lighting again

[sdds]

Hi all, just playing with lighting while reading Mr Jeremy Birn's book. This is an attempted at natural evening light with indoor light. According to what ive read realism in a render is a lot to do with controlling the balance of colour with your lighting.

[sdds]

Hows this looking for natural lighting? Lit with multiple lights.

[Zeilveen]

Hello Simon,

 

looks pretty ok to me, just a bit too much sun glare or glow for me, is that 100% 3D we're seeying here, or is this post?

 

Good work mate,

[sdds]

I tweaked the lighting through loads of test renders. The post work was applying a AO pass, removing some grain adding the back image and that was it. I am trying to learn how to properly balance a lighting setup. Maybe I would work faster if I learnt more about creating effects in post.

[batteryoperatedlettuce]

I've been outputing my renders as non clamped HDR files and adjusting the gamma/exposure in photoshop before converting to 16 bit for printing. I've been doing that for quite a while now...

 

...is this wrong?

[sdds]

I would imagine that gives you some good colour images m8, if it works why would that be wrong?

 

When I print, up the res with step interplostion post render, then sharpen & take care of noise and also add some.

[Zeilveen]

I've been doing this for about 10 years and find it difficult to control the image colours throughout the whole line. Im making digital images, full colour press, bil boards, websites and what ever more.

 

I've found that working with TIFF always worked good, keep it CMYK as long as you can and export to rgb after all the filtering and use the correct colour profiles in photoshop.

 

Still find it difficult though, always some surprise somewhere, keep testing :-)

[sdds]

Yea colour is a pain in the ass, but I find working mainly in RGB and keeping working docs in this format then converting to CMYK is the most flexible. Photoshop, Indesign etc have good previewing options for each format so you can work and see what it looks like without committing your self.

 

My reasons to not work in CMYK are, its creates larger file sizes, harder to control (a personal thing) and converting CMYK into other colour formats later on can cause loss of the file colour data.

 

I agree Zeilveen tiff is good keeps it flexible, The thing I find hard is when someone grabs a pantone book points at a colour and wants it replicated in CMYK.

[Zeilveen]

God yes, thats a pain, I've got colour table for rgb vallues, also for the RAL colours that builders use, but still, getting the endresult to look like that Pantone colour after all the materialising / rendering / filtering / converting.

 

Its not that easy some times, I'm going to try to do a project in Linear Workflow, I feel its mainly gamma and colour correct issues. Getting a colour certified screen helps as well :-)

[sdds]

Yep, I suffer colour chart madness don't get me wrong there good guides, but when someone asks for - 'a room lit with indoor lights and a sunset exterior, oh and by the way that table is pantone no....' Maybe Iam just inexperienced eh, got more learning to do.

 

I really need to get to grips more with post production for still & ani. Often I render many passes and end up in a big muddle, do you render in a multipass way Zeilveen? any tips you could throw my way m8.

[Zeilveen]

Thanks mate, what render software are you using now? Im playing around with vray 1.5 and max 9 at the moment. That workes fine for me and the settings are very specific for each scenes, I dont have a "outdoor" settings ready, its tweaking every time for me. Maxwell has some nice features to it, you can just cancel the render when you think its good enough, thats a little multipass idea right there.

[sdds]

I work on a mac so unfortunately no vray for me, have to fake. Cinema 4d is my working app/render engine. Hmm maxwell is available for mac I think, worth looking at thanks. Yea multipass can be a bit of a hindrance, I guess its knowing where to use it.

 

Anyway trying to learn about .rla files for compositing in after effects so will be making a post on that. Controlling some lighting effects etc in a comp app, might save time who knows.