NEW! Novica & Invited Guest Contributors Tips & Product Reviews Pt 6
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So several people have asked about the add-on, I can't post a commercial link, but if you go to graphicriver (it's a net, not a .com) the product is under the Add-ons-Photoshop-Actions section and is called Oil Paint Photo Action CS3 to CC15 and the vendor is KitKet.The product number is 12425929. (I'm not doing this as a referral link or referral, I do NOT profit from sending you there. Want to be clear on that. I'm doing it to share with you, that's it.)
If you haven't tried Photoshop before, and may be intimidated, this is the add-on to start with. SUPER EASY. And of course, I'm here to help. Again, Photoshop via the Cloud is about 20.00 a month, does anyone know if you can do it per month, or do you have to sign up for a year? This plugin would be worth getting if you can do it month by month, you could do a batch of your renders very quickly.
This particular product has ten types of oil painting options, I only showed you #1. So within each one, you have a lot of settings to tweak to get totally different looks.
I see myself using about four of the ten different options right away. (Some are really abstract, which is cool, but I don't NEED them at the moment.)
I'm in progress on testing products and saving them before I get to the final step, so you can see that stopping anywhere along your "tweaks" will get you totally different results. Here's a pencil product that offers black and white, or color pencil sketching. BOTH THESE ARE THE BLACK AND WHITE OPTION. All I did was change the blending option. This one is called Pencil Sketch Photoshop Action by iconFactory (be careful, there are a LOT of products with similiar names. Be sure and check for the vendor) Product 9515778
Using one of my London renders from awhile back. Original is posted first. I didn't sharpen it or contrast it, nada, so we can see how well the add ons do with regular details.
The second one is Pass Through as the blending action, without tweaking light/dark, contrast, anything. Next, I switched to Soft Light, still without changing light/dark or anything. BAM! It went to color! There are still many, many sections left that I can tweak!
I am going to do a separate post and take you inside the tweaking so you can actually see the user interface- and how easy it is to create your own little masterpieces. This is the third one from below, and remember it's a WIP and already looks fun!
Okay, here comes an inside look!
First image, I am going to go into Levels 1 by right clicking. No two actions are alike, it varies from vendor to vendor.
Second image, self explanatory.
Third image, self explanatory.
Okay, now for the next part. The Blend Mode on the original was Multiply at 70% for Opacity. I'm going to show you a few of the Blend Modes and do them first at 100%, then the 70% like the default was, then raise the Blend Mode back up to 100%- but drop the FILL MODE down to 20%. (That will show you some of these look similar depending on tweaking the fill. So play with those Opacity and Fill Opacity sliders!) These images go vertically (columns, not rows.) There are 3 screenshots for each Blend Mode.
CLICK to enlarge and click again on this image. It's 2000 pixels. Scroll up and down!
BE CAREFUL- Although I have this as a new window, it is not "taking." If you X out, you'll leave the thread. Stupid forums!
And the last four Blend Modes. After this section, there are still many ways to tweak the render. So, getting an idea how much you can change your original? Each option has options...but it's not confusing. Slide sliders and see what happens. It's more like playing with magic than getting frustrated at trying to figure out what to do.
Again click to enlarge, click again.
Okay, so I am going with "Multiply" and Opacity at 48% and Fill Opacity at 55%. (Below)
Invited Guest Contributor
OK so I returned to Venice by Aurelio to do the Iray render, but unfortunately I must have failed to save the scene yesterday, so I had to start from scratch and did a different angle and no boats. For that reason, I did a new 3Delight render first.
On the left is the 3Delight (same skydome and similar lights to yesterday - as well as I can remember).
In the middle is the Iray render, just Sun/Sky at 15:00 on August 10th, draw dome on, ISO set to 80 because the default sun was a bit brighter than I liked. I let DS do an auto-conversion of the materials as they came out-of-the-box. The water looks rather muddy and flat and almost solid enough to walk on - although it does look a bit like that in the smaller side canals in Venice, if I remember rightly!
On the right is a manual conversion of the materials - I changed the shaders to Iray Base and tweaked. I increased the bump on the buildings to double and the window glass to a thin glass shader but with the original texture maps. The canal comes with a "mud" mat zone and a "water" mat zone. I applied the Iray Base to the "mud" layer and changed the water to the Iray water shader, but kept the original bump map with increased strength and the original diffuse colour. It then looked far too transparent - I suppose the shader is meant for clear water, like in a glass and I'm not sure how to improve it. My solution was to add a brownish-green hue to the Diffuse colour for the "mud" layer, which I think produced a reasonable result. Not as good as the 3Delight original though, so since that renders so well (and is also massively faster then an Iray render with glass and water shaders) then I think I'll stick with that most times.
Wow, Novica, you've been busy! I don't suppose that plug-in would work with Photoshop Elements sadly. I wish I'd forked out for Photoshop when you could still buy it for keeps - I don't like subscription services (except PC+, OK so I'm inconsistent
) so I'm reluctant to join up with Adobe and so I soldier on with the baby brother product...
Some of those effects are really neat though.
Next, I right click Hue/Saturation and I posted the one above next to my tweaked version. I circled the popup and you can see the sliders I have to choose from. I'm going to show you something interesting about increasing the saturation- see how it added color? (And this is still in the Black and White option. You can do this sketch product in Color option from the very beginning.)
Second set of images: showing what happened for the Visible Copy 3 section- by merely changing the Blending Mode (again) you get various effects. The numbers are the Opacity and Fill Opacity (that we fiddled with earlier. Easy smeezy!)
I went with Normal (like the Hard Light, but makes it harder to change other settings later as the effect is so vibrant. I was going to go for Black and White, and Hard Lighting is too colorful.)
Next, in the third set, I wanted to show you Pattern Overlay. You find it the same way as the others, by right clicking on one of the sections, going to Blend (not Edit) and on the far left their will be a lot of options (you can see some of them, but Pattern Overlay is too far down to screenshot and keep the image visible) So I did the pattern large so you could see it, then shrank it a bit. Look at the sky to see the lines. It's a nice touch, particularly with this sketch style. (It is bigger than what I would normally have it, so you can see it.)
Now I'm doodling with the Gaussian Blur. What a difference you can make in your render. Totally changing the look! Remember all of these are large screenshots, click and double click after it opens!
And two of the "final" renders, playing with the Gradient Lighting. I made the center archway dark, so there's lighter at the start where we enter the street, the arch is darker, and it helps contrast the lighter building then dark sky. Then I used the same render and increased the contrast, midtones, etc. So done playing. Gotta go test more of the other plug in actions.
Here's the darker final. So now go compare this style to this one: which is the same product (from hours ago, lol. I am done showing all the intricacies. You get the idea!)
It says, "This action will work easily in photoshop CS3, CS4, CS5, CS6, CC, CC 2014 and CC 2015 all latest versions"
I wasn't familiar with Elements so I actually looked to see if it was in the Creative Cloud bunch, and it's not (was going to test it for you.) I went to Amazon out of curiosity because when they announced CC, we scooted and bought the CS6 before the discs shot up in price. I did look up the monthly vs the annual, and the monthly is $20 if you do the annual plan, but it's $30 if you do it by the month. I did see that on Amazon at least, there is a 30 day free trial, no obligation (posted by Adobe as the vendor, obvioiusly.) If anyone wanted to try it for free, I can speed you up by telling you which "actions" I bought and how they're doing. (I bought quite a few in the past week as I really have to get my book illustrations figured out. Keep in mind most of these are $2-$4.
I like the water in the first and third renders, if I ever need help with water I know who to go to! BTW, someone posted about the little bridges they used to go with the Venice set- it's in a thread over in the Commons. I don't know how to spell it so can't really look it up- I think it started with a L' M... I'm going to go search bridges a minute and see what I find.
MelanieL - the Iray sahder does have absorption settings, but for those to work the water needs to be a volume and not a simple plane. Try substituting a cube primitive, enlarged in x and z, for the default plane if the mapping permits. You might also try putting a cube just under the plane, giving it a refractive index of 1 to avoid doubling up and using the absorption setting on that.
Do you have any water that you've done that way Richard? Sounds like a neat trick.
Thanks Richard - actually I think the water does have volume - I put a camera end-on to it and it seems to be a squashed cube with a plane for the mud stuck on the base. I meant to take it into Blender to check, but haven't done that yet. I used the "thin" water shader first, then after I noticed the thickness of the water prop I switched to the "thick" water shader. Problem is, I don;t really understand what all the parameters of the shader do yet and experimenting on Venice wasn't a great idea as the render time (even spot render) was too much for the time I had available tonight. One day I'll (a) read the manual and (b) experiment a little on a simple cube.
Here's some quick clicks and the defaults (no tweaking) of "Comic Paint Art" plugin. London never looked so...well...whatever it looks like. There are 8 painting styles, I'm doing the others right now. These took four minutes to do.
Only two of the other three are worth showing- one is mostly gray, like having a very opague layer over it.
This is Creative Oil Paint Photoshop Actions andI got a popup saying the oil plugin is not found. I don't know if that is required, I tweaked the same as the other items, but you will really, really have to test all the Blend modes in every single layer. So be aware your results are going to be very different from mine. Worth it, I think.
For oil option 2, I will tell you to pick Multiply for the blending effect on Base Image Copy if you want the pen effect seen in the second one. (look at the stones on your right, lining the sidewalk.)
Shown: Oil option 1, Oil option 2, Oil option 7
Here's Oil 7, in the middle of doing the layers, not done but I liked this so far. A change I am going to make from Overlay blending to Normal is going to make it pen and ink, coming in a minute. So look at these next two- they are the exact same render but Overlay vs Normal in "Layer 1." I kept the olive shading, you can change it.
And here it is, below, switched over to Normal, 100%. You can really tell the difference on the left, look at the large horizontal gray building trim, running over the windows toward the arch. One looks more like camo, the other is blended more. Next I'll show you what happened when the 100% was lowered.
And below with 20% opacity. (When I continue, I'm putting it back to 100%)
And I went "different" for the final result on Oil 7, more like pen and ink. Keep in mind you could keep more of a solid oil look if you chose different Blend modes. (such as Normal, Overlay, Screen. Pick one, slide a slider, change to another one with a dropdown menu. Easy!)
Hope you've liked the day of Photoshop actions.
This is Photo To Impressionist Painting. There's three options, with high and low resolutions. Showing you two of them, out of the box, no tweaking.
Melanie was nice enough to share Venice, so sharing Venice back at Melanie
These are without extensive tweaks, giving an idea of what default and some twiddlin' will do. A couple actions also don't offer a whole lot of options, they vary based on what the add-on is trying to do. Sketch and Cartoon for example, differ a lot from Oil Painting (usually.)
First, a fun little tip. Using Pencil Drawing Effect Photoshop Action: In "Drawing" layer, keep Normal as the Blending Mode, reduce to 73% Opacity. That gives you more shading. What this layer does, is start taking you back toward the ORIGINAL, which is full color. By reducing the Opacity, you can get some cool hints of color into your image, or doing what I did and use it to get some more shading/tone back into the drawing. Then simply increase your midtones, shadows, and contrast, then desaturate and you have a darker lined, black and white sketch.
The original was very light, like the first colored one below, and black and white only. (not shown.) This program is meant to do black and white, with some color brought in if you wish.
Showing you the original that we will be working from.
Okay, next I did Photo To Painting.
Then Photos To Classics Oil Painting.
And a fun one, Creative Oil Paint Photoshop Action
And the original again to make it easy for you to compare.
Glad I'm providing you with material for fun! Some nice effects there, Novica
Yes, you did! I wanted to compare a waterscape with the town, and the buildings have really different textures to test. One thing I like is up on the Photo To Painting one, the look of the textured paper. It's really noticeable on the brown building side on our right. Kinda like watercolor paper.
According to this thread, Christian, aka Wancow, passed away 7/22/2015. Wancow was so very helpful in the forums, (had a great lighting thread.) had a good sense of humor, and always supportive. Will miss you Wancow!
Oh boy. What a sale. Be sure and read your popup banner. The REV sale has changed.
Steve posted:
"If you earned Rev Ups, you're still getting the discount you earned. Everyone who had Rev Ups should see a message when they log in. Instead of saving 40%/50%/60%, people save: (1 rev up) 46/50/60% (2 rev ups) 52/60% (3 rev ups) 58/60% (4 rev us) 64%"
And as I said in the other thread, how is it fair for you to be stuck at your discount the rest of the month? (I'm at 4 REVs so it doesn't impact me.) I get that savings for the rest of the month, and if you're at one rev, you have to spend your booty off to get 60%. (Buy 3 things at once.) People are trying to find out right now if the items are still six days for featured.
It was nice of them to take care of the frequent/daily buyers.
I'm always on the lookout for good hand poses anytime there's a new generation, and this one has a prop you won't see in the main promo- so check it out! The coffee mug has different patterns and liquid levels. (What product was it that didn't come with filled mugs? I'll look it up and post it back here. It was a coffee maker I think?) Here it is, the Expresso Set . So if you have that set, these mugs and poses would be a good fit.
Also note I linked the bundle for the poses, it is available separately.
This is Backyard Retreat which I think would be cool to link to Green Backyard Garden. Sasha for Victoria 7 is the gal and one thing I noticed was the Expressions (under Actor in Parameters) work very well on her. You know how some can look dorky? The ones I tested were pretty natural. It's Mane Hair and City Chic clothing.
The clothing is for Genesis 2 and easily fit Genesis 3, and the hair is for V4 and Genesis 2 and also easily fit. Please note, from now on, with the ease of posting links, I am NOT going to be writing out these ridiculously long titles anymore. If you like the product, there's the link, you'll see the lengthy title. If it's for a different generation I will tell you, aka, like I did for this one.
Invited Guest Contributors, feel free to do the same thing. With these "For Genesis 2 Female(s) stuff then Victoria 4, and Genesis 3 Female(s), enough is enough. Provide the main part of the product (the most easily identifiable) and that's good enough (with the link of course.)
This render went for seven hours because I wanted a good one. Those are Macleans Everyday Drinks and they are AWESOME with Iray, you don't do a thing except render!
Sasha for Victoria 7 again, the closeup. Rendered overnight. Same pose, a different camera angle. I like the teeth, they are not glaringly white and look very natural. As I said, the expressions seem more relaxed than some of the other characters- there's definitely an improvement IMO with Genesis 3.
I want to share an image I rendered last night. You mentioned Green Backyard Garden in your message above. This is Comfort Living Room and Green Backyard Garden. I didn't have to tweak any surface settings at all. It rendered this beautifully in Iray, just out of the box. All I did was move the garden behind the window and hide a garden wall. Then I added a sun node camera to direct the sun where I wanted it to shine. It is rendered with Sun Sky Only. The backdrop is just a recent photo with a nice calm sky.
(The Forum will not accept my image because the file is over 2MB. I had to resave at lower quality in Photoshop to make the forum accept it. I can't really tell a difference, though.)
Beautiful!
Thanks, I'd like to live there!
Me too. Maybe we could split the rent, because it would probably be more than either one of us could afford lol! Looks stunning.(Although I hope there's a door somewhere leading to it from another part of the house. It's got to be off to the left since that part of the garden is hidden, right?
I wish that set had a sliding door option, would expand the possibilities in a more practical way. (hint hint, nice follow up product...) The pillows look so real- like we could reach out and plump them.
Thank you for sharing. Impressive!!!!
I'm thinking of Stonemasons Pool House with the Backyard Retreat and Green Backyard Garden. Obviously, my main characters are quite well-to-do. Think of Dynasty and the Carrington family. It gives me a lot of options (since I've bought the fancy cars and planes, might as well use them lol.)
Your render is nicely lit- I do have a question. I've read about the Dome Mode infinite and finite settings- would a room this size be a finite or infinite setting on the sphere? For my outdoor Backyard Retreat, I used infinite.
BTW, another Photoshop product I bought/tested will take a smaller render and enlarge it and keep the details. You could render smaller, then enlarge. It's called Remarkable Image Enlarger Action V3 and the product number is 12363000 (again this is Envato, go to Graphic River (dot net) I tried it and wow. Went to 300 pixels, enlarged the image, and it looked even better than the small one. I don't remember which image I practiced on, sorry- but trust me, it does what it says it will do. Make your image HD and add crispness- once you use it, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it. (Although I don't use it here because I want you to see the products without enhancement.) But it's a WOW with that HD. The sample images there are a must see!
Envato is broken up into different sections, and this one obviously deals with graphics. The web page / blog themes are in a different section, and quite awesome. If you have a WordPress blog/site, check those out. Built in with Woo commerce if you want to have a store.
Eeek, I need help with Flashy Hair. I tried smoothing, collision, changing from sharp edges and corners to soft (DON'T DO IT, makes an escalator type line across the forehead/base cap) Then I tried increasing the render subdivision to 3. I didn't increase the subdivision itself. So there's your challenge. Anyone got the crinkles out of that hair? It looks nothing like the promos (which irritates the stew out of me. I should get the same look out of the box, and that's not happening.)
On the other hand, talk about a dream hair. Paisley Hair. (Genesis 3)
I'm doing Kathy with Paisley hair (took off Flashy.) So any assistance would be appreciated. I am doing Kathy in the same pose as Sasha, so if you can do it with more of the right showing (OUR right) I'd love to see how you handle the crinkles and kinks.