A Valentines Design in Photoshop 3D?

Is it even possible? To pull off a romantic design using Photoshop's 3D workspace?

Surely the rigid world of extrusions and meshes is no place to dabble in romance?

Turn's out it's possible to pull it off. Were using nothing more than some letters and a vector shape, but the result is pretty neat isn't it?

The trick is in choosing the right ingredients - in this case, the font - Nueva Standard, and a very cuddly, cute looking heart shape.

And adding a little organic detail using a picture of a sunset.

The video provides detailed instructions for pulling off the design. When attempting this, I would recommend spending some time on getting the camera position just right and also on getting the lighting just right.

Working with lighting is somewhat complicated. Lighting in the design view is not faithful to the ray traced final output. So test ray traced renders are needed to get some insight into the actual impact that changes in the lighting set up will bring. Even a short ray tracing, lasting a couple of minutes, will, with experience, provide adequate clues as to whether the final ray trace is going to looking awesome, or whether some further tweaking is needed.

An Update to Photoshop Creative Cloud for June 2013

Adobe have provided a sneak peek of the newest update to Photoshop for Creative Cloud subscribers.

In this video Adobe's Russell Brown discusses some of his favourite features in Photoshop CC.

Improved Camera Raw Integration

Along with a cute sharpening feature to deal with blur caused by camera shake, there is a range of new functionality related to Camera Raw.

In fact Camera Raw now has a listing in Photoshop's filters menu.

New Camera Raw 8 Features

Photoshop CC comes with a complete update to Camera Raw.

In the following video Adobe's Julieanne Kost describes some of these features.

End of the Line for CS

As for the meaning of CC, it seems that it is the official replacement for CS. The Creative Suite line comes to an end with CS6.

Putting the Blur Gallery to Practical Use

The filters in the blur gallery provide a different kind of blur from the gaussian blur filter, but like the gaussian blur filter they provide a live preview of the composite image and not just the layer being blurred.

Photoshop has the lens blur filter which provides a similar type of blur to that found in the blur gallery, but with the twin disadvantages of no live composite preview and relative slowness of application.

Using the blur gallery allows us, therefore, the prospect of creating a somewhat different kind of soft focus effect from that which can be created with gaussian blur, whilst permitting the flexibility and convenience of a live preview.

In this video we take a look at how to use the iris blur filter to create a selective blur for a cool soft focus effect - preserving sharpness where it works in our favour, whilst allowing us to preview the impact of the blur on the rest of the image.

The video also demonstrates the use of the apply image command to extract a black and white image.