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| copyright and all that stuff by yours truly |
I’m often trying to impress on my students the importance of being a good photographer. Not in the sense of using a camera, but in terms of being really good at framing and composing with space and light. This is the point of all the art history classes we make them take too. Design starts with visual composition and directing the eye, and if you don’t really understand what Caravaggio was doing with light, how good are you ever really going to be at laying out a page, much less designing a poster? And of course, the more you understand the old masters, the better your photography will be. You are not just taking a picture; you are composing the frame, controlling (or revealing) the light, and most of all, guiding the eye.
A place where not thinking like a photographer really shows up is in 3D renderings. To be fair, just getting those first few renders to actually happen at all is a huge victory, but once you begin to assemble a portfolio, you can’t just render. You need to make beautiful images.
The key is to realize that rendering are never used in their raw form in the professional world. They are always adjusted in After Effects, Photoshop, or some other compositing program. The first round of adjustments are pretty much what you would do to a photograph. Levels adjustments, color corrections, that sort of thing. Then, it is all about giving the rendering life and atmosphere; the organic sense of light and air that a camera captures (with the guiding eye of the photographer) but that the sterile world of 3D is missing until we add it in.
The basics of this post production are captured in this tutorial by Nick Campbell over at Greyscalegorilla. He demos the technique in After Effects, but you use the same techniques for still images in Photoshop. In a more recent tutorial, he takes those basic techniques to the next level and throws in some color lookup tables. And finally, a tutorial by Konstantin Magnus on creating atmosphere in architectural renderings gives a full tool box of techniques for making renderings anything but sterile.
(Bonus: 6 methods for making vignettes in Photoshop)
