Something old, something new...

Okay ... not new art -- I ran out of time, and I do want to touch base here today because the computer is about to get pulled apart and go to the shop. So I've delved back into the ancient archives and rebalanced a few of the very best from many years go. Top: Colorado Smith. Look at the shadow on the wall behind him!! I think anyone in the world would recognize that shadow, LOL ... the shadow is actually more important than the figure! Bottom: this is a Vue image in the background and a DAZ render in the foreground. I should do this kind of thing now, using the Terragen atmospheres I'm learning now...

Top: Stormweaver ... the background started life as a photograph and went through multiple processes to become artwork, which was used as a backdrop. The trick is to set up the lighting on foreground and background match. Bottom: Barbarian Princess. Always loved the reflections in that floor. The trick to getting them wavy is to apply a "wavy" bump map to the super-reflective surface -- almost any bump map designed for water is perfect...

Top: Elven Lover. Middle: Guard Duty. Bottom: Storm Light ... which was one of the first shots I was able to wrangle, in 2010, where I could pull sophisticated tricks, like transparencies on the fabric. Guard Duty was a long, long, long render as I recall. By 2012, most techniques were in place; the only things left to nut out were depth of field, special lighting, that kind of thing.

This, above, as I remember, was an experiment ... I'd just gotten GIMP and some brushes, and was happily painting my own backdrops. The hair is Spartacos and the skinmap is Atlas ... those, I would recognize anywhere, even after eight years! Ouch. Has it been that long?!

And some science fiction to round this out...

Three out of four of these, above, were done for book covers! The chromium "Fembot" was for a novel published by a company than ain't even there anymore ... the cyborg was a work-up design for the character that ended on the cover of More Than Human, and the space cities -- yep, you recognize those from Scorpio. Book covers are always a challenge.

The rainy-night-in-the-city scene is interesting: that's a photographic backdrop that's reflecting in the wet 3D ground ... which isn't actually possible, is it? Okay, here's the trick: create a plane (primitive), slap on the photo as a diffuse map and sit the plane right behind the figure. Add a ground plane and make it as reflective as a mirror ... yep, the background plane with its photographic diffuse map will reflect. Neat trick, and sooo useful. You're welcome.

Anyway: tomorrow the desktop gets taken to pieces and goes into the workshop. I spent this afternoon backing everything up, and ... it's time. I hope to get it back, blazingly fast, on Friday or Saturday. Then we'll get the new DAZ Studio, the new Reality, and we'll tale a look at Genesis... 😵

Imhotep, anyone --? And why we mess about in Photoshop

Answering a couple of questions today! Yes, you can reach me by email, and yes, I do answer questions! Of course I do ... thanks for asking! But first ...

Looking at Gil Cronin in the pictures from April 25th, something jogged my memory. Ah! The Mummy, of course! Arnold Vosloo as the shaven-headed priest who caused Brendan Fraser sooo much trouble during the First World War. Soooo...

Couldn't resist this:

No, it's not intended to look like Mr. Vosloo; just an excuse to play with the Anton's Treasures of Egypt prop set which I bought in a sale so many years ago, and seldom get a chance to bring out and dust off. I need so use 'The Man in the Hat,' and send him to Egypt, don't I! Anyway ... there you go: Egyptian priest. Looks like a supercilious character, actually; the kind you'd like to give a swift kick. But we won't. The eye makeup is hand painted in post ... the skinmap is actually the same JM Falcon you saw on Joe Ramos last week. It's a lovely skinmap.

And so to questions! 

Why do we muck about in Photoshop so much after a render is complete? Well, several reasons. One, even really good renders often show "artifacts" that need to be painted out before you can do anything with the picture. Say, the costume doesn't fit right; the mesh on the body crumples; the hair prop looks weird, no matter what you do with it, or something that should have been reflective just refused to play nice, till you ran out of time to fiddle with it --

This picture, above, had a BIG problem ... but you needed a good eye to see it. Part of the attraction of this image is the high reflection in the polished marble floor, offset by the lovely softness of the background. The problem is that the balustrade in the background is (correctly) blurred by the depth of field the virtual camera perceives ... but when the same balustrade reflects in that floor, the exact patch of floor in which it reflects is smack in the "band" of the image where the depth of field puts this reflection into sharp focus. So you have a blurry balustrade way back there, plus an upside down one in tack-sharp focus -- in the floor! This is actually 100% correct ... but the human eye perceives it as weird!! The only thing you can do is "paint it down," ie., obscure it with over-painting, so the viewer's eye doesn't go into rebellion at perceived oddity.

The other thing one can play with to one's heart's content in Photoshop (or even Irfanview, if you want the freebie that has a zero percent learning curve), is the "balance" of an image. What does this mean? Okay...

...you'll need to see this, above, at larger size to make sense of it, but the answer to your question is in another question: Which version do you prefer? Darker? Contrastier? Softer and flatter? Monochrome? Usually, you have half an idea in your mind's eye before you begin, a concept of what kind of image you want to end up with. For this one, I wanted a hint of sunset beyond the balcony to show through, give us a hint as to what time of day this is. So, not too dark ... but I also wanted to crush the shadows to give the picture some gravitas. Sure, the original render is pretty flat. Hunh. Well, it's just a raytace, after all ... though I might see what LuxRender can make of it. In the meantime, rather than fiddling with Lux for three hours, I decided to put it into Photoshop and rebalance it. This means fiddling with gamma, brightness, contrast and saturation till you see something you like ... simple as that. There's no hard and fast rule about what's "correct." It all depends what you, yourself, want or need.

The same kind of work can be performed on photos, obviously ... and often is. For instance, let's start with the finished shot, which is half photo, half art:

This makes  great wallpaper -- help yourself, I uploaded it at 2000 wide ... you're welcome. But a LOT was done to this shot to get it to this point. Here is where it started:

This was captured through the windscreen, at 100kph, on the way home from the Grampians last month. The sky did the most amazing things that evening. But the original photo has a road sign off to the left, the roof of a car on the right, and a windscreen full of "ufos" (dead bugs) to be painted out. Halfway through the fix-up process, I was here:

And that is already a gorgeous shot. You could stop right there and be very happy with it. I kept both versions ... I like them both. And if you notice, I cut out part of this same image and blurred it down, to use it as the backdrop for Imhotep. Take a look: the colors should look instantly familiar.

And of course you can also add stuff in the post-painting process that ought to be there, but weren't. For instance, the portrait of Gil Cronin. Gil wears a pair of diamond stud earrings, but I don't own any such prop, and I'm not about to go out and spent twenty bucks to buy one, even if I had the harddrive space to install anything new (which I don't: the reason I desperately need a new boot drive ... I'm now under 7GB left, and it's slowing the whole system down). In the interrim, before I can rush out and buy props, it's just as easy to paint the damned earrings! Photoshop to the rescue again, guys.

Some intrepid artists start from scratch and actually paint the whole thing right there in the software, Photoshop and/or Krita, or whatever ... and I've done this on a few occasions. Here's why I don't do it very often: one fairly simple picture consumes several days, and it's a long, slow process involving many hours of painting at the computer. Leaves me with too much pain in back, neck, hands, and often a splitting headache as well! In the same amount of time one could do a dozen renders and touch them up, without pain. But yes, I would, and will, and do, paint, if I'm contracted to, or if I feel like it! I just don't do it very often, for reasons of not enjoying the pain that goes with the job!

Anyway -- that covers the question! Next?

A French cafe, a mystery at Ponte Maggiore ... too many islands, but great clouds!

This was very nearly "the render that didn't happen" ... I knew that eventually I'd come up with a render that just could -- not -- be done. Or, not with my software and hardware! This seems to be it, because what you see here was composited from three layered images, when the original configuration stalled at 42% ... forever.

Initially, I had two buildings across the street, hit by spotlights; two walls to make a corner of a little French cafe; a transparent plane with bump map and reflection values set, to be the window glass; table and chair; bottle, glasses and plate, with transparency mapping on bottle and glasses; a Michael 4 (same dude as Amadeus, but with a honey matte on the Akaste hair); there was a lovely transparency map on the shirt too. It will render as a deep shadow map image, but as soon as you turn on raytracing, no joy. Soooo...

I took out everything but the buildings in the background, set lights and camera and rendered that, then re-imported the image as a backdrop and deleted the buildings. It still wouldn't render the remainder, so I did the bottle, glasses and food separately ... then did the table, chair and character against the backdrop -- with the window glass in place and reflecting ... and just pasted the bottle and glasses in!

Even then, it was an hour to raytrace the character, his hair, and the reflection in the glass, at which point I was so sick of this process, when the render turned out to be pretty awful, I almost chucked it in the bin. Sigh. Into Photoshop, and paint. And paint. And paint. And of course now I'm glad I did, because the nett result is rather good -- you just wouldn't believe how much painting it took to save it!

Harrumph. Anyway, this cafe scene came out of ideas spinning off a render I did yesterday that gave me phenomenal problems,  but was fixable inside the render:

The problem with the car was that it looked like a huge slab of plastic. The human eye expects to see reflections in highly-polished Duco, and there was nothing because, of course, the 3D stage is not the real world: there is nothing to be reflected. Soooo, I went in and used a photo of some buildings on the foreshore as a reflection map. Now the car looked like a bloody mirror. So I went back in and added a displacement map to make it look like there are the usual million tiny imperfections in the surface, which got rid of the mirror effect. Put in the sky image as the reflection map for the windows ... and so on, and on, and on. Aarrggh. In the end, it came out right, but ye gods--!! Admittedly, it is a very complex render, with a vast set.

And it got me thinking: there's a story in here! Someone went to meet a friend at the bridge on the canal, but all they found was a pair of women's fashion shoes, abandoned. Shook up, our hero goes to a nearby cafe to make a call, wait for a detective to arrive, and have a fortifying glass or two. Et voile. Thereby hangs a tale.

More misadventures than adventures in Terragen in the last day or two: island creation is giving me strife (or a challenge):

Safe to say, I'm not doing it right yet. There has to be a way, and I have a few ideas. It's not as simple as making very tall islands in a common "hightfield terrain," then flooding it: too many islands!!! And it's not as simple as making a "power fractal" terrain, slapping some heavy detailing on it to erode it or whatever ... again, you don't get one island, you get a thousand. I don't want a thousand. I want ONE. Tomorrow, I'll see if I can make a credible island in Bryce, export it as an OBJ (this much, I can do), then import it into Terragen (it should do this), and (the bold experiment) see if I can have Terragen apply its surface shaders to the OBJ island/terrain/mountain structure, to work up the color and texture. I don't know if Terragen will do this, but it ought to, and it's worth a shot! If not, well, back to the drawing board!

But this came out reasonably well:

Same project as the "better" island scene, with the camera flown up to about 10,000 meters and tilted to look down on the clouds ... then, the sun repositioned for noon-ish, and evening. That's not too bad at all -- and I'm pleased to report, I'm doing this on my own, without chickening out and running back to the tutorials! Getting there. Slowly.

Working with texture, color and light

Displacement map, bump map, reflection, refraction and gloss
values all set on ... well, everything.

Displacement, bump mapping and reflection are striking in this one...
DOF is turned off to make to make textures visible. 

In the last few days, I find myself fascinated by the textures of things, by the quality of light, the way distance -- actually, the density of particles in the atmosphere, but that strips the romance right out of it, doesn't it? -- strips detail, resolution and color from a vista.

So, working in CG, I find myself playing endlessly with the balance between displacement map values, bump mapping, reflection, refraction, the strength, color and direction of lights, the "drop off" of light over distance. (I learned the theory of all this via the 3D Studio Max Bible, incidentally, years and years ago. No, I never used "Max." It was out of my price bracket,  not to mention that my hardware wouldn't run it! But you could get the third-party manual for a song on eBay or something, and although 90% of the book was devoted to hand-holding exercises, teaching students how to drive the interface, the last 10% of the 700pp large-format book was invested in the theory of texture, light and ... all. So you had 70pp of in-depth, high-density information, the whole theory of the CG art form. This was all I needed. Actually, I always considered it a bit of a waste, printing a massive book teaching students how to drive an interface, because in a year's time the company will bring out the next version of the software ... they'll change the interface so radically, little you learned from a by-the-numbers book will do you a shred of good. On the other hand, master the theory ...! So, uh, I did. And it's infinitely applicable to DAZ, Poser, Bryce, whatever you can afford.)

Fascinated by light, texture and what have you, I couldn't resist painting in Photoshop too:

Digital watercolor: summer hills

Color gradients: none of this is in the source photo.
In fact the photo is a waste of storage space...

Digital watercolor: Near Yankalilla

Color and texture: again, none of this is in the source photo.
Lighting conditions on the day were ghastly. So ... painting!

As often happens, the very day that you're in the right place to get a perfectly framed photo, the sky is dull, but not dull enough to be dramatic. Just enough to make a digital camera record a picture that's so drab, it's just about black and white, so flat and boring, your mouse is hovering over the DELETE button. I tend to delete loads of pictures, and in the past the source photos for digital paintings like these would have been ditched... 

But I always loved the vibrancy and texture of watercolors, and lately -- bored out of my gourd (being disabled for a couple of years has impacted heavily on me) -- I've begun to play with things I never had time to consider before. Now, if I had to work on art board, with brushes and paint, this would never happen ... have you seen the price of art materials these days?! The boards are about $30 each. And since I haven't done this in around thirty years, I'll make a dozen messes before I get back to paintings I'm proud of. Uh -- not this year. Maybe later, if/when I ever find my way back to the cash, AND the pain in my hands and spine subsides to a level where I can actually do the work. In the meantime --

Yes, I work digitally. Everything happens in the computer. These paintings frequently start life as truly garbage snapshots ... full of foreground litter and background microwave relay towers! They're reduced to line sketches, then worked up to digital paintings in a process taking several hours each, and involving loads of, uh, painting, as well as many, many digital processes. But the whole job takes a fraction the time of a real, physical painting, and of course it costs nothing... 

Both those things are important when you don't have a lot of cash, and you're carrying a bundle of physical problems as well as the major disability that'll keep you comprehensively crippled for another year. It's all about the pleasure of being creative and winding up with a lovely picture; not this daft, ongoing game of "My materials are the best in the world, what are you using?" Dang, I hate that. It's like the "My car's faster than your car" game. Ack.

More soon.  

Movie poster ... NARC. Happy 3rd Birthday to this blog!

click to see all images at large size;

wallpapers are 1600 pixels wide

NARC: The Movie. Imagine! Jarrat and Stone and company, the brainchildren of Mel Keegan, in blazing color, on the big screen. In 3D. Whoa. Well, it would cost about $150m and take over a thousand designers and artists to make it happen; then, being a movie in which the romantic thread is ga, it would more than more than likely go over like a lead balloon at the mainstream box office ... but we can dream. So here was the idea:

Design the poster, as if NARC were a major motion picture. 

The first thing I did was have a close look at the posters for the Iron Man movies, and from these I took inspiration in the form of the dynamic. Not the design, but the spirit. This made two or three poster designs jump into my imagination, and I deliberately went with the one that is the LEAST like the Iron Man poster designs, so no one was going to be able to say, "Oh, you just copied." I didn't copy nuthin', and I'm very, very pleased with the final result.

The poster was assembled in Photoshop -- at 4800 pixels high, which gave me plenty of wiggle room for painting. The first step was to assemble a set of big, high-rez renders which would be used to compose the whole image. Where to start? Characters!

The four main heroes were rendered separately: 

Jarrat and Stone, Cronin and Ramos, were rendered at 2500 pixels high, which, for a portrait is big ... big enough to make it possible to paint human hair realistically, which I knew I'd have to do for Jarrat and Ramos, both of whom have hair that's luxurious, a little wild. Turned out, even Stone's hair needed some painting. Only Gil Cronin gave me no chore in this area. Thanks, Gil. 

They were raytraced, not rendered in Lux, for a good reason. LuxRender does fantastic justice to skin tones, but it really, really shows up the shortcomings of 3D hair. (The designers need to get on the stick and work out how to do hair that will look good in the top-end render engines.) In Lux, alas, Jarrat and Ramos would have rendered quite poorly on account of their hair, so I'd have had to paint the hair from scratch. Well ... I could do that, but it would have doubled the time spent on the project ... and the truth is, I'm also still getting the feel of my new mouse pen/tablet. I'm not quite ready to paint that much hair from scratch, though I can touch up existing hair for a composite image like the poster. Last reason for raytracing, not rendering in Lux: each of these renders would have been about a day long, and I'd have run out of time. This project was designed as the Third Anniversary Special for this blog, so it was time sensitive ... if I'd thought of it two weeks ago --!!

The next major element to be rendered was actually the planet! Working wholly in DAZ Studio, you're a bit hamstrung by what you can do with primitives -- ie, spheres. DAZ's spheres don't enlarge very well. When they get very big (or you get very close to them), you start to see straight lines around the edges, because these primitives are actually made up is gazillions of planes. So I went into Bryce, made a biiiigggg sphere and exported it as an OBJ. Then, I wanted to paint a diffuse map to make the planet beautifully blue ... I was thinking, Aurora, from Aphelion. To do this, I took a photo of the sky on a blue-sky day with white clouds, and in Photoshop put a heavy motion blur on it. Done -- how easy was that? The picture was saved at 2000 square, applied to the sphere in DAZ Studio, and rendered ... the render was passed back into Photoshop to that the atmospheric haze on the edge of the planet could be painted in. Save this ... pass it back into DAZ Studio and use it as a backdrop. Now --

Time to work on the ship! I know, I know ... this is not the NARC-Athena as described in the books. To built that, I need to be working in a 3D modeling program. They have learning curves like the north face of the Eiger ... in the last few years, I've either been working flat out, or sick, or (frequently) both, so I haven't had the time or the braincells to learn a new program and actually build the NARC-Athena. So --

This is actually something called the Allied Fleets Frigate, which costs about $30 from Renderosity. It's a lovely model, and you can do a lot with it. Here, I've fractionally changed the dynamic by stretching it in one axis ... and I've changed 100% of the textures on it, to get a whole new look. It was then lit from two angles. One -- the sun angle, to match the light falling on the planet (several glaring spotlights, far outside the frame), and two -- blue light reflected up off the planet. 

The ship was rendered at 3000 pixels square, and then shipped into Photoshop to have the engine flares added, and the red beacon lights marking high points on the hull, for aircraft avoidance. These were done with .abr brushes -- specifically, Ron's Bokeh Lights.

One element remained to be rendered. Yep -- the NARC riot armor...

Now, as I was saying a moment ago, I never did climb the learning curve to master a 3D modeling program and build the NARC armor as it's described in the books. But I was able to cobble together something very like the armor -- certainly good enough to do the trick, till I can make the real thing! What you see here is jigsaw puzzled together from two different body suits; two suits of SF style armor; a "survival" suit; and an SF style costume for M4. With he exception of the helmet, I'd just about defy the folks who designed the originals to tell the bits and pieces apart...

The trick was to dump every single surface map off every single bit, so the whole suit turned into featureless white plastic, and then start again, and build it back up so everything matched. Obviously, I made everything black, glossy and reflective. I made everything very smooth, and used a reflection map -- something I don't normally do -- to get uniform, consistent reflections, across the whole suit. I used the map because (duh!) I rendered the suit alone, and there's nothing else standing in the frame for those surfaces to reflect. Then ... lights. I did red, blue and gold lights to pick out the armor in dramatic colors; then this was rendered at 3000 pixels high.

In the books, the armor is made of kevlex-titanium alloy. The pieces are "smart" ... you put them on piece by piece starting with the boots, and they "smart seal" around your joints. It's incredibly heavy, but when you put the shoulder pack on, which contains the power source, the anti-gravity turns on, and you can set the apparent mass of the whole suit anywhere you want it ... say, 250 kilos, to hold you down while an explosion goes through, or 20kg, to allow you to literally jump over a house. Soooo cool. The biggest difference you see between this armor and the "hardsuits" as described in the books is the helmet. This is not the NARC helmet.  But it's a heck of a nice helmet, and it'll do! (In fact, it's one of the two helmet designs that come packed with the Sedition Soldier for M4 kit.)

Now all the pieces were assembled, and it was time to start putting them together. The first thing I did was use a lot of compressed, low-rez cut-outs to get a "sketch" going ... basically, to make sure the design I had in mind was actually going to work. And it did. So, now I imported each of the high-rez elements into a new Photoshop project that was created at 4800 pixels high. Cut out each of the picture elements, and start painting on them...

Each of the characters was painted -- skin tones, eyelashes, hair, shadows. This was where I really, really got to play with my early-birthday-present. The Wacom Bamboo mouse/tablet is a dream. This was also a great project for me to start getting in some serious practise with it ... it's very much like drawing with a fine pen, and I love the way it "shakes hands" with Photoshop. 

Usually, you'll hear me saying, "start at the bottom and work up," when you're building a complex piece of art, but it turns out that there are times when you'll paint the bottom layer last -- and this was one of them. I'd bucket-filled the base layer to flat black, to let me work on the individual elements; then, with them all done, it was time to fill in the background with dramatic stuff, to make the image consistently interesting across the whole frame:

...this layer was painted right there, under the major elements, so there was no guesswork about where something ought to be, or how bright, or what color. To do this, you're painting on a 4800 high canvas, with your brush size set to 2500 pixels. It's huge ... and I am soooo glad that I got some extra RAM a few weeks ago. I'm working on 16GB of RAM now (with four processors threaded to work as eight). The lag time in the painting process, from brush stroke to "done," was usually unnoticeable; only big blending strokes, using the smudge tool, had a visible, measurable lag. No problem. Slower computers will show a longer lab, but her, just be patient. This background was done in five layers: black underlay; blue "flux" effect; red "flux" effect; bright white starfields; flat blue matte overlay adjusted to juuuuust the right merge mode and opacity to give you this result. The flux effects and starfields are .abr brushes -- find them at Renderosity.

The logos were done in Serif Page Plus ... I'm still using X3, though I believe X5 is out. I'll upgrade when the newer versions do something that I can't do, and need to do. These logos were done in Bolts SF font at something like 100 point. In Serif, I did the big logo green, with gold highlights added with several 3D lights, matted on a black rectangle. Copy to clipboard; paste right into Photoshop. Get rid of black rectangle ... duplicate layer. Make a drop shadow by modifying the lower of the two (adjust lightness to black, apply heavy Gaussian blur), and jog the top layer up and right a bit. Lastly, I "walked the color" of the logo through every shade in the spectrum to find out what worked best. It was going to be green, gold or red, and it turns out, red works best.

The final effects were done in Photoshop: lens flare; a shimmer dancing off the movie logo; major lens flare falling right over the logo; and a diffuse black border under the logo but on top of everything else. Done!

WALLPAPERS

These crops from the final image are 1600 pixels wide. They'll suit almost all monitors. I have them set on a 22" flatscreen and a 15" laptop, and they look ... amazing. Enjoy!

With this project, I'm marking the third birthday of this blog! I uploaded Post #1 on September 25, 2009, which was about five weeks after I started up DAZ Studio 3 for the first time. For post work, I used Micrographx Picture Publisher until I upgraded to Windows 7 and a 64 bit system, which won't run MPP. Three years later, I still Use DAZ Studio 3, (because I -- can -- not -- stand Studio 4), plus LuxRender; plus Photoshop Elements, plus Bryce 7 Pro, plus Serif Page Plus X3. I do have Poser Pro 2010, but don't use it ... too cumbersome, and the Firefly Render Engine doesn't produce work which is one bit superior to LuxRender. I also have Cararra, in which I'll one day -- I swear! -- do the 3D modeling part. All I need is time and health. (On the desk next door, Dave has Vue Esprite with a load of plugins, and he's doing marvellous work. I need to learn that. One day...)

So  it's Happy Third Anniversary!

Next: Abraxas, in a couple of days.

Jade, September 25 ... 2012

Photoshop retouching ... at last!

click to see all images at large size

As promised -- a feature on retouching in Photoshop. All images have been uploaded at large size -- they're usually at 1:1 size, so you'll be able to see the details. 

Retouching images in Photoshop is a skill that's essential, if you want to take your pictures to the next level. The difference between a good render and a  fantastic finished image can be startling -- and before you read on, I invite you to compare the above two images. There's a world of difference, though they were both raytraced with the same lights and textures. Everything else happened in Photoshop, in "post work."

I'm working in Photoshop Elements 9. I know version 10 is out now, but 9 gives me everything I need, and I'll stick with it until Adobe makes a huge difference in the program -- a difference that's worth shelling out another large price! I'm assuming the version 10 interface is pretty much the same, so anyone using 9 and 10 should be able to follow me here without problems.

Going into a major retouching project, you'll have rendered your scene (or framed the best-possible photograph), and it'll be pretty good ... but you'll be thinking it's missing something.  If you're delighted with it as-is, you're not going to be thinking about retouching, so we'll assume that, here, you want to take a good image and make it great.

This feature is not about painting as such, because we're starting with an existing image, not a blank canvas. If we were going to 'paint' in Photoshop, we'd be starting with one or more sketches and building up the work from nothing. In retouching, we are actually painting, but everything we're adding is to bring out the details, and make more of the existing features of the painting.

Here is where your artist's eye is critical. Can you look at an image (in this case, a 3D render, but you could also be starting with a digital photograph, or a scan) and see where things need to be adjusted, amplified, diminished? These "tweaks" you'll be making are the retouching process. Like...

...in these detail crops, it's easy to see what I've been doing. I'm adding highlights and shadows to almost everything, because even in a good raytraced render, the fabric, hair and some of the skin tones looked "flat." In fact, it's often a lot easier to retouch the image, bring it to life, in Photoshop rather than fiddling with the surfaces and lights in your 3D program. Why do I say that? Because of the render time. Each minor tweak in the settings will take a while to render up in test, before you know if you achieved the result you wanted, or it you have to go back and try again (and again, and again...). Three or four hours later, you can still be there, fiddling. Post work in Photoshop can be quick by comparison, and the results ... see for yourself: look at the lustre on the skin, hair and fingernails, not to mention the fabric, and the shadows under the shirt collar, where it lies across his chest, and the shadow under the hair, where it lies on his forehead. 

Obviously, these are illusions. They're effects painted over the "flat" image to bring it to life, and the only question we're asking, and hopefully answering, today is -- HOW?!

In Photoshop, you'll open, or paste in, the original image, and it'll sit in the bottom "layer" of your project. The project is going to wind up like thick stack of sheets of transparent plastic, like the old "animation cells" used by companies like Disney in the days before everything in the world went digital. If you shuffle all the layers into the one pile and look at them from the top, you see the cumulative effects of everything that's been added in, one teeny bit (or layer) at a time.

So the first thing you need to wrap your head around is working in layers:

Over on the right side of your screen is a pane in which you can see the layers stacking up as you create them. In the menu ribbon across the top of the workspace there's a LAYERS drop-down menu; and New Layer is one of the choices. The first thing you get to do when you create a new layer is to give it a NAME. If you don't name the layers, they default to Layer 1, Layer 2, and so forth ... which is dandy, if you're only going to end up with maybe four or six layers. But for this project, today, I wound up about about 25, and you can be soooo lost and confused, if you haven't named the layers! If you don't name them as soon as they're created, don't sweat: you can right click on a layer and name, or rename it later on.

Four things you need to know about layers. 

First: they stack from the bottom up, and the uppermost layers are, in a visual sense, sitting on top of the bottom ones, so whatever you paint into them looks like it's on top of the content of lower layers. This is fantastic for painting mist over trees over hills over sky, for instance. Let's say you painted in a range of hills ... trees in the next layer ... mist in the next layer. Then you went to the bottom of the painting and painted in the sky under the hills, and then clouds on top of the sky, in a layer between the sky and the hills. Aha! You can drag the layers up and down to change their order. You're going to love that feature.

Second: layers have a blend, or merge characteristic:

...and what this means is, you can apply effects to just the layer you're working in, and that layer will change the way the lower layers appear, because of how it, itself, is changed. Let's say you had an area of the painting that was "flat" -- as I had in this image. You wanted to bring out the bright areas and maybe add something that looked like a sheen or glow on various surfaces. You'd do it like this:

In Photoshop, you create a new layer on top of the "flat" picture, and then you paint in a brighter color, where where you want the highlights to appear ... here's the trick: use your color picker to sample the brightest existing pixel in the part of picture you want to liven up (such as the leaves on that plant); then use your color pallet to brighten this way up, close to a pure white. Now, set the size of your brush, and its hardness, and its opacity, to settings appropriate for your piece. Hose on a LOT of virtual paint over the areas where you want the highlights to appear brighter. It looks like you're making a huge mess, but you're not. Trust me. When you've painted over the appropriate parts of the image, go to your Layers pane and set the blend/merge mode to OVERLAY. See how the effects pops up? Is it too pronounced? Could be. So --here we come to the third thing you need to know about layers:

Third: layers have an opacity setting, from 0% to 100%. Using this, you can adjust the "strength" of whatever you've added to the image, to get juuuust the right amount of brightening or darkening. If you're brightening the highlights, the blend/merge mode to use is Overlay. If you're darkening the shadows, the mode to use is usually MULTIPLY, then jiggle the opacity of the layer to get it just right. And --

Fourth: you can also apply filter effects to a single layer, not to the image as a whole. This is great to use for soft, diffuse shadows:

In the original render, the clock looks so flat, it could be a picture painted right onto the wall. So I went in and created three layers on top of the image. One was for highlights; the second was for hard shadows; the third was for soft, diffuse shadows. To paint the highlights, follow the instructions above. To create the hard shadows, it's just the reverse: sample the darkest existing pixel, use your pallet to darken it to close to black. Set the size, hardness and opacity of your brush to exactly what you need for your specific piece, and stroke the shadow in where you think it belongs. Use your eraser tool and your smudge tool to clean it up till you get the illusion of the dark shadow right under the clock. Set the blend/merge mode to MULTIPLY and jiggle the opacity of the layer till it looks good. 

The soft, diffuse shadow? Paint in a separate layer; use a lower opacity on the brush to get a softer darkening effect and go through the layer adjustment process, just the same ... but now, pull one last trick: apply a blur effect to the layer. Because the only thing painted in this layer is the soft shadow, that's the only thing that will be blurred. 

The effect is so easy, and so convincing. I used the exact same trick to get the lovely shadow under the hair on the character's forehead. It looks so natural, you'd never guess it was added later. 

Working around lights is also a challenge. Go back to the comparison shots of the candle on the table. If you view them at large size, you'll see that the candle flame is painted literally from scratch, because the 3D model just gives you something like a "place holder" to show where a candle effect ought to be. Now, in your 3D program, you can work with particle effects, flame effects, reflectivity, luminosity, volumetrics and so on -- you can actually create the effect right there in the program ... so long as you have several hours to fiddle and a looong time for rendering! If you have the time, tools and the inclination to play -- go for it. On the other hand, if you would like to be finished  this afternoon, painting the candle is an attractive alternative. So ... how would you go about doing it?

First, use your eyes. See that the candle flame is made up of a hotspot (the bright area where the color "burns out" to white); and a golden corona; and a halo of light; and notice that the candlelight brightens and warms other surfaces close to is, such as the plant and the astrolabe. You want to make a separate layer for each of these effects: the layer where you'll brighten the highlights on the nearby objects using pale "paint" plus the overlay merge mode, plus a tweak of the layer opacity; then, a layer where you'll paint the halo, using a big, soft brush, very little opacity on the brush, and a tweak of the layer's opacity; then, a layer where you'll paint in the corona, in a flame shape; then the top layer where you'll paint in the hotspot. The pure white hotspot wants to be the top layer; the halo wants to be under the yellow corona...

Painting in the candle flame (the corona shape), you can either hand-paint it, if you're good at drawing with a mouse or mouse pen; or you can use an .abr brush, which would let you zap on the flame shape with one click. If you're using an .abr brush, just make sure to use the right kind of flame, and to get it the right size. You can download .abr brushes from many places (a Google search is a great place to start), and they're often free. You can also spend some serious money on them, and get professional quality brushes. There are marvellous selections at DAZ and Renderosity. Happy browsing!

The other kind of light in this image is an electric light:

In the original render, even though I set a couple of point lights to get the shadows, the lights themselves don't look very "real." Sure, you can spend the next couple of hours fiddling with the 3D settings, and you can get fantastic results. But ... I was in a hurry. Alas, I almost always am! So a bit of post work was the answer, to come up with some lovely results in a few minutes. Just as with the candle, the light bulbs should have a hotspot, a halo, and so on You don't have to worry about painting a corona, because these are physical objects -- big plastic bulbs. So you'll create two layers: the hotspot layer and the halo layer. The hotspot is easy to paint: it's just pure white, where the light "burns out." The halo is done with a big, soft brush, white "paint," and then adjustments made to the layer's merge mode and opacity...

Speaking of the blend/merge modes ... there are loads of them, and the only way to learn how to use them is to play with them. I can't give you any quick way, any "Richard Of York Gave Battles In Vain" mnemonic, because I don't think there is one! But if you just play with the modes, you'll soon get a feel for it.

Similarly, with the effects menu ... there's several different kinds of "blur," even before you get into the other effects, and there are scores! Play. Some, you'll use often. Some will be seldom used. Just remember that you can apply any effect to an individual layer, and then mix it down with the blend/merge mode, and the opacity for the layer.

Painting the shadows and highlights on fabric is a lot of fun. Use the exact same techniques outlines above; work the shadows in one layer and the highlights in another, not forgetting the blend/merge step, and tweaking the layers' opacity levels. Use your eyes and see where the natural highlights and shadows fall, and follow these with your brushes when you magnify them. What you're doing is taking a flat image and making the highlights brighter, the shadows deeper...

Or, you can also decide that the image has an area that "glares" -- meaning, something is so bright, it's "shouting" out of the picture, commanding the eye to come look at it, even though it's an unimportant part of the image. If you go back to the raw render, third from the top in this post, and have a look at the stack of books, you'll see that I dimmed down the bottom of one of the books, which was way too bright in the context of the rest of that part of the painting. Also, have a look at the wax on the candle -- it was pure white and "shouting" out of the image, trying to command the eye. The viewer's eye tends to go to bright places in an image, and linger there, so you might need to dim down some of the brighter zones that aren't important.

One of the things you'll soon learn is how to configure your brushes:

Configuring Photoshop brushes is another skill best learned by playing. You can change the angle, hardness, roundness, shape ... almost anything you need to do with a brush, before you even get as far as the colors and opacities. There are even a few blend modes that can be applied at the brush stage, but I usually find that tweaking the blend and opacity at the layer level works better. 

The simplest job to do with the color picker and brush is to fix "dead pixels." These are pixels that just didn't render in a 3D image ... they finish up white. Or, in a digital photo, they're those "UFOs" or blotches in the sky, or in otherwise plain colors. (Or maybe a bird that blurred through the shot? Or a blot on a window?) Fixing these is easy. Use the color picker to sample the color zone right next to the UFO or dead pixel. Choose a tiny, soft brush and dot in the color till the problem is cosmetically fixed. Do this in a layer on its own, if you can. If you absolutely have to paint directly onto the image, you'll need to "duplicate layer" on the bottom layer where the image itself lives, because Photoshop doesn't let you add anything to the original layer.

So, how many layers can be used to retouch an image? It's only limited by your computer's ability to handle the size of the project file ... but when you're done with a section of the work (for instance, the candle, or the lamp), you can also "merge layers," taking a whole bunch of layers and turning them into one. This can help to control the number of layers you're handling.

When the retouching is all done, you can look at softening, sharpening, resaturating or desaturating the image as a whole. This should be the last phase of the project. You won't know for sure what changes you'll need to make until the whole thing is done, because in the course of the retouching you can find yourself brightening or darkening various areas, such as this:

Until you're finished, you won't be quite sure how bright, how dark, how soft, how sharp, things need to be in he final image, so resist the temptation to mess with these "global" values till you're here:

The original DAZ Studio image uses Michael 4, wearing the Victor skinmap and the Midnight Prince hair set to blond. (The face and body morphs were designed by me.) The costume is the M4 Veranil pants ... and I wish I could tell you what the shirt is, but I can't recall! All the textures were changed out for my own before the scene was rendered. The furniture is the B9999 Queen Ann antique chair and coffee table. The lamp is from the Modern Furniture prop set. The room is the AS New Age Room. Outside the windows is the Dystopia skydome, set for "overcast." The floor was done by increasing the gloss and reflectivity and then adding a displacement map for the textured effect. The window glass was made more reflective and less transparent. Most of the books are from the Apartment Zero prop set, but the big, thick book as actually the "Bible" from the Mesh Manglers Vampire Hunter prop set! The plants and candle are from various DM prop sets, all mixed and matched, and the astrolabe is from The Magician's Study prop set. The scene was lit with a spotlight outside the windows pointing in, plus an off-camera light on the character, plus two "bounce lights" simulating reflected light from the floor, plus a point light on the candle and two point lights on the stand lamp. It was raytraced at 2000 pixels wide.

Hope this helps ... thanks to all those who asked for this feature, and thanks also for bearing with me while I got around to doing it!

Jade, July 26