well i finally made my first model =) and im wondering what to do on photoshop i have it but i always see some image that say poser and photoshop...what they do in photoshop?....plz

A lot of us do postwork in Photoshop. By that I mean that after your image is all set up and rendered in Poser (or any 3d program), we take it into Photoshop and add to it. For example, some folks paint clothes, hair and other things or do sharpening, levels, color tweaking, etc. Other people, like myself, use Photoshop in addition to UV Mapper (pro, in my case) to make the texture maps that wrap around the 3d models. Laurie

I use it to hide my poor artwork by using filters and stuff to make unique images :)

I've used it to put in shadows and whatnot and try to blend the render better. Some filters are quite nice like making Black and White old film type images. Er, and I do what Dave-So does as well.

ahh been in photoshop for some minutes now and i dont know what to do...lol how do u blend the render better? EricofSD?....plz only thing i have done so far is put my name...

"what they do in photoshop?....plz " They cheat, is what they do. :) runs for cover

first thing I would do is make a duplicate layer. If you are new to PS, just start trying differnt things, hue,color correction, and so on... you can use the "undo" as often as needed(mine is about worn out). If you are not happy wtih the hair try painting a layer and merge. If you do not paint well, get you a hair or fur brush and try smudge. Just have fun with it.

Sometimes the joints like armpits and elbows have strong shadow lines that I use the blend tool to soften. Sometimes just softening the edges of the model. I tend to render at low resolution to save space on the HD (which is fine for being a hobbyist). The dodge tool works well on some of the real bright spots. Sometimes a filter is good. Sometimes I change contrast/brightness. Sometimes reduce saturation or skew certain CMY colors. There's a curve tool to play with as well. Your image, for example, look like the bikini was pasted on 2d after the render. No offense. It happens to me too. I'd probably increase the shadow line that you have and then take the bright red lining and darken it a bit as it rolls away from the light source. Maybe darken between the breasts directly on the red fringe. Maybe put in shadows around the hand on her leg so it looks like the hand is closer to the leg. Maybe reduce the brightness in the finger joints on the other hand. Things like that. I'm no expert. But go to my gallery and look at the thumb of the girl's face with the hair piece. The thumb has bright red dangling things that go off at an angle which isn't natural. That was part of the model. Then look at the full sized image. The dangling things go more or less strait down and they're green. The color change was done pixel by pixel in PS. To rotate the angle, I selected each leg, transform/rotated it, and then cleaned up the resultant disruption in the forehead texture by cutting and pasting sections that were close in tone and blending. And sometimes the only thing I do is put my name on the image.

If you don't mind, i'll screen shot your image and play a bit just to show what can be done.

You could use a soften brush and fix the areas under her breasts so they blend better. That white area needs to be toned down. Also do some work on the one arm where the bend is so severe. Add a little blush to her checks with the airbrush, use the RGB brush to lighten and darken areas on her eyes to bring them out more, can also do the same on her hair. I use Paint Shop Pro for postwork. Every now and then I get a Poser render that doesn't need a bit of postwork which is great but doesn't happen every time so a little postwork is necessary to smooth out bad render areas. I enjoy the postwork. And it's not cheating. [throwing my copy of PS at SamTherapy!] Poser can only do so much sometimes and I'd rather do a little postwork than share something I didn't do my best on.

thanks niles...do u know where i can get the hair brush?...that exist? didnt know about it. all i have done so far.... http://img.ranchoweb.com/images/joster/modelhatzjolight.jpg im pretty new to all this just to let yall know. and was hmmm...just testing the flare stuff heh. (the image may not work right now...takes 5 minutes for the server to upload it...and i just did it)

oo yeah eric that sounds cool thanks

If you have PS7...grab hold of that healing brush HEAL BROTHER ! HEAL !! HEAL !!! especially that left elbow kink :) The image looks pretty good overall for not having any postwork, LOL

Do a search here in this forum for "brush", I think there was a few links to some free brushes, also some postwork tips.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1039172

Try the links mentioned in this thread. Lots of good resources, and a brush creation mini-tutorial.

thanks for the help everyone. checking the link heh

lol...o man what a mess i have done...thanks god there are layers but i cant fix the elbow...dont know how...erm anyone?...and also in that link April already removed the link for her brushes....thanks anyway checking some other site 3d mange...something.

Subtle changes. Made the hair longer on her right side. Shadow line around the right hand. Changed the bikini red in the center of the breast. smoothed the shadow lines on the elbows and collar bone. darkened the shadows in the fingers on the left hand. Some contrast, brightness, color balance changes. Reduced the saturation a bit. Didn't use any filters, but there's a ton that you might enjoy for certain things. Look in the galleries and you'll get some ideas.

And you could soften the collar bone more, or put darker shadows between the breasts, or even add a reflection to the nail polish. Maybe even a subtle shadow line around the lower bikini half on the top edge. Shadows make all the difference in the world for depth. I'm still learning about that as you can tell.

Yee Haw....looking good Eric :)

yeah, and like flybynight says, the breast line and left arm pit could be darkened. Think of PS as an electronic canvas. Anything you would do with graphite or oils to blend, tone, and shape can be done in PS.

wow nice thanks alot... i liked the hair change there...lot better thanks. the elbow also looks better now....and the shadows of her hand, ahh how u did that? the show by her hand? its really nice

Oh, and NEVER work on the original. Open your original, save as with a different name, and go that way.

Something else I always do:Always make plus a render with bright lighting.With everything except drop shadows on. You can use this later as a layer If you want to brighten some details that may be dark on you other render layers... narcissus

wow im gonna go crazy i cant do the hair!! >.< how u did that eric? i though i could do it after reading a tutorial and still i cant like the one u did....it doesnt look hmm real...u know what i mean?....yours looks really good

Shadow around the hand I just selected a round feather brush, gave it a black color, and made it a bit transparent, about 85%. Then drew a line around the fingers on the leg. Then used the blend tool to smooth out the shadow. Hair I used the smudge tool and the smallest round brush I had. Just smudged it down line by line. I threw in some reddish lines in the main part of the hair with a single pixel round brush as well. Make the strands at the end with different shapes, not strait. Just like you would draw hair on a sketch tabelet. Wiggle the lines a bit. Then smudge back and forth a bit until the colors look right.

Ok, more hair, highlight on nail polish, tone down left thumb and armpit, blended lower breast line, smoothed colar bone shadow more, put in a shadow line on the upper edge of the bikini bottom, and highlight on the blue thingie on the bikini top.

Eric... that bikini shadow does wonders for reality of the clothes.. There is a short blurp about how the Vic 3 clothes don't look real over on the Yahoo Poser group...such as the bikini...they're just too tight to the skin, so this postwork is a necessity.

Kicking butt in postwork already!

smudge and blend tools for the breast line, armpit and colar bone shadows. Brush and smudge tools for the hair. Brush and blend for the bikini shadow, nail polish and centerpiece to bikini. Used the zoom tool to work on the pixel level. Kept most of the brush additions at 50% transparent except for the highlights on the nailpolish and centerpiece. Those were 100% opaque. While these changes are very subtle, they do add some 3d depth to the centerpiece and nail polish and the bikini is starting to look more like its part of the character instead of a paste on 2d thing. Shadow work can be fun, one stroke at a time.

wow eric u are amazing. Where is this smudge tool? please...and when u say blend what do u actually do?... thanks for all the help... the last pic is amazing.

I have PS 5.5. Blend tool is the teardrop, smudge tool is the hand with the finger. In blending, select that tool and then a brushsize. you want to work in a relatively small area. I use a circular motion with the mouse directly on the area that you want blended. Be careful when working with shadows on the clothing line not to overlap the blend tool onto the clothing. Keep the clothing line sharp. I think you have only one undo selection so every time you let up on the mouse, scrutinize and zoom out and back in before doing more.

wow eric thanks alot all this really helped. Thank you. Going to start now...gotta practice a little heh. Thanks again.

I think you'll find pre-work in your photo app, on texture maps, to be an even more effective way of getting better results from Poser. Start monkeying around and having fun. :O)

hmmm, my reply to fls13 seems to have not posted... I agree, the better the render the easier the postwork goes. Some things you can't fix unless there's a ton of time to do it. For example, the breasts probably should morph to her left a bit, like a slight sag with gravity, to fit the bikini top better. If that shifts the clothing too much then get the best you can and post work it. Her left breast can be smudged into place. Her right one would take more work. The bottom of her right breast would be smudgable, but the cleavage presents a problem in trying to fill the bikini and still keep the texture. The other choice would be to smudge a different curve and reshadow the right bikini top material. I find that as I fix things, other things stand out. So its good to get away from the image for a day or so and come back. Like the left thumb still isn't right to me, and she could have some highlight on her left thumb nail polish. Maybe give both more reflection. That's better done in the render though. The eye whites should shadow around the corners a bit too now, and that didn't stand out before. Now that there's more hair, the right neck needs to be shadowed more. Things like that. Sometimes its necessary to shadow the teeth, or the corners of the mouth. Reflections in the eyes can be postwork as well. And lets not forget the glowing nostrils, which you don't have here, but often does occur. Then its important to decide what you want to stand out. What will the viewer notice first? The eyes? The lips? Is anything else distracting that so that people don't see what you want? That's where having others look at the image helps a lot.

ahh...good point there. The breat with that bikini top was really hard to get it right....it didnt want to fit the way i wanted so i just left it like that....thats the way the real model i think david71?17?...something did it. just noticed the left breast...yeah that need a fix but kinda late .....almost done here with hair and shadows... but all u just said is really helpful now i gotta add more shadows around heh thanks again lol

Well, I just couldn't leave it alone. Reshaped the breasts and bikini top a bit and took a shot at the neck shadow and elbow fix. All with smudge and blend tools. Some paint added here and there. Little eye white shadow. And, er, some other things.

Joster, I recommend getting a good book on Photoshop - Inside Photoshop 7 is my favorite. You will find so many cool things that you can do with it that you can apply to your work. I use it for backgrounds, making textures, adjusting colours, adding poser people to montages and reall photos, smoothing dodgy bends, reconstructing very busty scenes that I could not render in one go, creating hair, touching up make-up, adding fairy wings, putting text on, drop shadows, oh I could go on all night! I actually had a life before I discovered Poser and Photoshop!

Me, I do more than half my work in Photoshop, usually... for instance... in this piece (which follows my normal pattern), I started with a thumbnail sketch, reworked it into a detailed sketch, matched it in Poser, then finished it in Photoshop to work in the details of the original sketch. BTW, I don't see how anyone can claim using Photoshop as 'cheating' -- if I'm going to label anmy part of the process 'cheating', it's going to be using Poser at all. Once upon a time it was frowned on to take photos and trace them, despite the increase in speed and productivity it created. How much moreso then to generate photo-like images and trace those? However, it's art and it's all a part of the process of expressing a creative urge. Whether you 'trace' like I did to a Poser render in the final image or like DAZ did from a resin cast of a mdoel's face to make Michael, or whether you work the entire thing from imagination is irrelevant, as long as the work you finish with either expresses what's in your head or, though a pleasant accident, you express something even better.

_dodger - I was taking the piss, hence the smiley. The only reason I don't use Photoshop in my renders is because I'm trying to get as good as possible at using Poser without recourse to other methods. I figured I'd learn more about it that way. Likewise, with my posts to the Poser gallery; I can't call 'em Poser renders if they're postworked, so I leave 'em be, warts and all. All that said, If I was creating an image for a client, I'd postwork like hell if need be.

Sam, hmm, I can tell you how to do good fire... B^) nods I actually have plans for a gallery system with which you'd list off the things you used (including some 'other' fill-ins) and upload, Rather than uploading to a specific gallery. That way you can mark somehting as using 3DSMax, Poser, and Photoshop, if you choose, and the work will show up in all three, but won't show up in the Pure Poser gallery, for instance. Sometimes postwork is a good thing, and sometimes it's better to let the render do it, if you're going for startling realism, especially. Myself, I have to admit that I get miffed when I see someone use one of my lightsabres but then postwork in the blade, especially when I referenced movie stills to get the blade exact, and their postworked one is a huge fuzzy one instead -- I never say anything to the artist, of course. It's their choice.

Nice thread you started here Joster.

Somebody postwork that poor girl's goosebumps, though- aren't they supposed to keep photo sessions warm with all those lights? ;P

The shiny PVC would reflect some of her skin IRL or in a raytraced render, I think. Along the lower edge, faintly, and quickly fadnig to dark as it will fade the opposite way. I think a hat band would hide some of the squished-ness of the texture on the hat.

I do mirror reflections, add my signature, stuff like that. I'm mostly intrested in how well I can get stuff to look in renders these days, not making a painting out of the render. I'm not saying anything is wrong with that, but I've done computer paintings in the past, now I want to see how well I can get mesh to look in a render.

wow nice one those Dodger and Jim. interesting the way you guys work with photo...well it will take sometime for me to get good with it. and thanks for all those tips. (jim really like that hair looks pretty good...)

One other thing that PS is good for is experimenting with lighting. Take a quick render in there and you can shift color balance as if you had changed lighting colors in Poser. You can even set up spotlights and whatnot in PS. Granted that doesn't cast shadows, it does give a bit of an idea as to what is going to stand out when moving the lights around in Poser and that's a heck of a lot faster than a render cycle. Dodger, I agree with you about the once upon a time thing. We all think of "real art" as our hands and a pencil/brush and paper/canvas. Some artists stretch their own canvas and consider it cheating to buy a canvas board at the store. I suppose the debate has to do with how much one creates from scratch and how much one uses ready made off the shelf products before beginning. IMHO, PS, as an electronic medium, is much closer to a white canvas than a program such as Poser. But also, tools are a wonderful thing. Why struggle trying to paint a little bush in a canvas landscape with a single camel's hair when you can take a fan brush and make the same bush in a fraction the time? I have a ton of brushes in the bucket here. And I have more than the 8 basic colors in oil tubes. I like to think of Poser as a really nice fan brush with some really nice color blends in the tubes. SamTherapy, however, has a very excellant point to make in the purist department. If you want to get to know a medium, such as Poser, then the longer you struggle with it and the more you learn it, the better off you are. And if you go to postwork to fix little blemishes all the time, its a good indication that you're getting lazy and in need of more learning with Poser. So I can see why some consider PS an essential companion to Poser and others think of it as cheating and yet others think of PS as the more conventional with Poser as the cheat sheet. Isn't art theory and philosophy fun?

This is one of the most interesting threads I've read in a while. I've learned a lot about what people do, and why. Great topic, Joster.

You can do just about anything you can imagine...

wow hankim thats beautiful...amazing...im really impressed by that one. ----------------- Yeah SamTherapy, hope this topic help some people and not only Joster =)

The only thing I would add to my commentary above is that IMHO a true artist goes beyond the simple medium. A white canvas on a board could be labled "Polar bear in a blizard" without even a fingerprint on the material. Take Poser, load a model, load a clothing item, and call it "Polar bear in a blizard". pose that model with a ready made pose and you're moving towards something that comes not from the folks who give it to you, but something from your mind. Move the pose to match the image in your mind and you're a step farther. Load a texture and you have something pretty. Make your own texture in uvmapper/PS and you have some sweat and tears and effort incorporated in the image. Work hard at the 3d and the PS and you have something no one else can do. Snap it together and its a start, a good start, but surely with effort there's room for personal growth. Its like the difference between art and construction. Buy a plastic model at the hobby store and snap it together and you have a corvette with all the curves just right. Find a piece of driftwood and whittle it to the image in your mind and you have something that 10,000 other consumers couldn't buy at the mall. Poser and PS are just that, art or construction. Construction comes from the press of a button and technical knowledge. Art comes from the heart, mind and soul. The constructionist looks at Poser/PS as a tool to build a scene. The artist looks at Poser/PS as a tool to express what can't be said in words. The resultant images are nothing alike. Oddly enough though, I think there's more to this debate than just art/construction. Art uses one side of the brain. Science uses the other. Not many people can think with precision with both halves. (gee, if I use this node and select that parameter combination, will the result be what I want to convey?) That makes the CG art community a very unique group of people. Some lean towards art, others towards science, but all of you can do both. If you lean towards science, make the best technical image you can and use your art side to pretty it up. If you lean towards art, get the basic shapes in there with what you know and brush in PS to convey our mind's eye. Both types of people have awesome images in the galleries here and they inspire me to grow.