One of the most talked about and technologically significant updates to Photoshop Creative Cloud last week was the addition of 3D printing support. Now, I don’t necessarily find 3D printing to be as significant to my day-to-day Photoshop experience as say, linked smart objects, but I get that this is the future calling. And although I’ve resisted embracing 3D in general (mostly because I haven’t mastered 2D yet), I understand that actually creating these objects in real 3D space (otherwise known as reality) has vast potential for our long-term daily lives.

And, I can no longer argue that these Photoshop creations are just 2D representations of 3D objects, because once you “print” in 3D, the Z-axis gets real. I know, at an early age, I was exposed to Carl Sagan’s explanation that the “plexiglass cube-within-a-cube I am holding is really just the 3D shadow of a 4D tesseract.” But I’ve also been exposed to the ideas and observations of another modern thinker, Deke McClelland.

And the good folks at lynda.com have seen fit to unlock Deke’s new movie about 3D printing in Photoshop that lives inside his Photoshop Creative Cloud Update course, so you too, can hear about the cosmos of printing from Deke. Click the image below to watch it at lynda.com:

And if you’d like to get Deke’s insights into the workings and usefulness of the other new Photoshop features, you can get a free week’s trial at lynda.com by going to lynda.com/deke and signing up. A week will give you enough time to learn about the new Perspective Warp command, the aforementioned linked smart objects, and more. Plus the rest of the week to explore Deke’s Techniques, Deke’s One-on-One courses, and the vast library of other lynda.com offerings. The Photoshop future is here. And it’s got a z-axis.