Cebas - PDS Manager

[JHalton]

Thinking of getting PSD manager from cebas. http://www.cebas.com

 

I get the general idea but I was just wondering, what the main advantage of it is, and what people who already use thought of it.

 

Cheers

 

D

[JamesTaylor]

great plugin! only useful on still images but non the less powerful.

 

main advantages are that it gives you selection masks for the various pieces of individual geometry, eg. a selection that is precise to the areas of glass in an image so speeding up post processing whilst ensuring accuracy.

[Tim Nelson]

Thats what I use it for, only because that seems to be the only feature of PSD Manager that works with Vray.

 

If you are using Max's scanline renderer it gives you a lot more control because you can also seperate the different elements like shadow, reflections, gi, diffuse, etc. That gives you so much control of you image you won't have to re-render a lot of things you normally would because you can easily adjust them in Photoshop.

 

Definitely worth the purchase.

[JamesTaylor]

is't it possible to render out shadow passes and reflection passes etc. seperately anyway, from both scanline and VRay, without the need for PSDManager?

[Tim Nelson]

Yes, but how to compile them all in Photoshop is still a little bit of a mystery to me. I think PSD manager just makes it a lot easier.

 

But one thing that PSD manager does that you can't get anywhere else is the seperated object output. This is so great because you can change colors of individual objects, layers, and really allows so much more control over your scene.

[JamesTaylor]

I've never tried it, but surely if you render at 640 x 480 for example each pass will be rendered at this size, save as a format which supports alpha channels and open in photoshop, i guess this is where it may fall down as i'd guess you have to save each pass separtely, open each pass seperately and manually drag each element into the same document?

 

sorry to waffle a little, like i say i've never actually tried it but thought it'd be straight forward, maybe using PSDmanager just removes all the faffing about?

 

i'll try out soon and post what i find.......you've got me interested now!!