On PTE/ Photoshop CS4 Extended and Possibilities

[Lin Evans]

Hi Folks,

As some of you may know, I posted some questions the other day for users who have Photoshop CS4 Extended. I was having lots of difficulty installing the trial version and finally had it resolved by installing manually and omitting the Adobe Media Player.

As it turns out, the Adobe Media Player is "not" necessary nor is it an integral part of CS4, so if you have difficulties installing CS4 and it crashes as it tries to install Media Player, just go to manual install, remove the checkmark beside Adobe Media Player and the install will proceed perfectly.

I also asked the question about whether it was possible to output an AVI video with a transparent background because I wanted to be able to use my decompiler and break down the AVI into individual frames without having to chroma key, etc., to get transparency behind the files. The answer is good news!

Not only does CS4 Extended have the ability to create AVI video and export 3D objects, it can very easily output individual PNG frames from that AVI complete with transparent background. Evenly more important, for me, was the fact that you can choose the names of the files so that they can be directly loaded into my template to simulate video!

Photoshop CS4 Extended can take a two dimensional image and "wrap" it around a sphere, a soft drink bottle, a donut, etc. It can put the image on a cube, a ring, a cone, a cylinder, a wine bottle, etc. You can adjust lighting, create X, Y and Z axis manipulations of these 3D objects and even import and use other 3D objects available on the web and elsewhere.

To demo some of the possibilities, I made a little sample. Please ignore the "jerk" when the "bird globe" starts it's second rotation. That's just because I didn't bother to precisely match the XYZ position at the start and end of the animation output from Photoshop. With a perfect ending and starting point match, there would be absolutely no perceptible jerk - just smooth rotation. The demo is nothing special, just a quick and dirty example to show some of the possibilities. Obviously, CS4 Extended isn't a full blown 3D software package, but it does let the user easily do some pretty neat things.

This is just an informational demo.........

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/birdglobe.zip (~ 34 meg zipped exe file)

Best regards,

Lin