Photoshop course to make renders look nicer?
Illidanstorm
Posts: 655
Can someone recommend me a photoshop course that helps to make renders look better in photoshop?
I'm not sure if something like that exist, maybe it's the same as in normal people photography? If so, can you recommend a course about that, which helped you to improve your renders in photoshop?
Thanks
Post edited by Illidanstorm on
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I just started messing around. Figure out what looks good to you.
The idea is the same as enhancing normal photography. Playing with contrast and brightness is probably the first thing.
Then go from there. Add different effects (plenty of online tutorials for specific things like soft focus), decide what's right for your work.
I'm hardly an expert, though.
Youtube has so many photoshop tutorials on image enhancing and retouching. The same techniques would apply to renders.
Not sure about a specific course, but I would look up photoshop retouching techniques for photography (and if you're leaning toward a specific type, such as portrait or outdoors, look up those). I've used similiar strategies that I learned from my photography classes to enhance my final renders in Photoshop.
"Levels" and "Color Balance" are two of the filters I use on almost every render.
@Illidanstorm
Learn about lighting. Iray is designed to emulate real world lighting. You will always get a better result if you start with a better render.
Not to mention that acquiring the Photoshop skills to properly enhace images won't be easier or simpler than learning how to create a better render in the first place.
Sveva at Rendo has some great tutorials that really worked for me. Her intro to backgrounds makes the difference between blah renders and pictures that pop.
What do you mean by better? What do you think your current weaknesses are, and what would you like your renders to look like?
There are many tutorials right here at Daz. A quick search in the shop on "postwork" came up with many options.
This first one is even free.
7.1 Great Art Now - Postwork
And several others that have a cost to them.
Search results for 'postwork'
Like Fastbike said; I used to fix my images a lot in Photoshop, but its actually better to invest the same time perfecting the light in the scene itself. There's quite a lot that people try to adjust in Photoshop that you can actually do in-render.
WARNING: Do not listen to me, I'm a silly purist but I do know that the result counts and not the tools used.
If I need to adjust a render in Photoshop or whatever, I had made a sloppy job to begin with and go back to Bryce and work to improve the result. I have only rudimentary experience with Iray, 3DL and Carrara but with all of them it is possible to get a decent result without having to resort to a 2D program. Admittedly, there are cases of special effects that need to be added in post, but that's not the rule.
Re: what novastrider and Horo said above, I'm on the other end of that spectrum; I more or less treat raw renders as the starting point for edits. But my style is closer to paintover/photobashing, and for that I look up tutorials on video game concept art, matte painting, and motion graphics. It depends on whether you're looking to tweak your renders a little in terms of lighting/color grading; if you need to fix issues like clipping or add minor special effects; or if you want to use Photoshop to dramatically change the look from render to final product.
@Illidanstorm, what sort of work are you hoping to do? I don't want to fling a bunch of tutorials your way if they won't be helpful, but it would probably help narrow it down for folks who have favorites to share.
Working with renders in Photoshop is just like working with any other image in Photoshop. The more you understand the tools in the program, the more you can do and the better you can make your renders look with postwork. I would recommend looking at general tutorials and beginner tutorials that are designed to teach you the program itself, rather than looking for anything specifically geared towards renders+Photoshop. The latter sort will probably assume that the audience has a working knowledge of Photoshop to begin with. If you don't mind paying for good tutorials, I highly recommend looking for Photoshop courses on Lynda.com and Udemy.com. Lynda has a subscription-based model, and Udemy is fairly inexpensive and has frequent sales.
As Richard said, the best thing to do is to figure out what needs improving and go from there.
If you think the scene is blah, look at some tutorials on composition, rule of thirds, camera angles, posing, etc. (Not just photoshop tutorials, but photography and cinematography tutorials as well.)
If the colors are washed out, check out tutorials on levels, curves, gradient maps, the color wheel, etc.
For lighting issues, tutorials on curves, color balance, and vibrance, among others may help.
On YouTube I like PiXimperfect and RafyA. (I'd swear I had a few more channels saved but I can't find them.) PiXimperfect does tutorials by subject while RafyA does photo manipulations. RafyA's series isn't structured, as such, but I learn a lot watching his images develop.
Some things won't come out as nicely if they're corrected in Photoshop versus corrected in Daz Studio, but most of the time, it's good enough for me. I'd rather spend 5 minutes playing with curves, levels, and layers than spend 2 hours dorking with lighting.
Hope this helps.
+1
80-90% of image quality is in the lighting. This includes how to position your lights so they work best with your scene. Lighting interacts with posing and camera work. Also important is the rule of thirds. For iray lighting Dreamlight has a lot of good tutorials.
The great-art-now tutorials are a good place to start and are free.
Overview
https://www.daz3d.com/7-steps-to-great-art-now
Step 1 Software
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-1-software
Step 2 Scene-Making
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-2-scene-making
Step 3 is posing but I cant seem to find it anymore.
Step 4 Camera
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-4-camera
Step 5 Lights
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-5-lights
Step 6 Rendering
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-6-rendering
Step 7 Postwork
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-7-postwork
I would start with these so you can determine what you need or want more work on so you can invest any money spent on tutorials wisely.
I agree with mwokee. The OP needs to provide more details in order for anyone here to actualy provide appropriattly targeted help.
Realistically, "making renders look better" could be photoshop, but it can also involve posing, lights, camera, scene setup, or even learning more about the capabilities of DAZ studeo itself. DAZ studeo has a lot of diffrence making features that may be missed by the casual untrained user such as push modifiers, smoothing modifiers, the in's and outs of the paramaters & surface tabs, what render engine settings do, etc.
What any of us recomend will depend on what specific problems your trying to achive, and any specific issue may have multiple correct solutions.
Also, diffrent tutorials might cover diffrent topics in photoshop also. What to steer you towards requires us knowing what specific problems your trying to solve.
If you want photoshop specifically this is the correct route to go in my opinion. You first need to know the software before you can target the specific issue's.
Most of my personal problems involved knowing daz studeo itself better, and proper lighting tequniques. Practice and 'trial and error' have also been great teachers for me.
I have not done postwork yet, generally I have not needed to as I mostly did character portraits for D&D/Pathfinder and Champions RPG characters. I also plan on getting into postwork now that I have a computer capable of rendering actual iray scenes in under 3 days. And photoshop basics is where I will begin, some of the other tutorials I have purchased on other topics such as comic book creation do assume some basic photoshop proficiency.
+1 for PiXimperfect. Another one that has a huge collection of high quality free Photoshop tutorials on Youtube is Phlearn. Their paid tutorials are fantastic too, but they cover all the same topics, just faster and in less depth, in their YouTube videos.
IMO there are two parts to any question like this...
There's the "mechanics" part, and there's the "art" part.
Mechanics means learning software and how to apply filters in Photoshop and do color balancing and stuff like that. It's what most of us focus on because you can watch some videos and spend some time to figure it out.
Then there's the "art" part, which few of us ever mention. It's about learning or knowing what "good" is. It's about not the "how you get there" but more about "where you should go". It's about having a natural talent to be a good artist. It's why some go to school for many years to learn how to direct that talent to make amazing stuff.
The "mechanics" part is far easier, and what we like to focus on. Because obviously we're already great artists.
As Richard and others have implied, personally I'd recommend first learning the "art" part, then the "mechanics" part becomes a lot easier.
Although personally I have zero art talent, so feel free to ignore what I say.
Not specifically Photoshop but there are many filters that can make dramatic differences to renders as well as photographs, Topaz Labs has a cool studio that’s both standalone and a plugin I use often on photos.
Things like Dynamic Auto Painter or FotoSketcher are great too
Also there is postwork where you paint in extra things like smoke, magic effects, sunbeams or even the scenery and people etc.
this can also involve tubes which can be renders with an alpha channel as brushes
I rendered out tiny images of plants I created a gimp brush from that changes the plant each stroke to quickly paint meadows etc