Photoshop Is Bringing 3D Printing to the Masses

3D printing has been creeping into the mainstream for a while, with dozens of firms now selling desktop printers and MakerBot promising a printer for every school in America. But the reality just hasn’t yet lived up the hype. Sure, we’re already making some pretty cool stuff with additive manufacturing, but it’s not yet accessible to most home users.

Part of that, of course, is cost—though prices are coming down all the time. But a major barrier is difficulty level. Designing and printing 3D models is still fairly complex (have you ever tried to put together a RepRap?) and one thing I’ve heard repeatedly from people in the addictive manufacturing world is that mainstream adoption will only come when designing models is as easy as Photoshop. And now it looks like that day has arrived.

Today, Adobe announced its latest Creative Cloud release—an update to the regular Adobe Photoshop CC software—and 3D printing capabilities took centre stage. The company claims its update will allow users to “easily and reliably build, refine, preview, prepare and print 3D designs.” And from their description of the tools included, I’m inclined to believe it.

Photoshop will allow users to design models from scratch in the software, or import designs from other modelling programs. It boasts the ability to add colour and texture using the usual brush and gradient tools, and to preview models in the material you’re printing in.

The killer app for me, however, addresses a basic failing in other 3D modelling tools: An automated process to make sure your model doesn’t collapse in a mushy heap on the print bed, or as Photoshop product manager Stephen Nielson put it, “result in a pile of spaghetti.”

According to the video demonstration above, “Photoshop automatically fixes water tightness issues, and builds a scaffolding to prevent the model from collapsing while printing.” It essentially identifies any problems with your 3D mesh before printing and generates support structures where needed. That’s music to the ears of anyone who’s ever wasted filament on models where holes, thin walls, or just bad physics have won out over structural integrity.

What makes this release most relevant to 3D printing on the whole, however, is the simple fact of the Photoshop name. It’s familiar, it’s easy, and it takes some of the mystery out of 3D printing for hobbyists. Sure, you still have to know the basics of designing a 3D model, but that’s a minimum requirement analogous to knowing how to take a picture before using the company’s ubiquitous image editing suite.

The only potential issue I can see is printer compatibility. Adobe claims Photoshop supports “the most popular desktop 3D printers,” but it’s partnered with Makerbot and Shapeways (the popular remote printing service), and pushes those pretty heavily.

Can Photoshop do for 3D printing what it did for digital photography? If it lives up to its promises, it could be just the boost amateurs were looking for to get started with the trend. In the meantime, you can get a month-long free trial of Photoshop Creative Cloud, including the 3D update, here.