Achieving the photographic look tutorial

[BBB3]

Hi Folks,
Just a small heads-up that I've written an extensive, layman-language guide to how to achieve a photographic final look in renders.
See what you think and let me have your comments.
Best, Bertrand

[NicoC]

Hello Bertrand !

And Happy New Year
Thanks for this article, that seems great (I've just quickly ran through it during a preview rendering) but a bit frustrating, because of the "layman-language" I guess ... however, it's definitely a good starting point for further enhancing our renderings !

Keep up the good work,

Cheers.

[AndresAhumada]

This is the best gift ever...
Thx Bernard.
As always yours posts are the king inspirational
Thanks for transmit your knowledge
A great reference for young people like me

happy new year

[andybot_cg]

Nice write-up! I thought it laid out and explained the background on the basic concepts pretty clearly.
Thanks for the plug for ArionFX, def will check it out.

Andy

[cheerioboy]

great post, thanks for sharing!

[Morbid Angel]

Excellent tutorial!

[glorybound]

I am just amused by the render times. 2-6 hours per view, which it seems on this forum means you are not doing it right. Some say anything more than 20 minutes is insane. Now, I know that I am not broken, so thanks! Most of the best of the best have those render times; it just seems to take that long for great results.

[Morbid Angel]

Imho 2-6 hours per frame is quite acceptable.

[glorybound]

Me too, but others would disagree.

Imho 2-6 hours per frame is quite acceptable.

[theedge]

Wether those render times are acceptable or not totally depends on the context.
For eg I almost only do arch competitions. So really anything longer than 1 hour (and that's for 5-6k resolution) is unacceptable because of short deadlines and common last minute changes.
But if time allows I don't see anything wrong with cranking up the settings, doing in-camera DOF and spending hours to render.

[glorybound]

Hardware plays a major roll and we hardly mention the hardware used. I purposely went with a budget workstation, which would force me to optimize my scenes (plus a license for each slave was just to much money IMO). Currently, I am getting the same render times with 1 less expensive machine as I did with 6 more expensive ones, because I am learning to optimize everything. However, I am still seeing times a little over an hour on most scenes.

[PGD]

Great write up - put like this it all sounds so simple, but developing the eye to perfect all this is another matter!


I use a Mac for the PP side of things here, so it's a shame to see the ArionFX plugin for Photoshop is PC only.

[Deflaminis]

Thank you for writing this, it's well organized. In my own travels I've started using 180 as white myself, though there was a post from Vlado a while back stating that actual white walls are something like 156. For me changing down to 180 from 240 or 220 was a major speed and quality boost.

The one main question I have after reading this is what type of light unit you use on vray lights. For example... luminous power vs. default.

Thanks again.

[Nicinus]

Is there a similar recommendation for black materials? I.e. never go below 10 or something? I have some leather sofas that I have completely black with the actual pattern in the reflection slot, but I feel it really sucks light compared to the rest of the scene.

[Joelaff]

In a linear workflow, which everyone ought to be using these days, I like a black of 3 (out of 255). If it is something crazy black like black velvet (it could be none more black...) then maybe 2.