So what does the future hold for us photographers and what will the next generation of the Adobe Photoshop CS software change? Well, I don't work for Adobe and I have no special knowledge beyond what you can see in Terry's video, but here are my guesses about what CS4 will change in photography:
1. Three Dimensional Imagery: Thanks to Russell Brown and his team of mad scientists, the next version of Photoshop will include the ability to turn a two dimensional composite into a true three dimensional image. I expect that we will soon be seeing a lot of images as 3D anaglyphs. As someone who has always been fascinated by 3D movies, I know that I am very interested in this new ability.
Viewing anaglyph images in 3D would ordinarily require the viewer to wear those goofy 3D glasses, but the game doesn't end there. Soon Photoshop will also offer us the ability to print 3D images for use under a lenticular Microlens. You can place or, even better, laminate a lenticular lens over top of your print and suddenly the image becomes 3D for everyone without the need for those silly glasses. The important part is that these illusions will now be created entirely within Photoshop without the need for additional software, like Power Illusion.
2. 360° Stitching: We have all seen giant panorama images stitched together in Photoshop, but so far most of us have only worked in two dimensions. Photoshop CS3 made it easy for us to tie multiple images together into huge expansive landscapes, and this is the next step forward. Soon we will be able to use Photoshop to combine many images together and then to map the combined blob of photos onto a sphere. The result of this mapping is a completely immersive viewing environment in which the viewer seems to be standing in the middle of a scene.
This type of viewing experience already exists, but for now it takes additional software to turn the spherical panorama into a Quicktime VR. Here's a link to a gallery of Quicktime VRs. Check them out. I think that they are a pretty cool way to put the viewer inside a photograph.
On a tangent, Stephen Johnson has been using this trick for years, but instead of keeping his immersive environments in the computer, he has been printing them out and wrapping his prints around the inside of a plastic bubble. To view these images, the audience must literally climb inside of the image bubble!
Obviously, creating this sort of art will require us photographers to shoot a lot more frames. For a simple panorama we need lots of overlapping frames but the camera only needs to move in one plane; say the right to the left or from the top to the bottom. For the 360° immersive effect we will need to shoot a lot more so that we have overlapping frames in every direction.
3. Seam Carving (a.k.a. Dynamic Resizing): About a year ago two Israeli scientists introduced the world to their "content aware resizing system." In Photoshop geek circles this invention caused quite a stir and now we know that this new dynamic resizing system will be a part of CS4. Basically, seam carving is a way to resize an image so that import elements of the picture retain their geometric integrity. Here is the original seam carving demo from YouTube. For folks like me who often shoot horizontals, but need vertical images for perhaps a magazine cover, this looks very promising.
4. Motion: Photoshop CS3 Extended Edition gave us a little hint at what could be done with motion in a still photograph. With CS3 we can make time lapse images come alive by placing multiple frames together into a single document and then saving the composite as a Quicktime video. I suspect that with CS4 there will be a lot more that we can do to include motion in multiple directions and on multiple planes into our photographs.
I hate to overstate it, but I have a feeling that these new technologies will force us to reexamine the fundamental question, "What is a photograph?" Is a photograph a single click of the shutter? Is a photograph just a representation of a three dimensional world projected onto a two dimensional surface, or can a photograph truly be 3D? What is the line between photograph and hologram?
Likewise, I feel like soon we will have to ask, "Is a photograph always something tangible--something that you can print out, hold in your hand, and pin up on the wall--or can a photograph also be something that can never be printed?" Can a photograph be something that you climb inside? Is it a photograph if it completely surrounds you or is it something closer to what we traditionally call a diorama?
I teach for a wonderful, but very traditional, photography school. It is built around the classic Ansel Adams "the camera, the negative, the darkroom, the print, the matte, and finally the frame" model of photography. The question that I am pondering now is will this school draw the line at the creation of motion from still photographs? For that matter, where do any of us draw the line now on what is and what is not a photograph?
Right now I find myself wondering if teaching motion effects will eventually change us into a school combining all the visual arts. Will these new technologies and techniques eventually lead us down the path of video design or will we draw the line and say that motion effects are not a part of photography and that they will not be taught here?
One final note. All of these changes that I have seen are going to take a lot more computing power. All of this new stuff is going to work better with a 64-bit operating system and a whole lot of RAM. Apple, if you are listening, could I have a laptop with a Quad-core processor and eight Gigabytes of RAM for Christmas, please?
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