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Adobe Photoshop CC - Advanced Training

How to export a high quality 3D image from Photoshop

Daniel Walter Scott

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So we've got everything we like, we've got the shadows how we want, the materials, the angle, the Depth of Field. How do we export this? We already exported it, what you do is you render it, and then don't change anything. I'll show you what I mean. 


First thing I want to do is I want to crank up my Preferences. We turned them down in a previous video. So under 'Photoshop' 'Preferences', Performance, no, '3D', it's under 'Edit', 'Preferences', '3D' on a PC. Now what you'll find is, cranking this up to like maximum of everything is actually just going to take a zillion years to render. If you're okay with that let's see how long this is going to take. Let's hit our 'Render'. Now rendering is all the buttons plus R. It's this shortcut here, or you can just click on this, or you can click on this option here. Zoom render, yours is just at render, come halfway through mine. Under 3D though, there's an option that says render, lots and lots of rendering. Let's just see how long it's going to be at full noise, of an image that's only 1500 pixels across. 


You can see down here, Time remaining, it's going to be about 14 hours. 13 hours is a bit jumpy at the beginning here, but you are going to get the most perfect render that you're probably not going to need. So you've got to decide what the balance is. A really good balance is under 'Preferences', it's probably something like, 3D. So Shadow Quality is going to be 'High'. And the Quality Threshold is going to be about, the 4, 5, 6 is fine; looks good. If you find there's some noise that you don't like, you might come back in here and increase it up, but up around 10 is just way too hard core, even for like finished final work, 5 is going to look just good. So I'm going to render now. You have the benefit of me speeding this up, so we'll just see how long this one's going to take. I'll see you when it's done, I'm going to go get a coffee. 


All right, I'm back. Didn't make a coffee, I made pot noodles. It's grim, nothing here in the office, but we've done our render. Now I want this to not look, like, want to get rid of this 3D stuff that's rendered. The trick is, don't move anything. What you want to do is go back to your Layers Panel and click off that layer. And that's it, you just got a file that's ready to be used. You can import this into InDesign or Illustrator, but it feels a bit weird because you've still got access to this 3D stuff. I know I do, so sometimes I just want a JPEG, I'm going to go to 'File', I'm going to go to 'Save As'. I'm going to save mine on my desktop. I'm going to call this one 'Rad'. Actually you're going to be a JPEG. Click 'Save'. Click 'OK'. Hopefully, on my desktop I've got Rad. There he is, and that is a high quality version of Rad. 


Let's say you plan on going in and back, and looking the 3D type. What you might do is click on this layer here, do a 'Select All', copy and just paste it. Then you've got a version of this that's-- I moved over a little bit. But then you've got a version of this, that's actually just flat, there's no 3D about it. You turn it off, so you can come back in here, and go and mess with 3D again. '3D Panel', 'Current View'. That's about with it. Potentially, now you can go and re-render it. If you weren't happy with the render you got before, you can go in back into here and just increase the Quality Threshold. I felt like mine was fine, but let's say you're having problems, with maybe artifacts, with say, you went with a glass option, and you just went happy with the realism of the glass, you can crank up the Quality Threshold, and hit 'Render' again, maybe you do it before you go to bed, or just before you go to lunch, and you're happy with a 1-hour render. But because we did a copy and paste back in here in the layers, we can always go back to that one, and maybe compare it against our new render. All under one file. 


All right, so that's going to be the end of our 3D experience. Now there is a lot more to 3D than what I've shown you here. Just covered the basics, we covered making things 3D, either by converting it into a postcard, or like here, where we extruded the text. We looked at changing the materials. Then we looked at using the cameras to our advantage. So setting and saving these different views, and playing with the Depth of Field. We looked at lighting, and the shadows, and we looked at exporting just now.

 
So that's going to be it for our introduction to 3D in Photoshop. I hope you found it useful. Let's get on to the next part of the tutorial series.