of Photoshop users identify themselves as photographers. In contrast, more than half call themselves designers. (In case you're wondering who the heck else uses the program, think realtors, medical practitioners, lawyers, law-enforcement professionals, insurance investigators, scientists, and anyone else who makes for good TV drama.) If you fall into this superhuge "designer" bucket---which includes all walks of visual artists, btw---there's nothing better you can do to get a leg up on the competition than learn and eventually master 3D in Photoshop CS5 Extended. Why? Because 3D is exciting, liberating, and outlandishly powerful. Not to mention, no one else in your immediate vicinity has a clue to how it works.

Which is why, just yesterday, I released the Part 3 of my 4-part Photoshop 3D series in the lynda.com Online Training Library. Titled Photoshop CS5 Extended One-on-One: 3D Scenes, this nearly 9-hour video course takes you to the far reaches of 3D, including scene building, lighting, shadow casting, camera manipulation, and stereoscopic imaging. Below you see me introducing 3D lighting. Note that I'm taking the topic so seriously that I'm wearing a jacket, even though the temperature on the set is roughly that of the sun. And I'm so bulging with 3D info that my left arm (the one on right) looks like I borrowed it from the Michelin Man.

Photoshop CS5 Extended One-on-One: 3D Scenes intro

I should mention that the live-action illustrations and many of the 3D models hail from Paul Roper, an incredibly talented guy at lynda.com.

Meanwhile, here's an illuminating chapter-by-chapter description of this transformative and, I freely admit, life-affirming course. Read more » 

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Illustrator Transparency + Photoshop Resolve, Part 1

Submitted by deke on 29 June 2008 - 1:50am.

In this two-part article, we’ll take a low-quality digital photo of my youngest son, Sammy, banging on a hopelessly busted piano:

And transform it into a work of otherworldly vector-based weirdness (below bottom). The primary instrument of this transformation will be Adobe Illustrator’s Transparency palette. But while Illustrator can belt out a medley, can it carry a tune? The answer is, yes, so long as Photoshop oversees the final production.

Here's the idea: Illustrator allows you to assign varying levels of transparency to vector-based objects. That’s great because, as we’ll see, it makes for a remarkably versatile drawing environment. The problem is, Adobe's original vector-based technology, PostScript, doesn’t accommodate transparency. And given that PostScript has long been and continues to be the professional-level commercial reproduction standard, this conflict seems to raise a red flag: How can Illustrator make art that PostScript can't print? Read more » 

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