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Agreed
Since the OP asked about preferences, here goes! I started off in photography, where post-work is often called the "digital darkroom" for a very good reason. Back in the film days, absolutely nothing save a Polaroid went direct from camera-to-print. Lots of big decisions had to be made regarding tone, contrast, and cropping within the darkroom to bring out the best that the negative had to offer and to better match the photo to the venue it was going to be sold at. Photoshop and similar programs allow for the same work to be done. But because there are so many bad examples of Photoshopped photos out there, the very term "Photoshopping" often implies very bad things, especially to people who only know digital photography.
I use postwork on renders the same way that I do with my photographs. I warm up the colors, improve contrast, do some cropping, include some film emulation, and so forth. If I am going after a more classical illustration look, then the processing becomes more intense and requires more of my postwork skills set. If I am trying to compensate for my computer's processing power limiting things I can do within DS, I will use compositing techniques.
However, it's very important for me to ensure that my initial render has the lighting and overall composition that I desire. I don't believe in Heroic Photoshopping. A good image can be made better with good photoshopping. A bad image will still look bad even after intensive photoshopping.
I try to do my renders straight up . but 80% of the time . they end up in photoshop for one reason or another
When I create animations there is 100% post work required
I am, by no means, great at post work. I simply have found it useful after too many imperfect renders.
One way to get better at it is to try to emulate a style that requires post work. Noir, watercolor, comic book... Go find a style you'd like to imitate and find a tutorial online. Then take your render and do it.
There are so many GIMP tutorials, you just have to find something that fits your interest.
I pretty much postwork everything at least a little bit, typically using GIMP.
First, if I'm using a background image (like in my Walking a New Path image), I do the merging in postwork since I have more control over the placement and color / exposure matching there.
Second, one "trick" I read about using Iray is to render larger than I want the final image to be and reduce the resolution. This will help cleanup some of the little fireflies that are left over from the original render. Depending on lighting and how much noise is in the image, I may also copy the original image into an additional layer, run a slight gaussian blur against it and blend it with the original to cleanup more of those annoying bright dots in darker areas.
I'm also finding that depending on the intended display for the final image, I may need to adjust lighting and colors. For instance sometimes I'm rendering something that I know will primarily be seen from a phone which has different display characteristics than my computer monitors. For that, I'll often copy the image to my phone and use the free Photoshop Express to tweak it to display better on those devices.
I post process all my images. I use the Nik Filters in Capter NX2 to do all my work. Its mainly colour enhancement and such.
I used to think it was enough to do a render using Reality or Iray, but it isn't really. Post processing makes the image look more vibrant, alive, etc. I use a lot of Topaz filters and those are god send. Makes thinks so much more interesting.
something else to think about: your computer is slow and cannot handle the full scene? Render background, middleground and foreground in seperate steps and put them back together in photoshop. Right now I am working with Airport Island by PW productions. All items together, my PC seems to do pre-processing for ever. Split into seperate pieces each layer renders in 10 minutes with IRAY.
I almost always do at least a little post-processing on my images and sometimes do a whole lot of work on them. Mostly it's because I have very little time available to me for my art hobby - at most a couple hours a week, and I just can't spend the amount of time needed setting up the scene and all the effects I might want and then waiting for it to render. DOF for example is easy to do in the render, but can double or triple render times, while just rendering a depth pass and doing it in post takes seconds.
Another example might be something like the person early in the thread who said they wanted to do an effect like heat off pavement. That's pretty easy to set up in-scene: all you need is a whole bunch of partly overlapping nearly invisible spheres with varying sizes and IORs. But you'll need to let it render for hours, possibly overnight. Doing the same thing in Photoshop takes just a minute or two.
About the only times I don't do any postwork at all is if it's a quick challenge of some sort where that's the part of the guidelines or when I am learning how to use some new feature.
I have to add that there are two types I need post work: one is to create an Orton effect. This needs to blurr and over expose a copy of the render and combine it with the original one (Photoshop work). After all, the original Orton effect also needs two exposures put in the same slide frame to be projected. The second is if I do a spherical HDRI from a scene. This scene needs to be rendered several times with different light settings to fake different exposure times and these renders must be added to create a true (faked) HDRI (HDRShop work). So yes, the silly purist also uses post work if it cannot be done directly.
I recently did an iray animation in DS and that is one situation it makes complete sense to do post work - render the background once and then render the moving model with it's shadow and plan for the shadow to be on the ground otherwise you'll have to expose hidden background models for the animated model's shadow to fall on. The logic behind hat is basically how all compression algorithms work, including jpg and other types of compression. The amount of render time it saves is days & days on my 7 year old laptop with intel HD Graphics
I prefer the rendered no-post process look for now for my 'art look'. Often, I even up the pixel filter radius to 1.0 & change it to mitchell. Others don't like that crisp exacting look. Of course others have their look and I often like them and considering copying the style but really that's not practical for me personally.
..ah, "pre-work" I actually tend to do more of that, like creating photo backdrops using a plane rather than the backdrop function, or altering textures before applying them. On that bus stop scene above see the stenciled graffiti on the bricks"? that is just one example. I simply went into the texture file, applied it as a layer then saved it with the a different name in the texture folder. This way it conforms to the bump and displacement so it looks like part of the texture.
I found it kind of interesting that same graffiti image ended up on a product in the store.
https://www.daz3d.com/junk-yard-wall.
Also the cityscape backdrop is a photo on a plane where I changed the sky portion of the photo to an alpha channel so I could use an IBL sky that gave more depth instead.
I don't always post-process, but when I do, I use Ron's brushes liberally (although I need a bit of practice).
To me DAZ Studio is just a start. But beyond just fixing poke throughs and basic tone, I really didn't start until I got Dreamlight's Light Dome Pro-R. Aside from doing all the scut work of breaking out layers to render then combining them in Photoshop, it taught me HOW to layer, how to light. Sure, it's all hidden behind encrypted scripts but you can see what's happening.
When I migrated over to Iray, that information still holds: render by lights and combine them in a graphics program and you can get a look you want without having to rerender a million times. I'll use PS brushs, mostly Rons stuff, and I'll usually go overboard but that's my personal limitations.
I think that might be more what the OP is taking about - adding details you didn't have in the render. I'll add smokes and other such in post rather than render them out with a smoke object. It gives more control BUT sacrifices lighting details that a smoke object might accomplish easier than trying to hand paint them in.
I should have probably added that when I started Daz, I already knew how to use Photoshop and do photomanipulation (not always well, but I know how lol). I chose to not use any post processing the first year I used this program because I wanted to have a firm grasp on the basics and take my renders to as close to what I was trying to achieve without any postwork. This was my personal preference because I knew that it would be very easy to just say, oh, I will fix it post and not go to the trouble of learning how to get the best out of this program. I am happy that I did, because I think I learned a lot more than I would have otherwise. However, my ultimate goal is to make my art match what's in my head and I really don't care what tools I use to get there. I continue to learn and try and make each render better but quite frankly, I love doing postwork, and I love rendering and combining the two makes perfect sense to me. And I have no issue with anyone who chooses not to any postwork or with those who do very basic rendering and do a lot in photoshop. To each his own, if you are enjoying what you do and happy with your work, that's really all that matters.
...I was working with photomanips in Gimp as well as working with Inkscape for over a year before I was introduced to Daz.
I have an image in mind (hopefully early on in the process, but eventually); I use whatever tools will get me there, including post-processing, moving parts to Blender for Tweakage, re-rendering, combining with what I've already done; more post-processing.
... Whatever it takes.
I postwork everything, sometimes to make things look more real or often to look less real and arty. I do try to get the best render I can though first and even adjust gamma and toning, even though I know I can do that later in postwork. I also like to render everything at 99.8% although I know later, it propbably won't matter with all the postwork I do LOL.
I start all my renders as a base for the finished product.
I use Carrara - it has the advantage of being able to render out a whole series of render passes in one go.
I can imagine that less flexible software would encourage you to do it all in situ.
For me photo realism is a craft not an art. For me adding the hand of the maker is important.
But each to their own - of course.
Craft is just as important as art otherwise we would all be eating our meals off Picassos and Derains - and not ceramic dishes.... ;)
some of my recent work mrhugoball.com
Good news, this thread wasn't closed, so I could read opinion/preferences of others. We all have opinions, different methods of acheivement. Now, I know why? certain artist desire or need postwork, etc..... Threads shouldn't be segregated to one set standard, just sayin
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Hah!....no worries, i do not get insulted easily. I am all for people having their own opinions and ways to do things. I hope my comment was not insulting to the purists. I was trying to be clear that it was only "the way I see things"........to each their own
edit.... I am starting to assume there was a post that got deleted which I missed
Oh, I think its not really a purist versus purist thing...Since plenty of purists are criticizing non purists. its the typical artist argument we see in the forums where people try to define what is and is not art, what qualified in the gallery based on their perceptions, and how something is or is not art based on narrow qualifications which seems to align with their specific artistic 3d preference. Inevitably threads like this get locked.
A better description would be General Artists verse Daz Enthusiasts, which would make sense in the context of THE DAZ GALLERY. If it's supposed to be a showcase of the Daz Studio environment and meant to show (only) what Daz Studio is capable of, then yeah some sort of imposed limit make sense. Why make a gallery to show off the results of your user base and have works that DO NOT use your assets.
Should there be Octane renders?
Should anyone be showing off content NOT available in the Daz Store?
Does the post work stray so far from what's available in Daz Studio, that it misrepresents the tools supplied by D-studio?
In you think any of that is logical, then comes the How much is too much? And what about the tons of POST WORK products sold in the store.
Obviously Post Work is considered a viable choice by the makers of Daz themselves.
If you want your extra credit, then you add it yourself- in your signature/watermark. "Rendered in iray, no postwork"
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Threads shouldn't be segregated to one set standard, just sayin
So do you have an opinion on the Daz Gallery being segregated? Because that's one of the opinions that keeps getting floated.
I sincerly apologize if to you and RawArt if you felt that my question was an insult to you and Raw Art. That was not the purpose of the question, but when you start using words like "purist", they can lead to nasty results. The word has a value, and often a negative one. Hence I felt that it was better to speak up.
Quite obviously, that was a mistake, which I will not repeat.
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That other thread was locked for different reasons, its whole premise was that Postwork didn't belong in the gallery and was kind of ranty besides.
If you read the original thread you will see what that opinion is, since it was clearly stated there.
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A fair bit at least. I also see DAZ as method to get material for composite images.
My computer is slow so rendering whole scenes takes forever.
Rendering a character to use in composites is much quicker and photography is my main hobby so those go well together.
I also have no proplem with using stock images.
I'm going to forget about this topic and move on............ Doesn't really matter what I or anyone shares. No sense of having this thread closed as well, due to difference of opinion. First Amendment doesn't apply to this forum, all I've learned is, to keep thoughts to myself, and share elsewhere my opinions are accepted and understood Peace to all and have fun creating