Understanding Photoshop CS6 Extended

Posted by graphicfordesign On Tuesday 3 July 2012 1 comments
For years, Adobe has heard the pleas of researchers, scientists, and other highly specialized users of Photoshop to include features that fulfill their needs. Adobe provides the tools these specialists need, but rather than just adding them into Photoshop CS6 and making everyone pay the costs for development, Adobe packaged them as a separate, higher-priced version of the software. “Let those who need the new features subsidize their costs!” was the decision.

And, in my opinion, it was a fine decision. As I explain, these extended features don’t really have a place in the workflow of most Photoshop users. That doesn’t mean that if you do have Photoshop CS6 Extended that you’ll never use any of these features! (How do you know which version you have? Watch as Photoshop starts to see which splash screen appears.) Even if you didn’t specifically purchase the Extended version (it might have been part of a package deal), you might find a need to calculate a height or a distance using the measuring tools in Vanishing Point, or perhaps use the Count tool. But unless you actually work directly in one of the target fields for the features of Photoshop CS6 Extended, you’re not likely to miss the additional capabilities at all. Another clue that you’re working in
Photoshop CS6 Extended "Tutorial" is that you can open the 3D panel and see 3D menu, visible in Figure 18-1, which contains features related to working with three dimensional objects opened into or created in Photoshop

Understanding Photoshop CS6 Extended
Photoshop CS6 Extended includes the 3D capabilities.

Using Smart Object Stack Modes.
Working with Photoshop CS6 Extended, you can combine a number of imagesinto a single stack as a Smart Object. Within the pile of images, you candetermine how the pixels in each interact with those in the others.Selectseveral related or contrasting images and add them as layers to a singleimage, select the layers, and create a Smart Object by choosing Layer➪SmartObjects➪Convert to Smart Object. Return to the Layer➪Smart Object submenuand take a look at the Stack Modes submenu that’s now available.
These options determine how the content on the layers within the SmartObject interact to produce the appearance of the Smart Object itself. (Notquite the same, but similar to the way layer blending modes help determinethe overall appearance of your artwork.) You can find technical explanationsof each option in Photoshop’s Help, but I show a couple of stacks as examples.On the left in Figure 18-2, you see a combination of the layers (shown tothe left as thumbnails) using the stack mode Summation, which pretty muchadds up all the lightness of each pixel in each channel, on each layer. To theright, several images shot for use with Merge to HDR are combined in a SmartObject using the stack mode Mean, which averages the values for each pixelin each channel. Not quite Merge to HDR, but with some planning and prep, itcould be a supplemental technique.
Understanding Photoshop CS6 Extended