Tips & Tricks Photoshop

Render out the right Masks

Now we'll take a look in how we can take our render into Postproduction. First of all, render out a image and make sure you use bring in some extra passes/masks. To do this, once you've pressed the render button, you'll see some letters that you can select. The selected one will be white. The ones we're gonna look at is D, S, A and M.

Depth - A black and white depth map that we will use to change contrasts

Specular - A black and white render that will boost reflections on objects that recieve lights

Alpha - A map where the sky sky is in White and the rest in Black, this is useful for sky replacement.

Material ID - Will create a unique color for each material, useful to change colors on seperate materials.

Import to Photoshop

Once you've rendered, open photoshop. Navigate to File in the top left corner, then Scripts and finally Load Files into Stack.

Press Browse and select all images, then press OK.

Structure the Layers in Photoshop

Now you've loaded in all of the images into Photoshop. Let's start by structuring the different layers by putting them into layers. Create three different groups that's called RGB, Passes and Masks. Create a group by pressing on the Folder logo in the bottom right coMode rner while you're holding in the ALT key.

Then move the layer of your render into the RGB folder, the Depth and Specular layers to Passes and SkyAlpha and MatID to Masks. Should look like this.

How to use the Specular and Depth Map

Let's start by hiding the Masks group by pressing on the eye left to the group name. Let's also hide the Depth layer. Now we select the Specular layer and change the Blending Mode on this layer by pressing where it says Normal in the bottom right corner. Change this to Screen.

You'll now notice that the reflection have been boosted in your image, see the results by turning the layer visibility on/off by pressing on the eye to see the changes. Here you can adjust the opacity on this layer to reduce the effect. Here we will also learn about masks and how powerful that is. So for example, let's say i only would like the specular effect to affect the brick facade. We need to tell photoshop to only use this layer on the facade. To do this we'll turn on and select the MatID layer that's located in the Masks group.

Now press on the Magic Wand tool in the toolbar on the left side. By standard the Magic Wand Tool is not automatically selected, so make sure you hold the logo in and then select the Magic Wand Tool.

Now select the facade, in my case it's the yellow color. For me i also have a bush in the lower right that will be automatically selected. This we'll take care off later. Once the facade is selected, turn off the MatID layer and select the Specular layer again, and press the Mask Logo in the bottom right corner.

You've now created a black and white mask for the Specular layer, let's open that mask and see how it looks and understand what it means. To enter the mask you press on the mask while holding in the ALT key. The mask is just to the right of the specular layer.

So how masks works is that whatever you'll see is White is what will be affected for the selected layer, in this case the Specular Layer and everything that's in Black will not be affected. In my case there is also a bush that is white which i don't want, so i'm just quickly going to brush that over with a black color. If your mask is correct you'll skip this step. To use the brush tool, press B on your keyboard and select a black color in the left toolbar and then paint the object over. Should look something like this afterwards.

Now the mask is correct and now we're going out from the mask by pressing on the mask once again while holding in the ALT key on your keyboard. You can now see that the Specular layer is only affecting the facade! Make sure you really understand how the masks is working, this is the most powerful tool for Architecture Visualisation inside of Photoshop.

Now let's move on to the Depth layer. Make it visible by pressing on the eye, make sure that you also have selected it. Now let's go into the Channels tab that you'll find in the middle on your left side.

Now let's click on the layer called "Red" while holding in CTRL on your keyboard. Photoshop have now made a selection based on this layer. Now let's go back to the Layers tab which is just left to were we clicked Channels. Now let's press the adjustments logo in the bottom right corner and select "Curves".

A curves layer have been added and Photoshop have automatically created a mask based on the Depth layer. Let's go into that mask and take a look how it looks. Same procedure as before, click on the mask while holding in ALT on your keyboard.

You'll now see a gradient with white in the foreground that will transfer into black the further away we go in the scene. This will be very useful to use in order to switch contrast in the picture and bring more attention to the architecture.

Exit out of the mask by pressing on it while holding in the ALT key. And now turn off the depth layer underneith the curves. Your layer structure should look like this now.

Now let's select the curves layer, and pull the middle of the graph down so you'll create the shape of a U. Something like this.

We've now made the foreground darker, now we would like to apply the same effect but in this case affect the background and instead of making that darker we'd like to make it more bright. So let's start by duplicating the Curves layer, to do this you can right click on the Curves layer and press Duplicate layer. Now we would like to invert this mask so it will give us the opposite effect. To easily do this we'll select the Curves layer we just created and press CTRL+I on your keyboard.

Now the mask is inverted, now we just need to change the parameters of that new curves layer to the opposite as last time. Something like this.

To see the effects of this we can press the eye button on the group called Passes.

What we can achieve with MatID and SkyAlpha.

Let's now take a closer look on what we can do with the help of MatID and SkyAlpha. Lets make the MatID visible by clicking on the eye, then make sure it's selected. Now let's use the Magic Wand Tool, you can press the button on the left side or simply hit W on your keyboard. Press on your facade for example to create marking.

Let's make the MatID layer unvisible by clicking on the eye, and then create a new Group by clicking on the group logo in the bottom corner while holding in the ALT key.

Call this Group "Facade" or whatever you've decided to create a marking around. With the Group selected, let's press on the "Create a Mask" logo in the bottom right.

You've now created a Group with a mask on it, this means that everything you put in this group will only affect the things that are white in that mask, in my case it's the facade.

Let's now for example add a Color Balance adjustment to this group, to do this you hit the Adjustment logo in the bottom right corner, and select Color Balance.

Try to drag the sliders, you'll now see that only the mask will affect what you change. If there's something that is wrong with the mask you can always enter the mask and paint black to change it. To enter the Mask press on the mask next to the Group layer while holding in ALT on your keyboard.

Feel free to try adding more adjustments to the group, like Hue/Saturation, Brightness/Contrast or Levels.

Replace the Sky

Let's now replace the Sky with something else, same procedure as before but in this case we'll use the SkyAlpha layer that we put in the Mask group.

Make sure the SkyAlpha layer is selected and then with the Wand Tool (W on your keyboard) select the sky which will be white. Make the SkyAlpha layer unvisible. Create a new Group called "Sky" by clicking the Group logo while holding in ALT on your keyboard. Now press the mask logo in the bottom right corner, and you've created a new Sky Group with a mask. Should look something like this.

Let's now place a new Sky in this group, if neccesary you can adjust the scale of this layer by pressing CTRL+T to transform it. Scale it so it fits the screen and just like that you've replaced your Lumion Sky.

Adding people

Adding people and vegetation in the foreground can be very useful to create more realism in a render since the people from 3D looks really unrealistic if they're close by. Let's start with people.

First of all, let's create a new layer called People. Click on the group logo in the bottom right corner while holding in ALT on your keyboard. Let's now import some cutouts to Photoshop, if you don't have any specific cutouts, there is a library on the server that you could use. It's located here, I:\A-lab\photoshop\folk\Epictor

There is also some useful websites where you can download even more cutouts. For example, https://www.mrcutout.com/ & https://www.vishopper.com/

Drag your cutout in the group we created called People. Adjust the scale by pressing CTRL+T on your keyboard. Let's now first create a shadow, to do this we create a duplicate of the cutout. Right click on the layer and select Duplicate Layer. Select the bottom layer of those two and press on the preview of that layer while holding in CTRL, it's important you press on the preview and not on the side. Here it's demonstrated where to press.

You've now created a marking on the cutout, let's now select the bottom layer and paint this black. Use the brush tool (B on your keyboard) and paint the marking black.

If this object is a Smart Object you'll not be able to paint on it, then you'll have to first Rasterize the layer. To do this you'll right click on that layer and press "Rasterize Layer"

Let's deselct by hitting CTRL+D on your keyboard, now let's select the bottom layer once again and hit CTRL+T, now we would like to right click inside of the marking in the middle and press Distort. This is were you're rightclicking in order to see the Disort option.

Now select the point in the middle of the top and drag the shadow in the correct direction, look around in your scene to see where the shadow is heading. Finetune the shadow now by dragging in the other points, mine looks something like this.

Once satisfied, hit enter. Now let's start by changing the opacity of this layer, you'll find the opacity slider here.

Once again, look at the surrounding to see what value that's closest to the environment. To make this more realistic we're gonna add some blur to the end of the shadow. The shadow will get more blurry the longer away it is from the object. So let's select the shadow layer and press the blur tool which is located here.

Remember that you can change the size, opacity and hardness of the brush.

Once that's done let's now create som Motion Blur on the top layer since she's moving in my case. Select the top layer and add Motion Blur by first selecting Filter in the top toolbar, then blur and Motion Blur.

Change the distance slider to something that looks normal and realistic.

Last we might need to change some of the colors/levels on our cutout. Let's apply a Levels adjustment in the group. Go down to the adjustments logo and select Levels. Place it above the cutout, like this.

If you now change the value on Levels, you'll see that that will affect the hole picture which we don't want. We only want this Levels layer to affect our cutout, to make this happen we can hold the ALT key on your keyboard and press in the middle of the Levels & Cutout layer, your Levels layer should now have a Arrow that points down, this means that it will only affect the layer underneith.

Now we can change the slider, feel free to add more adjustments like Hue/Saturation and make sure you also change this layer so it'll only affect the Cutout layer. You can have multiple adjustment layers on top of eachother, they will still only affect the cutout layer.

Apply LUT's and make final changes in Camera Raw.

One last thing we can do with our render in Photoshop is to add premade Color Corrections to our image, this is useful since you can see very quick what will happen if the image get's more warmer or colder for example. To apply this you'll need to press on the adjustment logo in the bottom right corner and select the one called Color Lookup, place this new layer on top of everything. Like this.

Select the layer, then press the drop down menu in the top where it says "Load 3D LUT", a quick way to go through them quickly is to select the top one and then use your arrow keys. Remember that you can lower the intensity of the applied LUT by changing the opacity.

Last we'll take a look on how to make the final adjustments inside of CameraRaw. To do this we first need to create a new layer with everything merged underneith. Select the layer in the top of your layers, in my case it's the Color Lookup, now press CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E. A new layer have been created, now let's convert this to a smart object, right click on the layer and select "Convert to Smartobject".

Now we can apply Camera Raw, select the layer and then press Filter in the top toolbar and then Camera Raw Filter.

In here we can use all different types of sliders to change colors and contrasts very easy, once satisfied press on OK in the bottom right corner.