Citing an explosion of digital photography uses, Adobe Photoshop Senior Product Manager Ashley Manning told Automation World, “Engineers can carry digital cameras into manufacturing areas to document the project cycle. As manufacturing information coming from computer-aided design applications is increasingly rendered in 3D, the 3D tools in Photoshop will allow professionals in manufacturing to document and collaborate in 3D naturally instead of finding workarounds to 2D images.”Manning’s comments came in reference to the latest additions to the Photoshop line of products rolled out this week by Adobe Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif. The company announced Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended, two new editions of the professional digital imaging application that for the first time extend the software’s capabilities to three dimensions. Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended will be available as stand-alone applications or as key components of Adobe's expanded Creative Suite 3 family. The software will be available as a universal application for both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs and will support both Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista. Customers will experience increased levels of performance and speed running Photoshop CS3 on Intel-based Macintosh systems and the latest Windows hardware.While the new Photoshop packages may open new application areas in manufacturing engineering, Adobe believes the products’ new features—including its extended 3D capabilities—will have major implications across a range of industries and disciplines. "This is the year in which Photoshop reinvents itself," said Deborah Whitman, vice president of product management for Digital Imaging at Adobe. "We're delivering Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended to a new breed of cross-media creative professional and stretching the limits of what can be done by architects, scientists and doctors."Advanced ToolsWith new features for advanced compositing, designers can automatically align multiple Photoshop layers or images based on similar content. The Auto-align Layers command quickly analyzes details and moves, rotates or warps layers to align them perfectly, and the Auto-blend Layers command blends the color and the shading to create a smooth, editable result. With the latest version of Camera Raw, photographers can process raw images with increased speed and superior conversion quality, Adobe says, with its support for over 150 raw formats, JPEG and TIFF files, compatibility with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and new tools such as Fill Light and Dust Busting.Photoshop CS3 Extended software includes everything in Photoshop CS3 plus additional specialized features such as support for 3D and video workflows, animation and in-depth image analysis. With support for popular 3D formats, creative professionals can render and incorporate rich 3D content into their 2D compositions, including texture editing on 3D models. Using the Enhanced Vanishing Point, designers can measure in perspective and also export from Enhanced Vanishing Point to a 3D model. For video post-production, Photoshop CS3 Extended now includes video-format and layer support to edit video files frame by frame. The resulting video can then be exported to a variety of formats including Flash. Pioneering new uses in areas such as manufacturing and medicine, the Measurement Log palette calculates a range of values within an image, the Scale Marker easily adds a scale graphic to any image, and the new Count tool tallies features in an image simply by clicking on them.Adobe Systems Inc.www.adobe.com/go/photoshop
Optimize food production with SEW-EURODRIVE’s hygienic, energy-efficient automation and drive solutions for precision, reliability, and sustainability.
George Reed, with the help of Factory Technologies, was looking to further automate the processes at its quarries and make Ignition an organization-wide standard.
