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Photoshop CS2

Mar 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By S. D. Katz

Making Video Better, One Image at a Time

The list of software engineers on the Adobe Photoshop splash page seems as long as the VFX credits for King Kong, but only in the past few years did they find the resources to make PS video friendly. Now, in the newly released Production Studio, Photoshop CS2's latest features provide a smooth and efficient video workflow right into After Effects and Adobe Premiere. Thank the rise of the Web for the merging of motion graphics and print, a trend that is likely to intensify since Adobe acquired Macromedia and its Flash technology.

Video support in Photoshop began with the option to compose for non-square pixels as well as an Action and Title safe grid and 16-bit support. Meanwhile, Photoshop's text engine and some image adjustment controls migrated to After Effects. All this was just the warm up for the Production Studio, which is all about integration, and while Photoshop CS2 did not inherit the unified GUI now sported by After Effects, Premiere Pro, Audition, and Encore, it has a few new tricks that will be of interest to VFX houses and motion graphic artists.

One of the big improvements to Photoshop is the enhanced browser, called the Bridge, which is available to all Adobe apps. In fact, it's actually a standalone application that can be launched from within Photoshop. At first, it looks like the old and very serviceable Photoshop browser, only it is far more powerful. The overall design is improved, but the main advantage to video artists is that you can now call up many more file types. Previously, only still image files were supported. Now, you can open audio files, movies, and documents such as Word and PDF files. Supported movie files include: MOV, AVI, MPG, GIF, 3GP, SWF, WMV, AIF, WMA, and MP3.

Metadata for all supported file types is displayed so you know creation dates, size, and other information instantly. One cool feature is the way that a multi-page PDF can be opened, allowing you to page through the doc from the Bridge's display window. The display is also improved and includes five configurations. One useful innovation in the default view is a zoom slider at the bottom of the browser. This allows for continuous scaling of the thumbnails that appear in the browser window. You can have a single thumbnail fill the window or scale them down so that the screen can contain perhaps a few hundred icons.

There is also a full-window plus filmstrip option that I particularly like. These workspaces allow for customization, such as the background color of the display window, and you can open multiple Bridge windows simultaneously with different views and source locations. There are many more features to this terrific browser, but it's a boon to video and film artists because they can now see their Photoshop image project in the context of the other types of files with which it will eventually be integrated.

Photoshop CS2 now adds FireWire support for an NTSC or PAL monitor. This is a simple but critical step in making Photoshop a true heir to Paintbox. Of course, you need a D/A converter for the monitor, but it's nice to have Photoshop support analog for broadcast while designing text and graphics.

Bit by Bit

Photoshop is moving more of the filters to 16-bit, including the Lens Blur that simulates depth of field narrow focus effects. Actually, you will find a key-frameable version in After Effects, which means you can fake rack focus. Liquify, Photoshop's mesh warp tool, is also 16-bit, and while it cannot be animated, there are often times when a static warp is useful — with greater bit depth, 10-bit and higher film formats can be preserved. A really big feature for VFX houses is the support for 32-bit High Dynamic Range images. This will mainly be used to edit and manipulate light probe data for CGI image-based lighting. Previously, FX artists had to use HDR Shop to merge and edit individual exposures, and of course, with Photoshop CS2 you also get a powerful image editing app at the same time (although layers are not supported in HDR). Photoshop CS2 supports OpenEXR, the extended range file format from ILM, and PSD, TIFF, PSB, PBM, and HDR file types, which are capable of holding floating point data. Another advantage to Photoshop as your HDR image editing solution is that HDR files can be big — 500MB and greater. You really want to have a stable, proven production product to handle images of this size.

While VFX artists were really the first to exploit HDR in a commercial sense, photographers are now getting into the act since HDR image allows tone mapping. By definition, an HDR image contains the full range of light in a scene that is normally reduced to the limitations of the film latitude whenever you snap a picture. Ansel Adams and Minor White's Zone system were ways to mentally visualize, and ultimately control, the inevitable reduction of the dynamic range through tone mapping with definite artistic goals in mind. HDR images allow artists to make the same judgments in front of a computer. Of course, you need a high-range monitor, but that's another article. In any case, HDR is becoming a new branch of still photography.

Vanishing and Healing

Here are two tools that are really enhancements for the Clone brush. In a sense, this is an implementation of the Perspective option in the Transform tool, but integrated into a single action. Vanishing Point allows you to build a simple grid within the scene based on a subject matter in which two- or three-point perspective can be easily identified, such as buildings, walls, floors, or the side of a large panel truck. For example, to paint over a window with a continuous brick pattern, you simply set up the four-point grid and begin to paint bricks within the grid. Bricks further away are automatically smaller and closer cloned bricks are larger, perfectly matching the perspective of the scene. When you need this tool, it's easy to use and looks great.

The Spot Healing Brush is a clone effect that preserves the underlying color and contrast when you clone over a target area. Photoshop Elements 3 had a similar tool, but the version in Photoshop CS2 has been improved. In fact, you don't have to define a source point, Photoshop does that for you, within limited circumstances. This works well for wire removal and other retouching, but like any one-click tool, its usefulness is image dependent.

There are a number of other smaller features such as a Warp tool and the new Histogram Palette, but the main advantages are the Adobe Bridge, 32-bit HDR support, and the overall tighter integration with the products in Adobe Production Studio. There is no question that Adobe has made a major commitment to integrate its products. Photoshop CS2 and After Effects play nicely together, but the main shortcoming of Photoshop remains — you can't easily import and play through multiple frames. After Effects provides paint tools, but these are vector tools and no substitute for Photoshop. There is still a great need for an easier workflow for animation-style image editing, painting, and previewing of multiple frames (including scrubbing) using all of Photoshop's tools. This may not be technically practical, but any progress toward that goal would be welcomed by motion graphic and VFX artists. In the meantime, Adobe gets some important tools right and provides a killer browser.

For Area 51 Visual Effects Supervisor Glenn Campbell's perspective, see p. 99.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.