How to achieve the Desaturated Rembrandt Style?
Write Idea
Posts: 435
The problem with not having formal training in digital art, is I have no way of recreating styles I admire. Feng has wonderful postwork on their images, and I've seen this technique done on a few other renders. Anotehr similar artist name escapes me. It's Olympios(and-some-numbers). I would reach out and ask, but artists don't really share their post work process. Which I completely understand. It takes years to find one's voice.
A few examples...
• FN Lilly HD
• FN Simba HD
• FN David HD
The only way I can describe it is a desaturated Rembrandt style (Rembrandt was famous for browns and beiges). Anyone have any suggestions of where to start looking? Or suggestions on reproducing the style? Photoshop tutorials might help, but use PaintShop Pro.
Thanks in advance.
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Maybe a large amount of the effect is done in render, by using a lighting set up to make deep shadow, soft lights, and no super harsh highlights nor rim lights.
I am not going to pretend to remember how to use paintshop pro as I stopped using that in 2003. As an alternative people are probably more familiar with, Photopea is basically just photoshop but free and in browser. You could play with Adjustment Layers in Photopea or Photoshop or Gimp to adjust saturation, contrast, vibrance, levels, curves, channel mixer, to get effect you want. Levels may be good adjustment layer to use because you can play with the low, mid, highlight lighting ranges if the render result is not to your liking.
Many Daz artists are deploying those sepia filters (purple/orange filters which i think look ugly and they flatten the color range) which is definitely not giving Rembrandt, it's giving more amateur hour. Im not saying that's what's happening in the examples which you have posted, moreso just noting a trend of heavy handed postwork filters which I personally think should be avoided if going after a more subtle Rembrandt look.
One logical place to start would be to play with lighting. Instead of using shades of gray, add a touch of brown to the light color. This example is still way too saturated, and I only edited the color of one of the three lights, but it will give you an idea of where to start. Also in addition to tweaking the light color, cut down on the light intensity a bit too, so as not to get the render too bright.
The example shows default lights on left, and adjusted light 1 tint on the right. Granted, it's not the look you are going for, but it will give you an idea of a place to start.
The Rembrant effect you're referring to is called Chiaroscuro . Type the word into Google Image search and take a look at the images and see if that's what you want.
This product will instantly give you the effect: https://www.daz3d.com/oot-male-iray-light
This product also gives you very beautiful lighting - but your person has to be sitting in exactly the right place in the scene. https://www.daz3d.com/classy-cover-photo-light-set-vignette
Are you on Windows or Mac? Do you have ANY image editing software, or app, or tool, on your computer?
I believe Fauvist is 100% correct. If I were doing it. 9 would render the portrait using nice moody light from one side (an HDRI), and then in an image editing program, create a mask that consists of a gradient from left to right black to white. The levels and saturation can then be adjusted to place one half of the face in bright light and the other half in near darkness. I have a more sophisticated photo editing program that can create the equivalent of iPhone's Studio lights where you can create a synthetic light on one side of the face and the program will create synthetic shadows over the rest of the face.
This https://www.daz3d.com/artistic-lighting-kit-rembrandt-lights
This https://www.daz3d.com/dramatic-iray-lights
This https://www.daz3d.com/luminosity-drama-iray-mesh-lighting-system-for-dramatic-lights-and-shadows
The tonemappings option can also be a place to play to change how a scene look:
This https://www.daz3d.com/ptf-legendary-lights
If it is the colour effect that you're going for - then what you want to do is have the content in your scene to be in colours of tan, beige, brown, grey, black, muddy darkish blues, greens, orange/browns, - that would be the colours of the background or room, and the colours of the clothing and hair - you don't want bright pink or blazing red or saphire blue, or emerald green. You want darkish colours to begi with. The lighting is called LOW KEY lighting - which basically means "not bright". Then after you render your scene. Import it into virtually any image editing sofware, ad you want to DESATURATE THE COLOURS, LOWER THE CONTRAST, and apply a colour effet - like SEPIA, or TOBACCO, which gives you that old fashioned mafia look, or old west saloon look. And you'll end up with the kind of image you are describing.
Legendary Lights and Male Iray lights are SO good. Also try Fast Production Lights for Iray. I use it a lot.
The color effect is exactly what I'm looking for. Where light and shadow interact with one another (thank you for teaching me chiaroscuro). I have been toying around with this desaturated/sepia look. And I just think mine look cheap. An EXAMPLE from my DAZ3D gallery. Maybe my scenes are to bright.
Thank you everyone for the suggestions and ideas!
This has a lot of possibile lights https://www.daz3d.com/iradiance-light-probe-hdr-lighting-for-iray-expansion-3
I suggest you start with ONE light product. The light product that most closely matches the idea of what you want. And experiment with that to try to get EXACTLY what you want. If you exhaust the possibilities of that light set - THEN buy another light set and exhaust the possibilities of what you can achieve with that. Don't buy a whole bunch of lighting products all at once because you'll just get totally confused.
If you give me permission - I can upload your image to my computer and see what I can accomplish with adjusting the contrast, brightness, the sepia effect etc. If not, you can eventually try the effects yourself.
I have more lights and HDRs than I can use in one lifetime. I don't really use spotlights at all. I prefer just to load an HDR and play around with the way the light hits the figure until I'm happy with it. I can tell the problem is with the postwork. I rendered this (using Fast Production Lights). I spent about twenty minutes in post desaturaring, lowering the contrast, adjusting the curves, and throwing in a very tiny, tiny sepia filter. Mostly used a Hard Light with the layering. It still reads as amateurish in my eyes.
Any and all help is appreciated, my friend! I just posted a new piece above altered & unaltered if you'd like to take your own spin on it.
I would look at the Tonemapping options, you can already do some of what you're trying to do inside Daz Studio.
The Rembrandt portait is in the public domain from the National Gallery https://www.nga.gov/artworks/79-self-portrait
This is my quick and dirty attempt at a transformation into a Rembrant style image.
the golden age preset in Dynamic AutoPainter
https://www.mediachance.com/dap/index.html
damn I never have enough spare cash to buy this program
You can do that be setting up for portrait lighting using Colm Jackson's, Dimension Theory's, or another ready made portrait lighting setup and then I believe changing the ISO to 800 in the render setting.
Or maybe doing a light vignette instead of the usual dark vignette and clipping out the obscured part of the vignette. That's also in the render settings.
Or reduce the contrast is also very similar effect. It's what happens to some photographic prints on some mediums.
From my experience, not all of the light sets mentioned above are equally useful for that kind of render (not saying they're not great, they are). The Classic lights set for example gives a very white, hard light which will take a while to transform into a Rembrandt set up. Personally, I always try Photography Masters first for this kind of thing, they bring along many variations of settings and a nice backdrop as well. It's here: https://www.daz3d.com/photography-masters
This is also what I do and supplement with emissives primitives where needed.
Closest i have to Rembrandt is attached, which is supposed to be a modern version of a dutch masters painting of Saint Sebastian (no postwork). I think to get a painterly effect might require style transfer or filters in something like Topaz. But for lighting, you can probably focus on getting the deep blacks and diffuse light in iray with little postwork.
In a lot of those paintings, there are bloom and halo/haze effects of lights, which you might be able to reproduce in iray using bloom or something in front of the camera lens.
Beautifully done, @Fauvist & @WendyLuvsCatz. Thank you for all your input!
I took one look at your image (without reading the caption), and the first thing that came to mind was, "Looks like an homage to St. Sebastian." So, good job on the reference and image! Ironically, my debut novel, the main character is named, Sebastian. Lol.
Never really used bloom effects, but I'll give it a shot.
And thanks for all your wonderful products, @UncannyValet. I have both Vadim and Gopniks. I use the skin textures as a basis for a lot of my own work. You create interesting looking characters that look like real people. Please keep up the great work!
If want to get that look using postwork, look up dragan style effect. You should be able to do it in any image editing program.
Write Idea,
Looking at the examples that you pointed to -- particularly in FN Lilly and FN David -- calls the mind a technique used in photo editing: Crusing the Blacks. It harkens to old film in which the dark tones look dull, lacking luster.
Good thing we live in the digital age. There are pre-packaged color grading effect out there, or you can DIY it. Using a tone mapping tool, you essentially raise the shadows and flatten it out. This is easier to grasp visually, so head over to this tutorial "How To Achieve That Crushed Black Film Look in Photoshop and Lightroom". That's where I grabbed the screenshot shown above.
Hope this helps.
Cheers!
@Write Idea: I think the Depth of Field hasn't been mentioned yet. In your examples i have the impression fstop(camera) is quite low. Here is my go for the effect, but more painterly (click to enlarge):
For the colors I upped gamma, lowered saturation played with the white point.
SC HDRi Lights for Daz Studio by SecondCircle and ITF Studio HDRI Pack 01 by InTheFlesh are two free HDRI packs that might help you. Former is available on Renderosity, latter on Renderhub. Warm up the light temperature in tone mapping and add bloom. Good luck!
So i did a quick render portrait of Feng's James and traumatically pulled on 30 years of using Photoshop to create selections and adjusting levels:
Start
Finish