Basic editing

I have received a lot of questions about the basic step of editing a perspective and also how to turn a daytime rendering into a night rendering, or simply how do I create night scene perspective. In this post I will explain the essential thing to edit a perspective from a basic rendering. Later I will try to explain about the night scene, but now let us first master some initial steps of a basic editing.

First, fresh after rendering without photoshop: In this image, the trees were added in the rendering process.

1. Brightness and contrast

The image was dark and flat so we want to add more brightness into it. I usually do it by adjusting the 'level' instead of 'brightness and contrast' option, cause level provide me more control to how much black and white color portion I wanted. Burn and dodge tool also help a lot to add more dramatic effect of light and shadow (look at the ceiling and wall behind)

2.Texture

Rendering process sometimes doesn't produce a texture that we are hoping, so I like to add a texture image to punch up the realistic effect. Adding a texture image is a very quick step, what cost me more time is picking the right material and decide how to make the new texture blends with the whole surrounding so that the image doesn't look fake. -Plafond : Since I already burn the plafond I wanted to keep it like that so after adjusting the image I just change the layer mode to overlay (you may want to adjust the opacity as well) -Wood partition : I don't really like the existing color and texture so I keep the new texture layer as normal with 100% opacity

-Floor tiles : I love the existing texture but I want the tiles to look more realistic by making a tiling pattern, so in this step I desaturate the image, and set it to overlay

3. Grass and water

First : Ground covering -Find a grass image, duplicate it until it closes the whole entire area that you want to cover (pay attention to perspective) -erase the edges with a soft brush eraser so that the images will be blend together well and then merge all the grass layers

-Select with polygonal lasso tool the area that you want to cover, after you are done, press shift+ctrl+I which is a shortcut for 'select inverse' and then press delete (make sure you do it in the grass layer that has been merged) to throw away the unnecessary parts.

-After you get the whole grass area covered, do the same step with the water.

Second : Grass effect

-use the stamp tool, change the brush into the grass icon brush, make sure you are in the grass layer. -press alt then click the grass image to get the pattern, then start to paint it in the area that is necesarry, for example : under the tree trunks, next to the river, etc (if u don't know how to use stamp tool, this step might be tricky)

4. Bushes and trees

In this step, I will just add bushes, since the trees are already exist (they have the same work principle) -Pick the suitable bushes or trees images, scale it (ctrl+t) and distort it (hold the ctrl whilst doing the ctrl+t) so that it has the 3d effect

-Do the grass effect once more to hide the bottom part of the bushes. 5. People and shadow

Adding people will help the image looks alive, but be careful, don't let the focus of your drawing changed. Also pay attention to the shadow, reflection and opacity of the people.

-Shadow : duplicate the original person image, press ctrl+u (hue/saturation) drag the lightness arrow to black or simply type -100. Adjust the shadow according to the sunlight using ctrl+t and distort option. (make sure the shadow layer is behind the real person layer) -Reflection : add reflection only when it is necessary (glass/mirror/marble, etc). Duplicate the original person image, flip it horizontally if the reflection is on the wall or flip it vertically if the reflection is on the ground, then set the opacity lower than the real person. -Opacity : the closer the person, the more opacity it has, I can't say how much opacity should you put, it is all case by case and personal preference, just note that the main focus should be your architecture.

6.Sky

Personally speaking, I like to put sky at the first step, cause what kind of sky that we choose determine the mood of the whole drawing, unfortunately in the image that I use we can barely see sky, so I need to explain it using a different image and decided to put it on the last step. For the simple case, the principle of adding sky is the same with grass and water, but sometimes the architecture might be a bit complicated that it seems impossible to select the sky area using polygonal lasso tool, in that case: -first, prepare a suitable sky image and then find the alpha file of your rendering (the black and white image on the left) and then drag the sky file into it, place and adjust it there.

- if the sky has been placed well, turn the layer off, so only the alpha layer remained and make sure you are in that layer. Open color range, and then click the pick color icon (look at the picture above) then click either white or black in the image, then set the fuzziness to the max. Clicking the white means you are selecting the white, clicking the black means the opposite, fuzziness means how dark or light the color that is going to be picked, for example 200 means they only select the really black one, if you try to drag the arrow to the left you will see the image changing, it means it will also select a greyish color when you drag it to the left (you will understand when you try it) when you are done, click ok.

-turn the sky layer on, and make sure you are in the sky layer now. If in the previous step you choose white color, just press delete, if in the previous you choose black then select inverse (shift+ctrl+i) and then delete.

-Now the sky is cropped well, move it to the original perspective image by dragging it and pressing shift at the same time so that the sky will be placed in the exact same position as when it was in the alpha file.

-Last but not least, sometimes it is better to just preserve the texture of the sky instead of just placing it with the original color, so you can desaturate the sky and set the layer mode to overlay. Try both option, or you can also change the sky color or overlay the sky with a new color.

(project credit : Wang Tong)

I am also aware that some of you have been asking where to get a good material library, well cropped free HD trees, people, etc. There are several websites that I can recommend for you which I also know it from another blogger (visualizingarchitecture.com)

1. Skalgubbar 2. Immediate entourage 3. Gobotree

4. Mr cutout

5. Xoio air

6. Cgtextures

7. Texturer

8. Swtexture

9. Rendertextures

10. Flyingarchitecture

11. Tony textures

12. GOOGLE everyone :) and also BAIDU (but u need to be able to type in chinese) :P

I apologize for not using video for my tutorial since it seems impossible to upload it with the internet speed that I have right now, and besides I am still learning how to edit a video well, hope the explanation helps! Feel free to ask me questions or give me suggestions in the comment box below! :)