Page 1 of 1 You probably know you can copy entire layers or special selections from a standard Photoshop layer. But did you know you can also grab 3D content as pixels? It's true! But there are some differences. This tip is for Photoshop CS3 or 4 Extended.
Ok, the first two things make sense right away – they are limitations of the way Photoshop interprets the copy command when dealing with 3D objects. And the important bit to keep in mind is that you are not actually copying the 3D content this way; you are grabbing the screen pixels. That means the current rendering, anti-aliasing and lights will all be captured in the copy, and pasted as pixels.
The weird thing here for most folks is the Paint Mode selection. Let's say you have diffuse and bump maps, and you set the Paint Mode (3D > 3D Paint Mode) to Diffuse, you can use the Quick Select tool to select regions of the diffuse texture directly from the model. You are still only grabbing screen pixels, by the way. But your selections will make some sense.
However, if you change to Bump in the Paint Mode, your selection from the object will be based on the Bump texture. Spiffy! I'm still working on some clever ways to take advantage of this, but the concept is clear: you can make indirect pixel selections from the 3D object. One possible application is to use this technique to grab selections that would otherwise be tedious. Here is an example of using some simple text on the surface of a donut (circular toroid, actually) that would be difficult to execute any other way. The bump map is simply white text on a black background. After a couple of clicks with the Quick Select tool, I got a nicely warped bit of text!
Figure 1 - The bump map.
Figure 2 - The toroid with the bump map applied.
Figure 3 - The copied and pasted selection.
In my article on work flow tips in Bridge, I mentioned using ratings and labels. If you change lenses a lot, you know that each lens has some particular characteristic. You can search on images and sort them by what lens they were shot with (your camera has to support writing this EXIF data to the image file). This makes it a snap to group shots for adjustments that are common to a given lens (say, chromatic aberration) or even a given focal length of that lens (like vignetting).
To use this feature, launch Bridge CS4 and open the folder you want to browse. From the Window menu, choose to display the Filter pane if it's not already visible. You can choose any of the available filters, and combine them to narrow the search.
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Keywords
3D, photoshop, bridge, cs4
