I have wasted 28 hours rending 3 images for printing that did not come out as expected.  The images that I am doing have soft shadows set in sunlight and radial lights.  I selected premium but failed to check the tick for soft shadows, assuming that my scene had taken care of that.  Of course it didn't and I ended up with 3 images with hard shadows

I then clicked the the tick for soft shadows under premium render.  Rendered at 300dpi, etc, etc.

So, what I need to know from the masses is this:  Why do my shadows STILL appear to be hard (not as hard as before but still hard).  What options does everyone else use for printing out an image?  What should I consider before wasting anymore time on rending something I can't use.  Help!!!!

I did ask this elsewhere but still need more information.  Would love to know how it's done as I've never printed out an image before ( or rendered one for a  print).

Hey Burpee, how goes it. I really can't answer your question, but I think I know who can, 
sazzart. Just send him a quick note here at RDR and tell him Thelby sent you. I will probably get scourged for it, LOL, naw not really, but I believe he may help because alot of his work goes to print, OK?!? Hope that helps even if it is in an indirect way :^)
Thelby

Attached Link: http://www.brycetech.com/tutor/bryce/bryceinprint.html

Everything you need to know for prints out of Bryce at this link, even a small calculator at the bottum of the page to make it easy.

As for the soft shadows, have you tried clicking soft shadows option and pulling down a little on the shadows slider in the sky lab settings.

Try using madmax's Zenith lighting systems(available in freestuff, I think),......either the Hi-Res or Studio quality,........these give the most beautiful softness to shadows  I have ever seen(depending on the angle of the light),.........however, if you use these in conjunction with Premium settings, expect those 28 hours to turn into 60 or 70 hour renders. Sometimes I just use a radial light with soft shadows enabled(in the light lab) which will increase rendertimes but not as much as the Zenith systems. Hope this helps.

also, there's a printing forum here, where they have more general info. Just in case you need it.

I've noticed that too. Soemtimes my softshadows are on in the render and don't work no matter what I do but other times they work I get a bit flumoxed at this the render times are the same when I hit soft shadows and they come out hard.

Great links and information guys, thanks!!  This is definitely a learning experience.  I gave up on render to disc for the moment until I do more studying of these links and printed out my Christmas cards using premium settings and the big render button.  My first prints ever.

The colors came out pretty close to the screen colors.  It seemed to be the degree of darkness in the colors that was a bit different.  My images looked brighter on screen than printed out.  Paper must make a difference too because I used a confetti (festive, lol) paper instead of bright white.

Again thanks!  Have a great holiday!!

Attached Link: Old thread - Soft shadow no go

I have had this problem too and I remember reading there is a fix for it as a known Bryce bug.  I've not tried using soft shadows again since reading this thread but still bear it in mind for if I try again.  I'm afraid my system is just not powerful enough to cope with the soft shadows.  The simplest of renders end up taking days and days let alone the kind of complexity I usually go for :S

Hi Kathy!  THanks for the link ;)  

I'm using B6 now and it is definitely applying soft shadows.  When I do a Regular render at 807x610, the image looks wonderful.  Nice soft edges to all the shdows.  What I did not understand is that when I chose Premium render option, I had to also select 'soft shadows' again.  It must supercede any in-program settings.

I have a loooong render going now and it better come out right this time or I'm taking a bat to the side of my computer, lol.  Well, maybe not, but it sure takes away the fun of creating when you have to wait forever to get your computer back.  :p

*** 
After looking at all the links and help I have another question.  Probably a stupid one but I want to understand.

?Brycetech says that we can choose 'render to disc' and select 300dpi and a larger image size in pixels.  He then says that Bryce renders default at 72dpi and that we can also choose to use the big render button in-program, select a larger image size in pixels and render that way.

If Bryce renders at 72dpi, wouldn't the in-program larger picture still be 72dpi?  He makes it sound like as long as I render at 3200x2400 it will come out 300dpi.  Is this correct?

---

PS - went to the render and publishing forum and could only see one sticky about Jenx's new name.  The stats show lots of posts.  Is there a way to enable them so I can see them?

I don't know if this will help... I mean the only printing I do is for my own enjoyment on standard US size paper. What I have printed has come out nicely. I've played around with lots of different papers, but the best I've found tended to be "presentation" paper from either OfficeMax or Office Depot. It says on the package: Office Depot, Premium Selection, Premium Matte Presentation Paper, 35lb, 96 bright (i couldn't find brighter), 130 g/m^2, matte finish.

It's for InkJet printers, but I've had excellent results using laser printers with it too. So far the colors match my screens (either the laptops or the desktops) close enough to keep me smiling. They come out crisp and sharp.

Other papers with a heavy gloss coat tend to absorb the ink, washing out the colors, and those without the gloss coat tend to be a sponge. I avoid the photo paper. For me, this presentation paper has the right balance of whatever it has. I guess not too much gloss coat, and not too little.

But, like I said, I don't know if this will help. My renders tend to be humble compared to some of the excellent work I've seen here. Maybe the complexity or the mix of mist, or the delicate skin tones have a higher impact to the eye on paper than anything I've done yet.

Does that mean Bryce 6 has fixed the soft shadow bug?

My personal solution for getting enough pixels to print well is to render as big as possible then change the resolution in Photoshop.  So if I'm doing an 800x600 image, I render it at a ration of 3:1 from the document setup.  I do this because I do a lot of plop rendering on my final image to get different effects to blend afterwards, that's my way of fixing Poser pokethroughs of limbs and clothing.  You just can't do that sort of thing easily with a render to disk.  

Then when I've done any post work after rendering in Bryce I will set the resolution to 150 (which is the maximum my inkjet can take) whilst and untick the box for resample image.  That forces Photoshop to do the resizing by changing the resolution rather than by resampling to the same size.

I know it's not the standard way to do things and I ended up arriving at it as a solution of my own rather than something I'd read elsewhere so it may be the craziest thing going, I just know it works for me :)

Kathy

Hey DaM, I had some of that very paper in my hands the other day.   I prefer the matte myself and there was only one package left of that and one of 48LB at 103 brightness.  Did not buy it as they had another deal going on that looked good.  I ended up with Epson's matte paper 44#, 9mil, 94% opacity, 97 brightness.  Will consider the presentation paper next time though.

For my Christmas cards I just thinking it would look fun on the confetti paper.  It was ok but not the best paper.  I think it absorbed ink like you said.  The cards were for an internet exchange.  Lots of fun. One went to Australia, one to Wales and one to England, the rest to the USA.  They'll probably get the cards and say 'ewww' , lol.  Next year I'll know better.

Kathy, not really sure how to resample in PSP.  I have heard about resampling as opposed to resizing but I'm not sure how it works.

In PSPXI, I have a RESAMPLE tick in the Resize option popup.  I can resample by:
Bicubic
Bilinear
Pixel Resize
smart size
Weighted average.

I don't understand what the difference is for these.  Would one of these be similar to what you are describing?

Well the thing to do is to get it to NOT resample at all so then it wouldn't matter what algorithm it used to calculate.  Does it have an option for none?  I've opened up my last render pre resizing and gone through the process with screenshots.  Hope you can find something comparable to what you want.  If you're wanting to go as high as 300dpi that's more shrinking still but I find that the image size I had in this one gives me good A4 prints when I do the resizing.  Hope the picture works, I don't normally post pics this big so I'm not sure how visible it will be.

Good luck
Kathy

Attached Link: Image resizing shots

Sorry, I deleted the image when I saw how invisible it was and it posted it to the forum without giving me chance to put in a link, be back in a mo when I've put it on pbase.

Kathy, I can untick it so that it doesn't resample.  I thought resample was a good thing, lol.  I don't, however, see a place for me to select a different resolution in PSPXI.

I also have XaraXtreme which is a vector program and will let you increase a photo and keep the same resolution that you started with.  I'm just not sure if I make the image huge if it wouldn't look grainy anyway when printing.

Resampling is very often an excellent thing, it can be used to fake antialiasing I found a few times. :)

Making the picture huge by resampling isn't such a good thing though.  I rarely do that because you do lose quality that way.  Only with very crummy blurry small photos someone sends by email or something do I occasionally blow the image up.

I don't have any problem with grainy ness in my prints as long as I ensure that I am printing a size that is a whole number division of the original.  Another way I do it in Photoshop is to use the 'scale to print' option from the print preview and I always choose 25% or 20% or 50% etc because if I just let it size itself to 24.1% or something it would lose clarity rather than becoming grainy but still just as undesireable.

Sorry, I do hope we're not talking at cross purposes here.  I know it took me a long time to get my printing routine sorted (don't even get me started on colour matching!) but I print all my images to A4 or sometimes bigger by cutting between several pieces of A4 but I've never dared yet to go to a commercial printer.

I've never printed anything out before for all these reasons.  I get so confused about it all.  I've seen people mention A2, A4 but what does that mean?

I'd give it a try what you say about PS but I don't know how to in my program.  I'm not seeing some of the things you mention.  I'm still waiting for Xara to get back to me on increasing the size in their program and what true resolution I end up. I have some images that have a lot of postwork and I do not want to have to redo it.  Not sure I could acheive the same effects.  Would be great to just be able to upsize them, lol.

Attached Link: Nice visual demo of paper sizes at Wikipedia.

A4, A3, A5 etc are the standard paper sizes in the UK  so they're the ones I'm most famiiar with and I only discovered they weren't fully international when I mentioned to a friend in the States that I was sending her an A4 print!  So I just checked it on Wikipedia and lo and behold, the paper sizes are split into international and North American.  So there you go.  Bit more general education courtesy of Wikipedia.  Where would I be without them :D