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kobaltkween — Wistful Contemplation
Published: 2015-01-23 09:27:24 +0000 UTC; Views: 2688; Favourites: 24; Downloads: 29
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Description
Poser, Photoshop--
Hello and thank you for taking the time to view my work!
This image has a kind of two fold purpose. It began as one of the two plain demos for my Essential Materials 02 manual. One of the many, many advances I've put into this new version is enhancing my manual with several more example images per entry, including one showing many different options. Since I've also expanded the number of materials from 20 to 48, this project is... prodigious to say the least. I wanted to start doing more fun images, but this manual has been kicking my butt. Anyway, I was thinking about the conversation with babaugaliano on my lighting tutorial about how realism was only a starting point, and I decided to try to work this image a bit more than I've been doing recently. And hopefully show a small and simple example of what you can do with a realistic base.
I took that original image into Photoshop, touched up the hair a bit (which is almost always necessary), and added Curves and Levels adjustment layers, which gave me a bit better visual drama. Then duplicated the render layer, desaturated it, applied an auto level, and gave it a Soft Light blending mode. That really made the skin pop, but darkened the clothes a bit much, so I roughly masked the clothes. Then I made a sort of vignetting gradient layer, and put it on Color Burn at 40%. I duplicated that layer, put it on Multiply, upped its opacity to 100%, and layered gradients on a mask to control its effect and not make it so simple.
It wasn't much, but I think it's a lot more striking and artistic than it was originally.
Credits:
Alice 5 Morph (RDNA) and V4 WM (free) by Aeon Soul
S4, A4, and Morphs++ by DAZ3D
Nana by DERIDERI (Rendo)
Classy Sassy Hair by Studio11 (Rendo)
Corset Dress by Biscuits (Rendo, free)
Five pairs of sling-back pumps by idler168 (DAZ3D)
Garden Deluxe Part 2 by ARTCollab (DAZ3D)
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Comments: 20
Nice garden furniture. 
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I to enjoy the swing... But with her would be better!
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Very pleasing to look at. Her pose and express- Good. Her skin, as you say, does POP, IMHO
Nice work.
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Thank you! I'm really glad you like it.
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I like the render, but my eyes move to the wood. The material is of quality, but the grain of wood on the objects not so good. I commend you for the hair.
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Thanks for the comment! Yeah, I know what you mean about the wood. But there's only so many hours in the day. The textures on one object in one demo for one material were beside the point for both purposes, so I didn't re-texture it. Besides, demonstrating familiar content with different materials _is_ the point of the manual/promo images. That swing is from Garden Deluxe Part 2 at DAZ3D, and my guess is many people have it because it was free for a short time. If I re-textured it, I'd be demonstrating textures not included in my product. Same goes for its sharp edges I'd like to bevel. I don't want people unfamiliar with the limitations of materials to get the impression that my product was able to soften edges or included wood textures.
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Yeah, I think that's what she's doing. Just taking a moment to think and move without moving.
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You have captured one of those quiet moments that make life worthwhile.
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There you are!
And tell me: how much fun did you have while doing all this photo-retouching work you so well described in details?
Once again you get the gist of the issue
I'm not saying that who elect to stop his work at the realistic render is not an artist. On the contrary. The choice of the subject, the choice of the pose, the direction, intensity and color of the lights... all these choices make the difference between a average/fair render and a good/outstanding one exactly as much as they make the difference between a photo taken by an amateur that use only a point-and-shoot camera on holidays (like me for instance) or the one taken by a professional photographer. You can immediately tell the difference at the first gaze.
I just want to give you an example: babaugaliano.deviantart.com/ar…
This is just a simple (may be not so good) attempt of photo-composition with some strong lighting effect in Photoshop. Nothing fancy. Just two pictures (subject and background) put together. The two pictures taken individually are already amazing (links are on the page). But how much more amazing they look once put together and refined in Photo-shop?
To me, as I said, the realistic render is just the starting point: it's equivalent to go surfing the photo-stock websites choosing subjects, backgrounds and accessories. Then starts the other fun part that is the post-render work and that those who elect to stop at the single render they will miss.
Moreover, likely of us poor old-computer users, you can sometimes accept even a less realistic intermediate result (maybe by using IBLs instead of IDLs) but still be able to achieve an outstanding final result.
Finally, if I may make a suggestion, you should also post the original picture so that everybody will appreciate how much more striking and artistic result can be achieved by having some more fun on Photoshop (or any other photo-retouching software they prefer to use)
Great work.
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It's kind of funny. So it was fun, partly because I hadn't done it in a bit. But if I do that kind of touch up- mainly color adjustments and corrections- too often, it gets tedious. I have to either go much further into postwork and really spend time painting or leave it alone for while. Otherwise I find myself in a kind of a rut. Sort of like when I spend too much time doing studio style renders. I find I need to shake things up every now and then.
I definitely agree with you. Since I favorite a great deal of photographs, I'm hardly one to say that you can't have artistry without special effects. I deeply appreciate the craft that goes into visual art basics like composition, color theory, etc. I so envy people like Laticis who seem to have an innately excellent composition skills. Conversely, I also know photographers often do much of the same types of retouching I did to this just as a start. I know that retouching is a skill and industry all to itself, and is so common in all media that I just read an article that said even the media stars in the photos never see an untouched photo. They're shown "raw" photos that are actually just a first draft retouching.
I guess that's a long way of saying I appreciate the craft behind making a striking image, as well as the craft needed to make a good image better.
I do like your photomanip, but it immediately makes me realize why I like working in 3D instead of 2. I feel an instinctive need to rotate the figure to the right around the Y axis. Which always feels possible to me, even when it isn't.
Just speaking entirely personally, I wouldn't say people who don't postwork miss out on fun any more than I'd say people who don't build their own content do. I do _far_ more pre-work than post. I pretty much always touch up my figure, sometimes tweaking for hours with the Morph Tool. I spend less time touching up dynamic clothes, but more in the few cases that I use conformers. I pretty much always replace all the materials in my scene, as I did here. I've written scripts to streamline scene wide edits. I bring content back into Blender and make morphs. I edit or replace textures (though not as much as I could, as IamZandar commented above). I convert clothing to dynamic, which sometimes involves (highly) editing the mesh. I convert clothes and such to different figures (if entirely inexpertly). I've even added particle grass to scenery in Blender, then exported it back out to Poser. And all of that is in addition to what I build from scratch.
Most people who do heavy postwork don't do any of that. It's just not where their time goes. The opposite is true for many content creators; they put the bulk of their time into crafting the scene before clicking render, not after.
I don't think either way is missing anything as long as the person doing it is happy with their craft and its results. I realize you weren't denying any of that craft or devaluing it, just pointing out how enjoyable you find postwork. Thing is, as I also said to IamZandar, there's only so many hours in the day. Some people would rather spend it editing renders, and some people would rather spend it editing 3D content. I'm kind of an anomaly because I am (for now at least) kind of in the middle on that. Probably because my core artistic inspiration is light, which leads to materials, which in turn leads to both textures _and_ meshes.
My big concern with my work, and especially my tutorials, is that it doesn't make people with a more stylized approach feel pressured to make their work more realistic. My big hope is that people use my work to have a better understanding and use of core shading and lighting principles, so they can do what they want with the knowledge.
To be honest, I don't know of anyone who eschews postwork because they don't know what it can do. They avoid it because they want to show how much they can do without it. Some of them, possibly even many of them, will look at the difference and consider my improvements "cheating." The same way many modelers consider using 3rd party meshes cheating. That's the type of attitude I want to be careful to distance my work from. It makes art into a competitive game that favors the ones who set the rules.
Anti-content community groups and artists who devalue content community art have galleries with a _very_ high proportion of fan art where they give little or no credit to other artists whose work they derive their art from. They only call it cheating when you get around doing what they like to do: 3D modeling. I appreciate the content community because I personally find character and costume design much harder than modeling, and most content community artists create a new character with each render. The "postwork is cheat" crew are mostly people who are more comfortable with the more technical aspects of lighting and materials than the more organic techniques of image editing. The opposing group, the ones who say "real art" is determined by more qualitative properties that technical renders inherently lack and always will, are often intimidated by technical information and defensive about learning technical information. They're more comfortable with organic techniques, so that's the rules they set.
I don't think my work would change someone's mind who thinks postwork is a cheat, and I certainly don't have a way to give artists who mainly create content for rendering more time. I follow some top-skilled professional 3D artists who always use 2D finishing techniques on their work whose galleries might make an effective argument about the value of postwork on highly realistic works, but my work just isn't on that level (yet). The ones I think I _might_ be able to reach are those who think of realism as a hindrance to artistry. If this image is striking and artistic enough for them, a comparison image might help show that a (reasonably) realistic base is no more of a limitation than a less accurate one.
That's one of the reasons I described my postwork. I mainly wanted to show how quick and easy it is to add drama to a reasonably realistic render. And frankly, it's exactly the same kind of postwork I've been doing since PPP days (levels, curves, hair touch-up, etc.). It just gives me _way_ better results.
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Thank you for the extensive and exhaustive reply.
Obviously there is a wide variety of people with an even more wide variety of opinions. I read the same about VIPs having their photos always... "touched up" a bit as well as I read comments from modelers that consider the use 3D Party mesh just cheating. I respect everybody's opinion and, to some extent, I can also understand their point of view but I definitely do not agree with them either.
To me it doesn't matter where somebody's art is coming from or which tools he or she used. What matters is the impact, the feeling, the pathos that that piece of art emits. I don't measure it by the time the artist spent on it or whether he/she used some preset content or he/she started from scratch.
I would say that I'm also in the middle. I too like to spend some time in modifying the original content, although not extensively as you described, mainly because they are never exactly what I really want (how can they be?). However my "modification" is generally limited to the editing of material nodes (color, transparency, maps. bumps etc.). I also tried to use more intensively the morphing tool but unfortunately my old laptop doesn't like it as much as I do: it responds so slowly to each stroke that the use of it become quite impossible. I limit it to smoothing a bit dynamic clothes. That's the maximum my laptop allows me to do at the moment.
What I found very interesting to read in your reply is that you are using Blender to modify quite intensively your subject. I do have Blender and I tried (unsuccessfully so far) to make it work but I never found on the net a clear tutorial explaining how to export Poser content (or scene) into blender and then to import them back. I would appreciate if you could put together a nice tutorial for that. I'm sure I'll not be not only one to grant eternal gratitude
Finally, I also tend to convert conforming clothes into dynamic. I love dynamic clothes.
Back to Pre-Render work VS Post-Render work, I totally agree with you. Speaking personally, I tend to focus more on post-render just because it allows me to achieve what I (my laptop) can't achieve. It's not a "cutting the corner". It's a "going around the corner".
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Quick reply on Blender importing and/or exporting: Oh, in terms of morphs and props, it's just a matter of settings. I've posted mine more than once at HiveWire3D. Let me see if I can find it them:
Making figure morphs - hivewire3d.com/forum/showthrea…
Import and Export settings - hivewire3d.com/forum/showthrea…
To get back into Poser, and do what you need to do:
Props - File > Import Wavefront OBJ
Prop Morph- Object > Load Morph Target
Figure Full Body Morph (FBM)- Figure > Load Full Body Morph
Figures are a bit more complex to bring into Poser, and often require more work after that point.
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Oh, thank you very much.
That's will definitely open for me a new horizon of experiences I can't wait to start exploring
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