Adobe creative products and Daz, looking for suggestions:
thrain9
Posts: 108
Adobe creative products and Daz, looking for suggestions:
I am considering upgrading from Photoshop Elements to Adobe Photoshop and ran into a confusing array of options and apps on the Adobe site.
What do I actually need (if anything) beyond Photoshop itself?
What I Do Now:
1. Still renders only, I have no interest in video, animation, or audio tasks.
2. Iray rendering only.
3. Character creation and modification: ie Turn Victoria # into fantasy muscle women to monsters to birds of prey or "whatever strikes my fancy". This includes shaping, kit bashing, and texturing.
4. Studio Glamor & Portraits - primarily female
What I Want to Do:
1.Create billboards and background mats (I have the billboard tools sold in the Daz store, but PSE does not have the necessary alpha channel tools)
2. Full outdoor or indoor scenes with multiple characters (my PC is fairly capable, but quickly bogs down in IRay when rendering a complete scene, so I have to render individual elements, and be able to create cut out masks for layering in PS) (PSE can do some, but not all of this)
3. create my own HDRI domes from my own photography.
All suggestions welcome.
Thank you for reading.
/s/LB
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Comments
You just need Photoshop then. It can handle most if not all your criteria. But you'll need tutorials to learn how to do that well.
Dreamlight has a number of tutorials on this site on how to optimise your renders for specific needs. Offsite he has a number of bundled tutorials for sale, including primarily female glamor and portraiture.
ShibaShake has a number of great tutorials at Think Draw Art. Excellent resources, and a pretty nice monthly contest.
And Adobe itself has a LOT of tutorials.
Well, I dont own Photoshop and never have. I would recommend that you first look into a freeware option such as Krita or Gimp for editing.
If you need a image viewer, XN View MP is the best out there imho.
A paid alternative is Affinity Photo. It has a free trial so you can give it a shot. Its not subscription. https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
I use Photoshop exclusively for most of the tasks you've listed, and you shouldn't need anything else to do render postwork and compositing. But I second Mattymanx's suggestion to try an alternative unless money is no object, and I'm seriously considering transitioning to Affinity Photo since they seem to be trying to be an affordable alternative to Adobe.
I'd suggest looking at the cheaper alternatives also, although I do use Photoshop. The only caution would be if you are going to have to give the source files to a client you are better off with photoshop since they probably will not have the alternatives. As long as you are only exporting pictures it doesn't make a difference.
Also all these programs have a fairly steep learning curve so decide on one quickly assuming your time has value also ;)
I'm no professional but before I retired I used Photoshop at work for small projects. I got used to it and was reluctant to use anything else but when I retired I could not afford to buy it for myself. I tried Gimp and it does work well if you can handle the UI but eventually I bought Affinity Photo and feel much more comfortable with it. The only thing I have found that I could do in Photoshop but not in Affinity is creating animated Gifs - but Gimp can do that I think. I also dislike subscription schemes so I avoid them if at all possible. Affinity is relatively cheap and a one-off cost. I'm on the latest update and have not had to pay a penny more for the updates.
At 9.99 a month Photoshop is really not that expensive anymore. Along with all the plugins and styles and actions you can use with it, it's kinda a no brainer if you really want to get into compositing and postwork. One place that's great for learning is Creative Live. You can get a lot of their classes for free if you sign up to be notified of when they are live.
I started using Adobe Photoshop (version 3) in 1996. There aren't any other photo editing software that can rival Photoshop. I'm using CC nowadays on my desktop, and is waiting for Adobe to release the full photoshop version for the Ipad Pro. Meanwhile I use the Affinity Photo app on my Ipad. Affinity Photo app is an adequate alternative for Photoshop for most of the work you've described. I don't have the Affinity Photo Pro desktop version so I don't know how much more it offers. But for less than a quarter of the price ($49) of Photoshop CC ($239), I think you should consider Affinity Photo Pro.
You could dowhload a trial and see for yourself : https://store.serif.com/en-us/checkout/?basket=9aa7bfc1a43d112bdac5d3496c8e766d3af323238b795cff
Sorry, while $9.99 sounds like a small monthly charge, I have to look at the bigger picture and I am not paying $120 a year or be tied in to software that I always pay on, especially when there are other, cheaoer or free alternatives.
I have an older version or photoshop, paint shop pro and GIMP installed and I find i use GIMP most of the time anyway.
True. I guess I've just always used PS, so I feel crippled in other programs. I use a LOT of brushes, actions, styles and plugins that they just don't develop for other photo programs so I'd feel like I had half the program missing. I hated the subscription thing when it first came out since I had already paid for the full Master Suite way back when, but I got used to it since I do use the whole main suite and its nice to have the latest upgrades without thinking about it. Adobe Connect is a bit of a PITA though. I found GIMP to be just far too clunky, but I've heard good things about Affinity.
I use Affinity Photo and have been pretty happy with it for EXR compositing, retouching, whatever. You can't use custom Ps actions unfortunately (AP has a macroing system) or plugins, but LUTs and Ps brushes work just fine. It can't do animated GIFs, but there's always The Gimp for that. It's really not expensive for what you get, and there's that demo, so there's nothing to lose trying it. It's from Serif, and I remember them from using PagePlus in the 90s, so there's a lot of graphics experience behind it.
I guess it also boils down to the type of art you do. I only use an image editing program for simple edits, maybe contrast, color correction etc. I am not a heavy postwork guy, so if you are one of those that uses the render as a base and spends days, even weeks painting over the render, photoshop would probably be the program for you.
Yeah, I had the whole Serif suite back then and Affinity Photo is really the latest incarnation of Serif PhotoPlus. Nevertheless, it is a huge leap forward in quality from those days. The old PhotoPlus used to crash on a whim but Affinity is pretty solid (I can't remember a crash so far). Also, it has duplicated much of what I came to expect from Photoshop so I'm very satisfied. Support is quite good too and their forum is attended by Serif staff (hint, hint) and very helpful.
Affinity Photo is quite capable and I would recommend it. I've had it for awhile and it does things that Photoshop CS 6 can't do....I don't know about PS CC because I've never had that.
Edit: I guess I should add that the Nik Photo filters work in Affinity Photo just like they do in PS.
Laurie
How are you liking the EXR stuff in Affinity? The mac version of an EXR plugin isn't the greatest in PS so I'm curious.Or it could just be me setting up the passes wrong..LOL.
I've not had issues, but there's a 30-day free demo, so you can give it a whirl.