Adobe to extend Photoshop with animation, rendering features

San Jose (CA) - Adobe today said that it will unveil two versions of its flagship image editing software Photoshop on March 27. In addition to the regular "CS3" version, there will be a "CS3 Extended" package that will integrate animation and rendering capabilities.

According to Adobe, CS3 Extended aims to appeal to film, video and multimedia professionals, by offering a new toolset that enables users to 3D and motion-based content. "Film and video specialists can perform 3-D model visualization and texture editing, paint and clone over multiple video frames," the firm said.

The image editing software will also add some animation features, which can be used to render 3D content into 2D images. According to Adobe, graphic and web designers can create an animation from a series of images, such as time series data, and export it to a wide variety of formats, including QuickTime, MPEG-4 and Flash video.

Pricing of the CS3 and CS3 Extended have not been announced.