3D printing is one of the most powerful new tools in the arsenal of many creatives, so it was only a matter of time before Adobe added support for it to Photoshop. You can get a sense of the capability from our coverage of the initial announcement, but since then I’ve been able to go hands-on and create and print — a small, in-color 3D statue using Photoshop CC and the Shapeways printing service. The process was a little trickier than I anticipated, but the statue came out quite nicely.

Creating your model

The process begins with a 3D model of the object you want to print. Photoshop has support for importing 3D objects, and creating textures on those objects, but it is not really a true 3D modeling tool. So you’re likely to start your project by getting a model from an online site, although you could use one or more of the simple object samples provided with Photoshop. You could also use a tool like the free Sketchup app from Google or the open-source Blender to create your model. Professionals may be willing to pay up for a high-end tool like Solidworks. In my case, I decided to use the same Thingiverse model of a Buddha that our sister site PC Magazine has used to test 3D printers. The model is monochrome, so this being a Photoshop project, the first thing I had to do was give it some color by painting it.

3D Painting

Photoshop’s 3D painting tools may be unfamiliar to many Photoshop users who have only used the program for images. They are much more sophisticated than Photoshop’s traditional image painting tools. Its 3D painting model not only incorporates the texture of the underlying material in how colors are applied, but also lets you set the way paint is applied. Typically you’ll be painting on what Photoshop calls the Diffuse surface, but you can also paint Specular highlights or change the Roughness of the image, for example. The paintbrush tools also have settings for how the paint falls off as the surface curves away from where you are painting. In essence, you can model many of the physical properties of a paintbrush on a 3D surface to create highly realistic objects.

Discovering lighting the hard way

Since almost all 3D printing is done in single color materials, there typically hasn’t been any need to worry about either color or tonal values. As a result, 3D models tend to be lit in a way that makes them pleasing to view online — with the lighting completely ignored when the object is printed. However, since my goal was to print in color, the print driver had to decide how to handle the lighting in the model. I received a nasty surprise when my print preview image was almost black — the driver had literally turned off the lights. Even with Adobe’s help, there didn’t seem to be a way to change that behavior, so I needed to lower the intensity of the lights in Photoshop and completely repaint the image. I would have thought that a simple Curves layer would have accomplished the same thing, but it doesn’t work that way when you’re doing 3D printing.

The process of printing

The actual process of ordering a printed version of my statue was really simple. I had to set up an account on Shapeways, of course, but everything else was point-and-click. One nice feature is that you can rescale your object right from the print dialog. That way, if you are on a limited budget and need to make your item smaller, or if you just never bothered to accurately dimension it in the first place, you can rescale it as needed. To keep it within my $100, I shrunk the Buddha down until it was about three inches tall.


As long as you’re happy with the model once you’ve printed it, you’re all set. However, one drawback of using Photoshop to work on 3D models is that they can no longer be exported back to their native format. You can save them as PSD or TIFF files from Photoshop, and keep all the 3D information, but not save them out in a model format like STL.

Using a 3D printer as a copying machine

Once I had successfully printed my Buddha, I decided to push the envelope by seeing how well I could build a model of my printed Buddha that would allow me to copy it — essentially using my computer plus a 3D printing service as an object copying machine. Obviously, since my Buddha was a model I could just reprint it, but I wanted to see if I could use 123D Catch from Autodesk to create a 3D model of it as a demonstration of making copies of small — or perhaps scale models of large — objects. Catch allows you to take photographs of an object from all different angles and then merge them into a 3D model. The application is still pretty glitchy, but with perseverance I was able to upload images and generate a model.

My first attempt to simply walk around the Buddha clicking away yielded terrible results. The stitching was off and the model had parts in the wrong places. It’s pretty clear that you couldn’t use this technology to snap away at a statue in a museum, for example, and build your own scale model of it. When I repeated the process, but this time placing my camera in a fixed position and slowly rotating the statue — all against a solid color background — the results were much better. Everything except the top of its head looked great. However, when I tried to fill in the missing pieces with additional shots from above, Catch got very confused. Using a camera and 3D printer to copy objects is clearly still in its infancy, at least with consumer products.

The bottom line

If you’re already a Photoshop user, and partake in 3D printing, the new capabilities in Photoshop CC will make your life a lot easier. In particular, if you’re using a personal printer that requires you to add your own supports to your models before printing, that one feature alone will save you time and the expense of failed prints. If you’re lucky enough to have access to a color 3D printer, then Photoshop adds even more value, as you can use its extensive painting tools on your items. However, since you can’t actually do full 3D modeling in Photoshop, unless you only download models from the web, it won’t replace a 3D modeling tool like Blender, SketchUp or Solidworks in your workflow.