Thank you Lisa. I learned a bunch of Photoshop stuff from PSDbox.com. They do mostly photo manipulation, but are very talented and many of the techniques can be applied to DS rendered images. I also do like playing around with new tools like the Nik collection, and there are also some cool effects tools at Graphic River.

Gotcha. How did you learn all this, trial and error? You are very good! I’ve been playing around with light layers for a few days now. We’re moving this weekend so I may not have time to get a pic in for the April challenge, although I’ve been working on three and if I can get the post working done I’ll submit them, or at least one hopefully!

Oh, good question! I do that so that I can control the intensity of my background light/environment map. The black background provides a solid backdrop that I can then add light to by setting my light layers blend mode to Screen and changing their opacity.

Try turning off the black background layer and turning down the opacity of the environment map. You will see that the scene starts to partly become transparent. The black background prevents that, and keeps things solid by mixing in the parts that are less lighted with black.

Thank you, I’ll try that. Another question, lol, why do you fill the background with black?

Try setting the Blending mode of each layer to screen. This will allow each light to be added to the whole. The blending mode is the drop-down menu on top of the layers panel that is usually set to Normal.

Please feel free to ask more questions. I always ask lots of questions too. 🙂

So I tried following the photoshop tutorial 😉 I rendered my pic without lights, with “front lights” and “back lights” we’ll call them. All rendered with my figure, is that correct? So when I bring them into PS, if I load the front lights first, then add the back lights on top, the front lights disappear of course because they weren’t on when I rendered the back lights. I’m just not getting it. I hope I don;t sound too stupid 😉

You rock! Thank you so much for the step by step. I just was not getting it! Ill go through your tutorials again. I most likely didn’t spend enough time on them 😉

Hi Lisa,
1. Atmo-Cam
– It adds a camera and a prop that is parented to the camera.
– Use that camera as your main camera.
– After we have everything in our scene set up and the camera set properly, then switch to wireframe.
– Switch to top-view and turn the prop on.
– Then we adjust the position of the prop, so that it encapsulates our scene properly (the prop needs to cover all scene areas that appear in our render window). In most of my scenes, I only need to adjust z-translate here.
– All lights that we want to render with volumetric effects need to be inside the prop.
– However, it is important that the camera is outside the prop, so when adjusting z-dimension, make sure that the camera is still outside.
– Volumetric effects will be applied to *all* lights inside the prop. Therefore, we only want to turn on the lights that we want volumetric effect on, and turn off all the rest (including the environment map).

Hope this helps. I have a diagram of this in my recent tutorial on soft lighting effects. Pretty much every one of my scene files also contains an atmo-cam that is set-up to work with a spotlight in the scene, so that can help serve as an example.

2. Lights and postwork tutorials

Do you render all the lights seperately then add it all together in PS?

Yes, I do exactly this. In Photoshop I can more easily and quickly adjust the intensity and color of my lights.

In terms of postwork tutorials, I would start with my Iray lighting tutorial. At the end of that tutorial, it points to the next one which is a purely Photoshop one, on how I combine the different light layers. For me, the postwork process is very integrated with the lighting process.

I plan to start working on a stage 2 postwork tutorial, where I adjust tone, contrast, add glow, and add my volumetric light layer etc. This tutorial will build on previous tuts on adding glow and soft lighting effects.

Thank you very much Denise, for your wonderful and motivating comment. Also thank you very much for your Patreon support, it is greatly appreciated. I have had to deal with some not very pleasant people lately, and your comment is a much needed ray of sunshine! Big hugs to you. If there are particular tutorial topics you would like to see, please let me know. 😀