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Anyone familiar with Pink Floyds "Comfortably Numb" might be aware the guitar solo has been voted in various music publications, blogs, and guitar players as one of the most indelible electric guitar solos ever recorded. Whats generally not discussed the solo is not one take or even two; it's pieced together from over a dozen takes. The best moments of the different solos were cut up and dubbed into one final mix. What you hear on that song are the best parts of those takes cut and pasted together to make the final product. So while this is not the work of a flawless guitar player it is still the work of an talented and truly inspired guitar player.
And any good album you've listened to was recorded like this. Anyone who tells you a band showed up in the studio and recorded in everything in 2 days and made a gold album is a P.R. - B.S. specialist. Even authorized live albums go back to the studio so engineers or band members (or studio musicians) can fix things that didn't work the first time.
This is post work.
I remember seeing comments on the internet from a commercial artist who did amazing portraits. He said part of his workflow was tracing a photograph and then filling in the details. Many commenters cried, "You're cheating!" To which he responded, "Why cheating? I'm getting paid for the final product, so whatever tools I can use to get to that result, I'm going to use. I'm not in school still learning how to draw, I'm trying to make a living."
Even Da Vinci and many of the greats "cheated" by developing pinhole cameras and other devices so that they could trace an image and make it more realistic.
Poser started off life as a tool for artists who couldn't afford to hire real life models.
I remember in an college art course we discussed Duchamps "Bride" which the artist felt had was somehow not complete. When the enormous glass piece was moved to the Philadelphia museum from Brooklyn it cracked. The curators of the museum were embarrassed to tell the artist but supposedly he saw it and thought the damage completed the piece. Wikipedia has a slightly different take on it but since neither of us where there it my have be an allegory released by the legal department so his family could not sue them later.
This practice is very common amongst artists in the art world. In airbrush class there was a special room with projection equipment all setup. For artists that achieve photorealism most work from photos.
I generally use as much post work as an image needs. Sometimes an image looks fine as is and just needs my signature added. Other times, I go crazy adding little details like dirt, mud, smoke, etc. Often lighting could use a little nudge on the levels to go from okay to much better. And little things are often easy to fix with the healing or clone brush instead of re-running a render for hours.
Postworking can be a lot of fun, too, in my opinion. If you enjoy it, do it. Unless they're paying you, you get to choose what tools you use to craft images you enjoy creating.
Looking plain and boring straight out of DS don't sell products. You have to add some post work to make it look more interesting. I do think there is a limit on how much postwork should be done, but his is about selling products. People buy what looks interesting and catches their eye.
I used to try to "be good enough" at rendering to not use postwork. I will say that doing so made me a very proficient user of my software, especially when it came to lighting. (And if you aren't going to fix clipping or pokethrough in postwork, you get good at using magnets/D-formers!) However, I have since realized that there is SO MUCH MORE I can do when I use postwork. Depth-of-field (pre-Iray, at any rate) was crazy slow in both Poser and DS, but using a Z-depth map, I could accomplish the same thing in Photoshop in a matter of minutes. I also frequently adjust color balance and contrast, apply a "softening" effect, add special effects or atmosphere, and about a zillion other things. Now, about the only time I don't postwork an image is when I'm doing promos for items I sell.
I don't do a lot of postwork.
In part because I want to see how much I can do with DS, and in part because I use a trackball. I'm sure there are many others who can use a trackball perfectly to get wonderfully painted lines, but I'm not one of them. (Maybe if I played more video games...) And every tablet I've had has met an untimely end. I'll do some color and brightness adjustments, maybe add an artistic filter or two, compositing when I have to split an image, but I keep the stuff that requires actual painting to an absolute minimum - usually just cloning out poke through or adding some shadows.
Also, unlike apparently lot of people, I find postwork tedious and uninteresting (which may be in part because of the lack of tablet). The fun part for me is coming up with the story behind the picture, which happens when I'm putting it together.
That said, I don't have any problems with people doing postwork on their art. Postwork can do great things for art. Sometimes it's neccisary.
I'll note that with postwork I do almost nothing requiring freehand art. The closest I get to THAT is painting a layer mask so that, say, stars don't show up in the hilly bit underneath (I'm finding stars, 99% of the time, way easier to just add in post unless there's a lot of reflective surfaces)
Hence the reason it has had a manequin in it forever....
An image straight out of DS without any postwork doesn't have to look plain and boring. More often than not it just means that you haven't put enough work into the DS side of things. I've created some nice images using only DS and no postwork at all that people on the site I post on have really praised up. Are you saying that DS on its own is incapable of producing good quality images? Because I disagree.
I know that better, more exciting images sell more products but if you enhance the look of a product in a promo in any way by postworking the image then you are essentially lying about the product (like Photoshopping in make-up ads, which does happen I know). This can then lead to complaints and refunds when people realise that the product does not look as advertised. I know I've returned a few things now where the reality of the product did not match the promos. I guess it just depends on whether PAs want to mislead their loyal customers or not.
Any postworking done in promos that doesn't impact upon on the look of the product is somewhat tolerable.
I fall into the postwork is a tool camp. I do usually say that an image is postworked, particularly if I'm trying to help someone out or explaining a process.
I can usually get pretty good renders without postwork, but some effects are so much quicker to do in post, as opposed to using the renderer. Raytraced Depth of Field comes to mind as a render time vampire. Much easier to set up a depth render pass in Carrara and then use that in Photoshop to add the DOF.
I would suggest posting a render you aren't happy with (pointing out what detail(s) you aren't happy with) to try to get suggestions about ways to improve those specific aspects. They may be issues other people have encountered, then found solutions to, in the past. It is also possible that while you can see something in your render doesn't look right, you haven't figured out exactly why, and others may be able to point out the reasoning it looks artificial. I would also suggest googling for reference photos to compare your render to. While of course those photos could be photoshopped too of course, just picking something you feel looks "right" to you and comparing it side-by-side with your render may be enough to figure out what the difference is and what you need to improve.
Back in the Stone Ages before personal computers were a twinkle in Steve Job's eye, I took photography in college from a respected commercial photographer. Although you were always fooled into thinking he'd just pointed the camera and clicked, he "postworked" the beejeezus out of his pictures in the darkroom. In fact, this is how I know that the little symbols in Photoshop for dodge and burn are based on tools and techniques for enhancing your image as it developes. I had to stand over pans of toxic chemicals for hours waving little wands over my pictures. I can't remember the exact quote, but he always said something to the effect of, "$@^!! what reality provides! It's your responcibility to make the image you capture into art."
In obeidiance to his teachings, I always postwork the beejeezus out of my 3d "photographs" too.
*cough* Maxfield Parrish..*cough* Norman Rockwell... Working from a reference photo is no worse than working from a sketch. Whether you project it on your "canvas" or just look at it. What kind of loon would ever sniff at an artist for working from sketches?
I agree. There's nothing at all wrong with using reference photos. If it's a portrait that's being painted, it may actually help the artist because their poor model doesn't have to hold position for hours and hours.
I also think there is great value in drawing and painting (or rendering) what you see in your mind's eye. The ability to transfer an idea with no physical reality to paper, canvas or pixels can be a very valuable exercise for every artist.
I don't like doing postwork mostly because I am lazy. :) Also I am doing rapid-fire rendering (I do a webcomic and I need to get roughly 1 panel a day to stay ahead of the game in my one-page-a-week posting schedule). Postwork just slows things down. I generally only do postwork under certain limiting conditions:
- For FX work... like speed lines or motion blur. It's easier to do this than try and find a way to render it
- For odd/unusual lighting effects... again same reason as above.
- If one figure is giving me lighting problems vs. the rest (such as in the background), I will re-render thatn one against blank, and then composite it in and screen it, then play with opacity to make it pop against the background. Rarely necessary in Iray.
I used to do postwork a LOT more in 3DeLight... Often I had 7 lights in 3DeLight and rendered each one individually and then composited and mucked around with screen/opacity layers in PS. I find I don't need to do that in Iray. Sun-Sky and position the sun right and I'm done. Or else HDRI and (a little more difficult) position the globe right and I'm done. It helps immensely that I can control exposure in Iray also.
I want to point out here... I agree for products used in DAZ. But some products are made FOR postwork, like Ron's Explosions, and those clearly should be exempted from this rule.
Well yes, thats true. Which is why I said in my original post "this is what you can achieve with this product in just Daz Studio (or the listed software) alone".