Bit of a random question but I was just curious to know if most people who use Poser or DAZ for their renders tweak the images in Photoshop, etc. afterwards or if there are folks who predominantly use their raw renders without any postwork at all. It seems that most people do some touching up to the color, contrast, lighting and all later on, but if anyone's got examples of really nice Poser renders that have zero postwork, I'd certainly love to check them out!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2161487&user_id=4&np&np

I usually don't do any, like on this one.  some guy volunteered to retouch it, but I didn't post it AFAIK.

I'm sure more people postwork than not.  However, it depends on what kind of postwork you mean.  If you're talking about simple color correction, levels, and maybe a little compositing, then that's extremely common, even among large studios.  If you mean painting over renders, and completely drawing things in photoshop over a figure (like clothes and hair), then I would say that is not as popular today as it was years ago.  The reason is that many elements of 3D today are vastly improved over just 5 years ago.  Things like materials and lighting are rarely in need of paintover improvements, because we now have very high quality render engines, like Luxrender or Octane, available at reasonable prices.  Also, the quality of models available, and their rigging, is far superior to older figures.  Genesis, weight mapping, etc.

I personally only adjust levels or gamma in post nowadays.  All detail I achieve now in the render, and the results I go for are photorealism.  Paintover work rarely looks as photorealistic as what you can achieve from a high end render engine with great textures, detailed realistic models, and physically accurate lighting and materials.

It also would depend on your talents and goals.  Would you prefer to do several hours of prep work before the render, to achieve photorealistic results, or would you rather several hours of postwork to paint in details over a fast render?  It's up to the artist to decide now, and not so much the limitation of the tools.

I took down most of my gallery images, but the one I do have in there is an example of Poser with Octane render.  No postwork at all.

Thanks for the replies! Yes, I was referring to the type of light postwork that I mentioned (color, contrast, texture) rather than actual paintovers. I'm just wondering whether or not a lot of people here or on other art communities tend to "enhance" their renders with smoothing or glow effects, things like that, or if it's all done within Poser in most cases.

Personally, I have a constant urge to play around with and postwork a lot of my renders but often feel like it's cheating, and am immensely satisfied when I feel one hundred percent happy with a raw render. For example, this one has no postwork at all and I love the coloring and feel of it, whereas the original render of this one was very dull and took a lot of color/contrast/texture work afterwards to get the right look. I suppose with enough trial and error I could have done it within Poser but there you have it.

That said, I do think the majority of my renders now are useable right off the bat and I've found myself tweaking increasingly few of them later on. It's just something I was curious about when it comes to other DAZ/Poser users, that's all!

Now that I know which kind of postwork you mean, I think that it's extremely common, and, even with the greatest render engines, almost always necessary.  Poser Firefly doesn't have post FX built in, like some other render engines (Octane, Luxrender, MentalRay, Vray).  It can't do spectral bloom, glare, lens flares, aberration, or other camera lense effects, directly in the engine (that I'm aware of).  These other render engines can.  However, even with post FX in these other engines, I still find it useful to tweak some color levels and add some gamma adjustments to the resulting render.  No raw render is ever going to be perfect.  Even the highest end studios spend hundreds of hours compositing and color grading CG renders for major film productions and game cinematics, so I'm sure there's no amateurs out there who couldn't benefit from that as well.  I don't believe in the perfect render.

That said, it's rare nowadays that I spend more than a few minutes on post color correction.  So the raw renders are very close at least.

I think of rendering in Luxrender or Octane, etc., much more similar to taking an actual photograph of a scene than anything else.  Especially since you're dealing with render engines that can reproduce light in very realistic ways, using Path Tracing, and real physical material properties.  It's very much like being a photographer now, and setting up lights like you would in a studio, for a render, and getting predictable results, is a reality now (no pun intended).  So just as you would color grade a photo taken with high end cameras, so too would you correct your photo render.

Not so much the same feeling when rendering with Firefly, because FF still uses very unrealistic techniques to achieve realistic results.  There's lots of workarounds, and it's not just a simple matter of staging a good scene with detailed models, adding real light emitters, and pressing render. It's closer to this than it was several versions ago, but FF is not quite there yet, and certainlly a different procedure than preparing a render for Luxrender or Octane.  Luxrender even accounts for light passing through environmental volumes like air. Firefly, and other non-physics based render engines, is more like taking a photo in a vaccume.

fixing tiny flaws like some pokethru , deepening shadows or adding some lens flares, highlights etc is pretty common.

Since I cant paint I used to try to get perfect renders. After a while I learned to o some postwork.

My philosophy is and all ways has been.
I'll get my Art done buy any and all means necessary.
I'll do what ever it takes to get the look I want .
Pre work,3D,2D,post work,topaz labs,I'll use crayola crayons if need be.
It's my Art ,I don't consider any thing "I" used cheating to make "MY ART".
It's my Art .I make the rules for my Art.No one else does.
I will use All the tools at my disposal.
To make the best Art I can.

Sometimes I adjust levels, but usually the only post work done is to add a sig and date. With Poser now I usually render with Lux via Reality, but before Reality I seldom did much if any post work. Otherwise I'm rendering with Carrara, DS, or now mostly with Octane via the plugin for DS.

I just like to get the most out of the render engine without much post work - probably because anything beyond technical adjustments I really suck at.

Quote - Bit of a random question but I was just curious to know if most people who use Poser or DAZ for their renders tweak the images in Photoshop, etc. afterwards or if there are folks who predominantly use their raw renders without any postwork at all. It seems that most people do some touching up to the color, contrast, lighting and all later on, but if anyone's got examples of really nice Poser renders that have zero postwork, I'd certainly love to check them out!

I would say its pretty common. It can be anything from color,saturation,light, etc touch up to tweek it out to full on joint correction, body mod, atmosphere, hair,etc.

Quote - My philosophy is and all ways has been.
I'll get my Art done buy any and all means necessary.
I'll do what ever it takes to get the look I want .
Pre work,3D,2D,post work,topaz labs,I'll use crayola crayons if need be.
It's my Art ,I don't consider any thing "I" used cheating to make "MY ART".
It's my Art .I make the rules for my Art.No one else does.
I will use All the tools at my disposal.
To make the best Art I can.

You win at life. This is generally my philosophy too...I guess I just saw some images that seemed to accomplish everything pre-render and felt like I should work harder at getting it all done within Poser. But this is true...whatever gets the image just right is the valid path :)

I try to do as much in the render as possible. So most of the postwork is just fixing things that are easier to postwork than bother to rerender - small bits of pokethrough, wonky bit of texture, weird kinks in hair etc.

Sometimes I add some effects in Photoshop, depends what the final result is supposed to be. But I rarely overpaint anything unless there's some serious problem I need to get rid of.

(It's easier in Vue as a lot of post-render adjustment can be done to the render inside Vue anyway, so any postwork is for Vue renders is usually only a case of fixing any little glitches I hadn't noticed.)

They make a bunch of different versions color,B&W's,fog etc etc of the same render and layer them in photoshop.

http://www.itsartmag.com/features/render-passes-zbrush-photoshop/
Very good Video to watch your see what I'm talking about.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?74301-Re-Angel
cool mech

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?35470-Aias-the-Tower-tutorial
was set up for painting

cool gallery
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc-top-row-gallery.php?p=1

Quote - They make a bunch of different versions color,B&W's,fog etc etc of the same render and layer them in photoshop.

http://www.itsartmag.com/features/render-passes-zbrush-photoshop/
Very good Video to watch your see what I'm talking about.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?74301-Re-Angel
cool mech

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?35470-Aias-the-Tower-tutorial
was set up for painting

cool gallery
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc-top-row-gallery.php?p=1

o_0 I ...am going to go wimper now.....I SO wish I could get to those levels.

I have played in zbrush and other then being able to do morphs for v4 etc I got stuck on the painting part. I just couldnt get it to move "beasty" around so I could paint all of him and it just wasnt working. (yes I did come here and ask in the zbrush forum) but it was like greek to me.

I wonder if there is a way to make a deal with the devil for instant knowledge of zbrush....

Quote - > Quote - They make a bunch of different versions color,B&W's,fog etc etc of the same render and layer them in photoshop.

http://www.itsartmag.com/features/render-passes-zbrush-photoshop/
Very good Video to watch your see what I'm talking about.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?74301-Re-Angel
cool mech

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?35470-Aias-the-Tower-tutorial
was set up for painting

cool gallery
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc-top-row-gallery.php?p=1

o_0 I ...am going to go wimper now.....I SO wish I could get to those levels.

I have played in zbrush and other then being able to do morphs for v4 etc I got stuck on the painting part. I just couldnt get it to move "beasty" around so I could paint all of him and it just wasnt working. (yes I did come here and ask in the zbrush forum) but it was like greek to me.

I wonder if there is a way to make a deal with the devil for instant knowledge of zbrush....

http://pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/ 
bottom left there's a download guide also.

You don't half to have zBrush to do this.

You could make multiple renders in any app ,render engine.
Each render engine /Shaders would have something different to offer.

You can layer any set of renders in photoshop ,gimp.

Anyone is capable of this :)

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - They make a bunch of different versions color,B&W's,fog etc etc of the same render and layer them in photoshop.

http://www.itsartmag.com/features/render-passes-zbrush-photoshop/
Very good Video to watch your see what I'm talking about.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?74301-Re-Angel
cool mech

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?35470-Aias-the-Tower-tutorial
was set up for painting

cool gallery
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc-top-row-gallery.php?p=1

o_0 I ...am going to go wimper now.....I SO wish I could get to those levels.

I have played in zbrush and other then being able to do morphs for v4 etc I got stuck on the painting part. I just couldnt get it to move "beasty" around so I could paint all of him and it just wasnt working. (yes I did come here and ask in the zbrush forum) but it was like greek to me.

I wonder if there is a way to make a deal with the devil for instant knowledge of zbrush....

http://pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/ 
bottom left there's a download guide also.

You don't half to have zBrush to do this.

You could make multiple renders in any app ,render engine.
Each render engine /Shaders would have something different to offer.

You can layer any set of renders in photoshop ,gimp.

Anyone is capable of this :)

oh its not the multiple layers that is the issue. I do that all the time.

it is the modeling. THAT is what I want to do. sculptris is easy enough. Its like "BAM" I have a wee beasty. But zbrush its like "OAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH slams head to desk

There is no cheating in 3D... lol.

Even the movies cheat... there is so much postwork done it will make your head spin.

At every professional level, you do what needs to be done within a timeframe.

Keep in mind... EVERY photo you see on the front cover of every magazine on the magazine stand (when you wait in line to buy groceries) has been altered with some sort of photo manipulation software.

Sure you can attempt to be a purist, but you'll have more fun making it personalized with your own brushstrokes, giving it more "life"... at least, thats the way I see it.

Quote - it is the modeling. THAT is what I want to do. sculptris is easy enough. Its like "BAM" I have a wee beasty. But zbrush its like "OAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH slams head to desk

Yeah, I felt like that too at first... do simple stuff first. I made mock-ups of rock sculptures and landscaping with Z-brush since I worked at a quarry and we made rock tables/benches/fireplace-slabs/fountains...

Got paid extra for all that.

Its the crazy interface, but once you get used to it, it gets better.

The funny thing is, I am a professional photographer and have no problem postworking the hell out of my photos for work. And I've spent a lot of time working in the film industry, including VFX, and have a ton of friends who are full time VFX artists...and I know there's no issue with postworking there.

But for some reason when I started out doing my own 3D hobby renders, I felt like I was doing something wrong if it didn't look perfect straight out of the box...like I should have the exact coloring and contrast and glow and all that without having to add it in later. I'm guessing this stems from the fact that it took me so long to learn how to do my own lighting. In the beginning, I used to render low quality flat, dull images and then completely redo them in post because I didn't know how to do better within Poser. Now I'm perfectly fine composing my own lighting and getting the look I want (or at least something extremely close to it) straight away, but I think it's just a leftover feeling in the back of my mind from the old days lol.

You are not alone Risus.

I felt that way as well when I first started. But Its just like the movie-set when you get to see how the Wizard of Oz really works...

oh, bluescreen behind the actors? wheres the spaceship set???
oh, pause camera, replace with dummy, roll-em! "SQUISH!"
actors reading off teleprompers???

Its all smoke and mirrors, unless you really want to re-render re-render re-render... rechecking till you get it all perfect.

Hobbists try to be the best at every aspect of 3D: ideas, concepts, modeler, shaders, poser, camera/render man... (some cases animator as well)
Reality is, when you are a pro, you end up likely doing only ONE of those things and leave the rest of the process to other pros.

So, as a hobbist do the best you can, copy/paste, fake depth-of-fields, recolor/post-process to your hearts desire. Use everything and anything to make it look good.
Yes, you can get flawless results like you see on the professional Poser covers made by troop of professionals.

I face the same thing with music these days, digital recordings edited and fixed to flawlessness... but it sounds like a robot performed it.
I can make my guitar lose its soul by killing its imperfections.
Grab the gimp/photoshop and have fun and love your creations ;)
Thats why it's art.

I've never used sculptris. A mouse is all but worthless with zBrush.

Not any one could have sculpted the ancient statues of Greece .
The ones that did sculpt the Greece statues wore touched buy the Gods of Art.

I apologize if I insult anyone. Not my intentions. I'm just trying to be helpful.

To me there are 3 kinds of Artist.

1 having fun with Art. somes good at it others not so much.
2 Art for $$$ .somes good at it others not so much. but there be good enough to get paid and don't strive to get any better.They leave work and don't think about Art any more.
3 Art is there Heart and Soul .Art is the love of there life.They would die with out there Art.
There only reason for living is to strive to get better at there Art. These where touched buy the Gods of Art.
A Blessing and a Curse.

Not that any thing is wrong with them & I like them but not talking about the "that's alright ones" but the "magnificent" sculpting you see in zBrush are done buy dedicated CGI Artist touched buy the Gods of Art.
They spent countless hours learning how to sculpt in zBrush.
They spend countless hours every day sculpting in zBrush.
Keeping there skill razor sharp. If they take a week off they will feel the rust.

The price they pay to be able to make Magnificent Art is there life.
Just like anyone that dedicates there life to be killer at one thing.
They don't have a normal life like others.

When Shaun White crashed and burned at the Olympics.or Da Vinci had his stroke.
For normal people .It would be like getting a divorce, losing your family while your watching your house burn to the ground
as the repo man is aggravating you for the keys to the car.

They also spend a lot of $$$ . on Wacom Cintiq tablets & Powerful PC's that can handle large projects.that if you spend 8 to 12 hours a day on only last a few years.
They will spend their last dollar on Art supplies before eating.

So there's no way you can compete with someone touched buy the Gods of Art. Evil or Divine
There's no way a mouse can compete with a Wacom Cintiq tablet.
Can a Wacom intuos compete with a Wacom Cintiq tablet ,ah well maybe.
but if there dedicated there have a Cintiq tablet.

I'm not saying any one could not get Wacom medium intuos pro and make some killer stuff and have a lot of fun.

I wasn't going to weigh in on this one but I've always been one to try to push the software to do as much of the work as possible. This is not to say that I am against post work at all, I've just always been more interested in seeing skills with Poser rather than skills with Photoshop (or Paintshop). Unfortunately, at least for me, the newer versions of Poser have been giving me problems with getting out a render that I can simply put my name on and then post.

Is postwork more common than not in the galleries? Oh, yes, always has been! That's great for those that can be Photoshop warriors. If you're rendering to put in the Marketplace, it's supposed to be a big no-no. Renders for the Marketplace are supposed to be straight out of Poser and/or DAZ. That's okay, that's how I liked to render in the first time. But its gotten harder, at least for me. Add SSS shaders, GC, and IDL....an yeah, I feel the need to go into an art program and fix colors (especially saturation!!!), but no yah can't if its for the Marketplace.

I use Photoshop SR4 and find that the Exposure correction layer is a great way to get the overall effect I want. For example, to avoid washed out areas I usually render with a little less light than the final image will have and then boost Exposure by 0.2 or 0.3 which adds brightness while maintaining color saturation. Then I use the gamma correction if the shadow areas are too dark.

Some people add backgrouns in postwork. I use a background prop like the one by Emma&Jordi because I can position and scale it to get exactly the result I want in my render.

My most common use of postwork is to fix little glitches in 3D and capture them in partial renders which I overlay in postwork.