Adobe Photoshop—More 3-D, Please
Next Tuesday, March 27, Adobe will ship not one but two versions of its flagship Photoshop application. You can chose between Creative Suite 3, which Adobe claims “includes all the features you love in Photoshop CS2, plus many innovative new ones,†or you upgrade to the extended edition, which is being marketed as an “ideal choice for film, video, and multimedia professionals, as well as graphic and web designers using 3-D and motion.”
This is a big move for Adobe, which has been criticized for releasing versions of Photoshop that do too little while charging too much—customers had little incentive to upgrade.
But this release has some real buzz.
Back in December, Adobe made the beta testing of CS3 available to the public for the first time ever. (If you have a valid serial number for Photoshop, you can download this year’s release and use it without restriction.) This gave potential customers the chance to kick the tires in exchange for working out some of the beta release’s bugs—a bold move.
What’s behind Adobe’s newfound populism? Jim Darlymple at Macworld.com reports that Adobe insists it is not trying to turn Photoshop into a full-fledged 3-D tool; the goal is to complement the tools its customers already use.
I agree that having more 3-D features is great, but I really wish Adobe had more aspirations than just supporting 3-D developers. They’ve crafted Photoshop into such a stellar do-anything image manipulation application that it’s exciting to imagine that ingenuity applied to a 3-D program.
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Chris Ammon said,
on March 23rd, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Photoshop was gigantic before, now it will be even larger. I think it’s time for it to stop trying to serve every possible graphic purpose. No doubt it is the kingpin of graphics software, but I would actually love to see them cut back on some features that compete with Fireworks, a tool with a more focused mission that does a killer job with interface design and functionality. Because Photoshop CAN do so much doesn’t mean it’s the best tool, particularly when you’re talking about products that will end up online. Fireworks was made to play nice with Flash and Dreamweaver, spitting out CSS and HTML so designers can help speed the development process. Go on Photoshop (you know you’ll always be my first love), go rock the 3-D world, but step back and let Fireworks do it’s thing.