Adobe debuts Photoshop CS3 Extended

Adobe today announced that it will expand its digital imaging product line, offering two editions of Adobe Photoshop CS3. In addition to Photoshop CS3 software for designers and professional photographers, Adobe will also offer Photoshop CS3 Extended, a new edition of Photoshop which adds a new set of capabilities for integration of 3-D and motion graphics, image measurement and analysis. Photoshop CS3 Extended also simplifies the workflow for professionals in architecture, engineering, medical and science. Both Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended software, which will be the first versions of the software to run natively on Intel-based Macs, will be formally introduced on March 27, 2007 at Adobe's launch of Creative Suite 3 (CS3); the company promised to disclose further details at the event. Confirming earlier reports, the company clarified that Photoshop CS3 is expected to ship in Spring 2007, countering previous reports that indicated it would be available at the end of March. A public beta is available now.

"We never imagined that Photoshop would someday help make major motion pictures, let alone save lives," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of the Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. "Whether it's a video producer texture editing the backdrop of a movie or a researcher counting hundreds of cancer cells, diverse industries are already relying on the professional standard in digital imaging."

Photoshop CS3 Extended is designed for film, video and multimedia professionals, and graphic and web designers, allowing them to leverage the Photoshop image-editing toolset and paint engine when editing 3D and motion-based content It can perform 3-D model visualization and texture editing, paint and clone over multiple video frames. In addition, animatiors can now render and incorporate rich 3-D content into their 2-D compositions. Graphic and web designers can create an animation from a series of images - such as time series data - and export it to a wide variety of formats, including QuickTime, MPEG-4 and Adobe Flash Video.

The new Extended edition also enables users to extract valuable quantitative and qualitative data from images. In addition to measurement and analysis tools, architects, medical professionals and scientists will enjoy increased support for specialized image formats so they can easily view, annotate, and edit images in their native format. Radiologists can closely monitor a patient's progress over time, scientific researchers can create animations from medical images for presentation purposes, and architects can make accurate measurements of objects in their 3-D images.

Last month, the company began shipping Adobe Photoshop Lightroom workflow software for professional photographers and earlier this month promised to deliver an online version of its Photoshop image editing application within six months.

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