Good morning, let’s talk 3D today. 🙂

As you already know, Photoshop Cs5 Extended can render 3D content! This is amazing! The things you can do inside Photoshop are pretty amazing, and you are still using the same application – that’s the best.

Photoshop supports two kinds of rendering: Open GL and Ray Tracing. Open GL is great but it lacks some advanced rendering effects like high-quality depth-of-field or full HDR rendering. Many modern graphics cards support Open GL and some of the advanced features.

Open GL is a cross-platform graphics rendering API (Application Programming Interface). One of the main reasons for using Open GL is because many graphics cards support hardware acceleration of Open GL, which is very efficient.

Many 3D features depend on the graphics card, and it is best if you have  a graphics card with at least 512MB of vRAM and with support for OGL (Open GL). Here are a few examples of features that rely on Open GL support:

• Repousse
• Overlays
• Interactive Rendering Mode
• Image Based Lights

Here’s how you can enable Open GL in your Preferences:

After navigating to your Photoshop Preferences, and then Performance, if Open GL is not available, check that you have the latest driver for your graphics card installed.

When lighting images in 3D, use 32-Bit images for highest quality lighting. 8-Bit images are limited to 256 levels of light, where 32-Bit images have over 4 Billion(!) levels of light.

I hope you enjoyed this bit of information. Have a lovely weekend and see you here on Monday! 🙂