Part III - Compositing, Adjustments & Final Touches
This article will cover the technical aspects in the making of my piece Starry Night. I hope you will find this project overview useful. Maybe you'll even learn something new and be inspired in your own work. Part 3 of 3 parts covers compositing, adjustments and final touches.
The post-processing phase
For this project (and many other projects of mine) the post-pro phase is every bit as important and essential as the rest of the project. It's not everyone who uses post-pro to it's full potential - some even ignore it completely by thinking it's "cheating". Well, the way I see it, post-pro has a lot of advantages and gives shortcuts for you to achieve things that would have taken a lot of time to do in the 3D application. Of course you have to do it properly there, but post-pro allows you to get all those little details right faster and allows you to experiment a lot more.
Compositing
I'll go through assembling the different elements and doing the effects for them one by one.
Background
The background, being in the back of the scene, had to be focus/lens blurred quite a lot, but before i could apply the Lens Blur filter I had to tweak the raw render a little bit. First, I had to take care of some obvious tiling issues in the grass texture. Second, the original rendering didn't include the boys shadow so I painted it in using a soft brush and some Gaussian Blur. And in the end, I played around with the Lens Blur filter till I was satisfied and added some adjustment layers to make it all more blue.
- Background effects added.
The body
The body render layer was accompanied with a z-depth pass. In post-pro it's used to control the amount/radius of lens blur needed. When that is applied, I paint a little bit of black and white shades on a overlay layer to give more depth to the body.
- Body effects. (It might be tough to see since it's so dark and low contrast work at this point.)
The head
I started out by lens blurring the head layer (using the head's z-depth pass). After that, I once again took the brush and painted black and whites on an overlay layer to give more depth and soul to the eyes and compensate for uneven illumination of the irises.
- Head effects applied.
Next, I applied some star glow to the eyes using multiple instances of the eye reflection pass (from part 2) with Gaussian Blur at different levels. I went on and duplicated my base head layer, blurred it and mixed it at about half opacity to give the skin more smoothness. I also added a desaturated duplicate of the blurred layer in overlay mode - this adds a lot to the depth of the head. In the end, I painted small details like a subtle and soft rims of light on the ears and the shadow of the hair on the scalp.
The hair
The raw hair render layer is far from the look I ultimately needed. I had to do a lot of post work to get it right - mainly, once again, overlay painting. First of though, I had to smoothen the hairline since it was very hard in the raw render. At this point the hair had many different luminosity nuances. To level them all out (equalize) I began overlay painting with black and whites. After that I darkened the hair to fit the eyebrows better. Quite a lot at this point actually, but it'll be lighter again...
- Hair effects.
Final adjustments & touches
At this point the image is looking more and more done. The last things needed are some adjustments and final touches.
Lighten up!
The boy should be the focus of the image so he will have to be the thing your eye catches. Lighting him up helps a lot with this. Differences in luminance can greatly help, or change, a composition. Very logically the eye tends to focus more on lighter areas of the image.
- The boy is lit up to make him gain more attention.
"Blitz" effect
To further enhance the point of focus I added a slight blitz effect to the image. I started by creating a centered radial gradient like below.
- Radial gradient.
I then apply the gradient to the image using overlay mode, thus obtaining the desired effect and greatly changing the image. This emphasizes the depth and composition. This one layer is one of the most important and influential in the post-pro phase.
- Effect applied to image.
Last touches
After doing the blitz effect above, a few more adjustments are added and a pair of blurred duplicates are mixed in with the image (one is in overlay mode to add a bit more contrast the other is in normal mode), thereby creating a slight soft focus effect.
- Final adjustments and soft focus applied.
- Overview of the layers in the final Photoshop file.
Completed
So this concludes the 3 part journey "Making of Starry Night". The image is completed and you've been along all the way through the entire process. I hope you had as much fun reading about "Starry Night" as I had making it!
If you haven't read part 1 and 2 yet you should really consider doing so.
Making of Starry Night | Part I: Modeling, Textures & Materials
Making of Starry Night | Part II: Lighting & Rendering
//Mathias
Have you found something not making sense, spelling mistakes or typos? Or have you got any questions that you feel I didn't answer? Contact me, and I'll try to see if I can help you/improve upon this.
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