Good tutorials for post production?

[Deflaminis]

I need to improve my post production skills. Does anyone recommend any specific training/tutorials (paid or otherwise) on this topic? I've googled and found some but I thought I'd ask in case anyone knows any special gems that I may not have found. Thank very much!

Best Regards,
Alfred

[Deflaminis]

Nobody? I figured there must be something... ah well.

[glorybound]

I have watched a few of these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-xg...ature=youtu.be

[VelvetElvis]

Arqui9 has some most excellent videos.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBz...i-Z5-x_svnZV1w

[Deflaminis]

Thank you both very much, these are good! I really appreciate it.

Best Regards,
Alfred

[Deflaminis]

Interesting use of the high pass filter. I've seen a lot of folks use Unsharp Mask, but the high pass filter has a much more clean look to it. Thanks again.

[cheerioboy]

Wish I had advice for this - I think I picked up a lot of my finishing knowledge from previous jobs/coworkers. More recently picked up some post production knowledge from https://www.fxphd.com/, when I learned how to use Nuke instead of Photoshop to handle post work. Made life less of a hell with the daily iterations on renderings and trying to deal with Photoshop! I think any tutorials you can find on photo finishing or cgi compositing should help with your renderings.

[Deflaminis]

Thank you for the info and link. It does seem that even for stills video packages are where it's at. I used Nuke once on a trial mode and it was incredible and my end result was the best result I had gotten at that point on my life and I had no idea what I was doing. So easy to use and such good feedback on the controls. But... $4500 is a bit steep, I guess I should wait for a sale. I suppose I could try Fusion again as a stop gap.

Thanks very much for the link, I'll check it out. I routinely see folks whose raw renders aren't very good end up with something better than I can so I'm looking at the man in the mirror to make a change.

Best Regards,
Alfred

[glorybound]

I routinely see folks whose raw renders aren't very good end up with something better than I can so I'm looking at the man in the mirror to make a change.

Best Regards,
Alfred

It can also go so wrong. I have seen post work make an image look very bad. I see one guy posting his post-production videos in LinkedIn and they end up looking look a poor 80's rendering with lens flares, glowing things and sparkles. The post-production should be very subtle, in my opinion.

[cheerioboy]

Deflaminis Yeah the price is steep for Nuke, luckily the company I'm at was willing to foot the bill as this was one of my requested programs. The Foundry used to have a payment plan for freelancers - maybe they dropped it... that was going to be my route if/when I leave my current job.

[Deflaminis]

I agree Bobby. Sometimes clients love those extra flares and things but it depends on the industry. Viz for industrial processing you can get away with basically anything which blows my mind. I'd say you have a good grasp the right levels of realism, your renders have gotten very good over the past few years my man. I check em out when I can.

Cheerioboy - My local reseller says they have big sales once in a while, but they stopped selling Nuke there so who know if that's still true. I'll look into the payment plan thing, good idea!

Thank you both for your posts.

Best,
Alfred

[Ihno]

I use fusion for about a year now and I couldn't imagine living without it anymore.
I do alot animation though.
But I'd always use fusion even for stills. I once edited a photo in it and even that was great. I did alot of texture edit in it too.
I tried Nuke once too and its better than Fusion in some ways. But the price is ridiculous.

Tip for using Fusion I wish I knew before: If you want to use multilayered exrs use the OptionRE render element and check exr multipart.
Than you'll get an drop down in your fusion loader to choose which channel you want. Instead of switching the RGB channels independently..
And the file will load 100x faster.

[Deflaminis]

Thank you Inho, I'll take a look. I haven't used Fusion much but it sounds like a good plan. I was surprised to see they had a free version and how many features were there. Plus the paid version being only 300 bucks is pretty great, this is much more my speed. Thanks again!

Best Regards,
Alfred

[OPEN_RANGE]

It seems like there are multiple things that can be accomplished with post processing. For myself first I strive to get the best I can out my raw render. I save as .exr. They are always a,bit low contrast and usually need at least a curves adjustment layer in photoshop. Linear contrast curve preset seems to work good. I have recently strived to get a better handle on tone mapping plus using either curves or camera raw filter to boost contrast. With camera raw, It seems using the clarity slider can improve contrast and sometimes opening up the shadows with camera raw filter is also good. That can take the place of curves adjustment.

You can purchase Vimeo videos from Richard Yot, itchy animations. pretty comprehensive overview of tone maping. @$25 I tried Fusion based on his instructional video. Then he provided a free update video with how to accomplish it in photoshop and for my work that seems better.

Comtroling and adjusting all the various render elements such as lighting, reflection etc passes I think maybe does require something more than photoshop. Like Fusion.

Adding lens flares as a post process I think check out ArionFX? I haven”t used it, I just use the vray frame buffer lens effects but having post independent control sounds attractive.

[Deflaminis]

Thank you Open Range, I appreciate your post. I am familiar with tone mapping and I feel pretty comfortable with it in many software packages, but I never did get it just right in Photoshop. I've started using LUT's a lot more and they help a ton. I agree with you that Camera Raw can get you very far. I also agree that maybe photoshop has just missed the boat of multi pass compositing. Even making things smart objects so you can dynamically update them only gets you so far. The edges... oh the edges. I find I often have to adjust the gamma of my multimatte alphas to get something clean and since the masks cannot be smart objects it's always a destructive edit. Argggg. (Or maybe the problem is Photoshop wanting to apply a color space to the multimatte which causes issues. I'm not sure but it's harder than it should be.)

My main issue seems to come from the post FX side of things and making image elements jive together, such as adding a sky and some rays over top so it melds the bg with the foreground. When it comes to post FX, struggle to get something decent with Photoshop. The amount of decent plugins for Photoshop for bloom and glare is very strangely small, but for video apps it seems much more expansive. Maybe the days of the still image photo editor are past and I just never noticed, stuck in my bubble. I do own ArionFX and for tone mapping and camera lut styles it's pretty great. For bloom and glare though it's pretty lacking on controls and customization and the VRay frame buffer does have more options. Also, once you use your own sky it's basically over because the dynamic range is shot, so Arion will sort of freak out on you a bit.

I took Fusion for a test drive last night and I'm overall pretty impressed with the color, exposure, and contrast controls. They seems to have less weight to them on minor adjustments, unlike Photoshop. Took me a bit to figure out how to change the color space and finding the merge node to combine passes, but so far so good.

I'm going to check that video though because I have many non-technical members of my team that may not be able to fully learn a compositing app like Fusion. Thank you so much for the heads up about it.

Best Regards,
Alfred