So I made this simple scene with a Douglas forest around a lake. Again, I found the straight PT outcome very dark in the shadows. So I made a HDR version in PS. And tried some different lighting up scenarios. See what you think. Perhaps the Photoshop adjustment is even the easiest.
I can't upload the other one, strange....
I think it works this time.....
I'd say of your crop renders the ones with the plane and the hemisphere look best. Quite noisy though. And the HDR image looks nice as well, but could use a little more contrast to my taste.
However, if everything else fails, why not using PS?
Btw. the grain (in water especially, but also in mist itself) also bugs me. It's a very shallow (80m) v2 mist layer, with cloud quality at 2, AA=6, robust sampler, but with noise threshold changed from 0.05 to 0.04. Still not good enough, apparently. I have to experiment with that too. The ray detail multiplier was set at 0.5 instead of default 0.25.
I agree, but I hoped to find a fast and less grainy solution.
Maybe more like this.
Oh yes, this is nice!!
Those are great examples Ulco ! Are you saying that you simply HDR the dark output by making several Photoshop versions and then re-import them in HDR PRO ? This may be a stupid question......but I am an amateur at all this language......but am learning !
I saved at 16-bits tiff and just did a (image adjust hdr toning) adjustment within PS, but without the saturation increase, and bent the curve a bit down in the leftish darker section to have it not too light.
Quote from: Dune on December 05, 2022, 05:54:46 AMAgain, I found the straight PT outcome very dark in the shadows.
Why not increase the exposure?
(Ducks and hides...)
Are you a hunter? ;D ducks and hides
I'll see if the sky won't burn out then....
Quote from: Dune on December 06, 2022, 03:00:48 AMAre you a hunter? ;D ducks and hides
I'll see if the sky won't burn out then....
That's it! Come on, Matt! Let's cheat a bit! ;D
(Ducks and hides as well) ;)
;D
Quote from: Matt on December 05, 2022, 08:52:07 PMQuote from: Dune on December 05, 2022, 05:54:46 AMAgain, I found the straight PT outcome very dark in the shadows.
Why not increase the exposure?
(Ducks and hides...)
It could not be that simple ...... right ? Mind you, you could do several renders with different exposures and do the HDR trick I guess, that could take care of the burned sky ! You multiply render times but, heck what else can you have a computer do when you sleep ! I tried in Photoshop yesterday with taking the render, overdoing the shadows booster in incremental doses, making 3 versions and importing in HDR PRO module and it kept asking me for the EV exposure values before it would import them.....at some point I put in some arbitrary values and got something that was really nasty for an HDR image. Ulco showed us a decent HDR trial higher up in the thread.....hope he can give us details on that.....looked pretty good. If you do want to do several exposures.....is there a value that will translate the exposure value for the camera into EV values, Photoshop seems to insist on getting those before it processes the pictures, usually gets it automatically from the camera metadata embedded in the pictures.
"Light exposure" 0.125 => EV -3
"Light exposure" 0.25 => EV -2
"Light exposure" 0.5 => EV -1
"Light exposure" 1 => EV 0
"Light exposure" 2 => EV +1
"Light exposure" 4 => EV +2
"Light exposure" 8 => EV +3
and so on.
However, if you work with EXRs then you only need to render once, and bypass all that stuff.
Quote from: Dune on December 05, 2022, 06:06:55 AMI think it works this time.....
Looks fantastic!! Are you saying you are lighting your scene via an HDR image?
Quote from: Matt on December 06, 2022, 07:10:06 PM"Light exposure" 0.125 => EV -3
"Light exposure" 0.25 => EV -2
"Light exposure" 0.5 => EV -1
"Light exposure" 1 => EV 0
"Light exposure" 2 => EV +1
"Light exposure" 4 => EV +2
"Light exposure" 8 => EV +3
and so on.
However, if you work with EXRs then you only need to render once, and bypass all that stuff.
I know all work and no play makes Matt a dull boy; but I'm (we're ?) on pins and needles for Terragen Sky and the TG Mac release. ;D
Quote from: pixelpusher636 on December 08, 2022, 09:25:01 PMAre you saying you are lighting your scene via an HDR image?
No, it's just plain default, but I used the Photoshop (CS6) adjustments-HDR-lighting to lighten the darks up. Bent the lower curve down a bit or it would be too light, and didn't use the 20+ saturation.
I'm just on my phone, so not so easy to see, but are there any translucency on your leaf shaders?
Anyway, to me that first image looks good. Like I would have wanted it, but this is just me. I would just recover the shadows a little bit in post.
I hope it's ok I did a try with your image?
- Terje
Sure, that's okay. I think tastes differ, and monitors differ (it's much lighter on my working monitor than on my older internet monitor), but your version looks okay to me too. But the first image is a bit too dark IMO, I'd like to be able to see more definition in the shadows.
There is some translucency, but not too much (0.2 I believe) as I think needles are rather thick and don't let much light through. But I may have to cheat a bit there too.
One more thing you could try is to rise the soft clip effect. It will give you a flatter image, but then again you could adjust it in post. I often set this to 2. Sometimes even 3. It helps out when you want to protect both the highlights and also the darks.
Good of you to remember me. Thanks! Heard of that before, tried it once or twice, and forgot about it again.