Monolith construction

[Crayox13]

After few struggles in compositing, here is the final result. A friend actually dreamt this construction, and I told him I'll put it in 3D. It was a good practice for me, to try out MS a bit more, and also compositing in PS. Everything is 3D except the mountains/sky background.

Still I couldn't figure out how to paste a grey scale mask in PS. Ctrl+click selects a mask but when I apply it it pastes only black and whites, no grey shades. Why can't I just select the z depth pass (saved separately), copy, and then paste it into mask? PS always pastes it as a new layer, even the mask is selected.

C&C really welcome! I want to learn more about post production. This had a bit of a Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban theme

[peterguthrie]

looks nice!

re: pasting into a mask, try alt-clicking the mask, which should show you the mask then paste

[MoonDoggie]

alt+click the mask and ctrl+v to paste into it.

[Crayox13]

Thanks so much guys! This simple thing was bugging me for so long

Oh, another PS question, how come you can't select multiple layers and adjust the same thing on all of them, like levels or something? I mean, you CAN select them, but can't do anything. The layers are the same type.

[s0real]

if you group layers then you can adjust blend mode, opacity, and fill.
i don't think you can apply filters to groups though without merging the layers...

i only have cs2 though so might be different in later versions.

[rivoli]

Oh, another PS question, how come you can't select multiple layers and adjust the same thing on all of them, like levels or something?

make a group from the selected layers, and then use the adjustment layer you need inside of it. if you set the blending mode of the group to anything but pass through, the correction won't propagate to the underlying levels. works roughly like precomps in ae.

[MoonDoggie]

Ctrl+Alt+ (left-clicking in between 2 layers) will make it so the above ones ONLY affect the one below it and nothing below that.

[Crayox13]

Thanks guys for very helpful info!