Terragen 3 - Render Elements in Photoshop

[digitalguru]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4Tw5NaYrcY

FIles for the tutorial:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d5gg6gpkc48o4na/terragen_render_elements_photoshop.rar

[cyphyr]

Great tutorial, much needed and very welcome.
A question. In the last part of the process when you convert to 16 bit do you have to flatten the image or can you keep the layers and keep working on them separately?
Cheers
Richard

[digitalguru]

Flatten

I tried converting to 16bit and keeping the layers separate, but it does affect the colours, they don't match the control image rendered from Nuke.

There may be around this that I don't know of, or it's just not possible :-)

At the moment it seems a reasonable workflow to do any operation that requires blending of the elements before flattening, you'll mostly need exposure, levels opcacity blending, desaturation using the depth pass (as you mentioned) and final tweaks using any favorite filters etc after a flatten to 16bit.

I think it may be something to do with the fact that conversion to 16 bit clamps the image (as shown in the tutorial) -it's now a 16 bit integer format rather than being 16 bit float - so the addition of those values are changed

[Kadri]

I will look at your video later . Thanks.
Did you saw what i wrote about Photoline and Photoshop in this thread?
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,16483.0.html

Interesting that the supposed best software lacks in this.
Photoline looked better in that aspect but i had still no time to test it...
Even Serif Photoplus had better HDR handling when i tested 1-2 years ago.

[digitalguru]

Nice image!

re: Photoshop, you can drag in an EXR ok (CS6) -

Photoshops 32 bit tools are still pretty limited - but then, why improve them when they can sell you After Effects to do this kind of work?

for your alpha, if you mean the parachute - check out

Terragen - integrating 3d elements and the spherical camera
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFxVA4ZHAp8

Terragen will output an alpha channel if you render the parachute separately - is that what you mean?

hear a lot of people talking about Blender - it has a compositing program built in and it's fee - might be another option to try.

[Kadri]

Thanks .
"Terragen will output an alpha channel if you render the parachute separately - is that what you mean?"  yes.

"Photoshops 32 bit tools are still pretty limited -
but then, why improve them when they can sell you After Effects to do this kind of work?"  looks that you are very right about this

[SteveR]

Thank you so much for this v appreciated.