Hello Ladies and Gents, I am hoping some of you can point me in the right direction to make my own special effects i.e. lasers, magic stars, dancing flames and any other effects not on Photoshop. I hope some of you can help me. If you can may Cthulhu grants you all you desire :) just be careful with him, he can be a bit of a trickster and has a foul temper. :) 

You will have more control and more options if you use Photoshop or After Effects in conjuntion with DS.   I can understand the appeal of a "one-stop-shop" using just one app, but believe me, you'll get 1000 time better results using the apps for what they were designed for.

-AniMajik

Yeah, I can see your point. And thanks for the replay animajik. You are right, you do have more control on what you want and less render time for the effects.

Doing Still or animation?

is it Cost on Photoshop or just don't want to use it (or those like it)

This way we can see what type of answer we should reply with.

If cost is an issue, there are plenty of free (or inexpensive) alternatives to PS for stills (GIMP, a free PS like app comes to mind).  There are some inexpensive alternatives to AE as well. (HitFilm, ParticleIllusion, etc).  Other than price considerations, why would you not want to use them?

-AniMajik

post production work for still images is a very common part of the workflow. You can spend countless hours of re-rendering or bring it into Photoshop, GIMP or Painter and do things the rendering software would otherwise be incapable of doing or require hours of setup or both.

Note there are many products that produce the exact effects you want within DAZ Studio (Or Poser for that matter.)