The latest Photoshop CS5 has received near universal critical acclaim for its seemingly-magical image processing power and Photoshop CS5 Extended builds on that with even more extraordinary 3D functionality.

photoshop CS5 extended

But is the emperor wearing no clothes? Does anyone actually use the extended 3D functionality of Photoshop Extended?

In a comment on my less-than-flattering Photoshop CS5 Extended review, John_C asked to hear whether users of Premiere Pro and After Effects would have a different perspective and I’d be interested too. Does the program suddenly make sense within wider workflows?

I’m sceptical because, to my way of thinking, if you want to produce 3D movie effects the place to do it is in a dedicated 3D package where you have direct access to advanced animation capabilities (I don’t think anyone would include Extended’s Animation palette under this category).

More to the point with advanced lighting control, including global illumination and ambient occlusion, you can render far more realistic and eye-catching results with a dedicated app. And with a program like PC Pro’s 3D recommendation Maxon Cinema 4D you can also output to After Effects’ and other compositing applications’ project formats complete with information on lighting, cameras and reference objects.

The most obvious advantage of a dedicated 3D package is that it lets you actually create your 3D models. Previously Photoshop Extended relied on loading externally-created models but CS5 does now offer its own modelling power via the new Repoussé command. It’s a fancy term, but dig down and you’ll find that it amounts to some extrusion, bevelling and revolving. It allows you to add depth to single objects but it’s certainly not up to serious modelling.

Of course Photoshop’s real strength is pixels and it’s true that the ability to directly paint and retouch 3D objects is pretty extraordinary. However it’s by no means unique. In fact Cinema 4D includes dedicated BodyPaint functionality for just this reason. And within Cinema 4D this hands-on bitmap-based texturing power runs alongside advanced procedural handling and within a full multi-layer material system (for managing reflections, refraction, opacity and so on).

To produce a successful 3D scene you need to handle models, materials, lighting, animation and rendering. Photoshop Extended now provides a little of everything, but it doesn’t excel at anything and is generally awkward, overcomplicated and slow.

Yes, all users might find it occasionally handy to be able to extrude some text or rotate the odd shape, but surely this could have been done within the standard Photoshop? Or, for CS users, simply left to Illustrator’s existing 3D effects embedded as re-editable smart objects (as opposed to text and shapes within Photoshop Extended which need to be rasterized).

I stand to be corrected, but I really can’t imagine many users choosing to buy Photoshop Extended as a standalone. And if you are thinking about it, please note that Cinema 4D including BodyPaint and the ability to render multi-pass/multi-layered directly to PSD works out at around £200 cheaper.

Inevitably the vast majority of Extended users won’t be standalones but will instead get their hands on the program as part of one of the Premium CS suites. Again I might be wrong, but I can’t help thinking that most of these users will be kept more than happy by Photoshop’s photo-editing power and many will never even look at the forbidding commands under the 3D menu. In which case the premium paid for Extended over the standard release – £248 +VAT for new users and an additional £129 + VAT for upgraders – is entirely wasted.

So is the real point of Photoshop Extended to inflate the price of the CS Premium bundles while fooling users into thinking that they are getting a bargain?