Matte Paint Super Tips,

#1

SUPERTIPS 1#

Tired of painting out cars and people in busy street scenes, I have a solution.

Lock of the camera and take up to fifty shots of the scene (before the light changes)

import all these into a layer stack in photoshop (only works on photoshop CS3 and above)

select auto align tool

Control A all the layers in the stack

Now for the fun part, convert into smart objects stack mode and select median , then watch as most of the pedestrians and traffic disappear. Photoshop calculates the median value and tonal range for each pixel this is also good for getting rid of noise.

Well now you read this its your chance to add to the supertip thread for matte painting,

Rich :beer:

PS if the mods are watching I think this would make a great sticky

#2

I guess I dont need to use police tape to block off a street anymore. Really nice tip Richard , I will have to check this one out.

I am actually in the middle of creating a tool for photoshop to help with color picking and once its done I will post up a link for everyone to download it.

#3

such an AWESOME thread idea! I’ll post anything here that I can think of but so far most of the tips I have are shared by other artists.

Cheers Rich and Matelis!

#4

Like a colour scheme in a painting or photograph. Want to look at the colours and appreciate the colour palette.

Duplicate the image and use the mosaic filter increase the mosaic size to taste.

Hey presto a colour palette showing the range.

Rich :wavey:

#5

http://cyclo.ps/

Tired off looking for reference photos, how about cyclops?

You can type in a tag for a photo, texture any amount of keywords and it will automatically look in all the top sites for you. This saves time searching through a myriad of sites, this is all on one page.

I have used this and found the results quite useful.

Hope you find it a useful tool as I have.

Rich

#6

Thanks for the link, Rich

I will have to have a look at that. In my experience Stock.xchng is the daddy and has never let me down, interesting that cyclops has a function for flickr as well though, i didn’t know pictures on there were guaranteed royalty-free.

#7

Yes I do find it strange that flickr is on there, however I go into the advanced search settings in flickr and tick creative commons. I always credit the author and send them a email with a link to, or what I have done to the image.

Couple of years ago a website stole a couple of photographs and sold them as theirs, my solicitor contacted and investigated them and contacted authors of other photographs he believed were stolen. Within days the site was shut down.

Because of the trouble, finance lost and the grief I always make sure that creative commons images are used. If I am not sure I will get in contact with the author.

I have found that having the one site to go cuts down the time in my workflow.

Pipelines, workflow and administration are the boring parts of the job however it is a neccessary evil.

glad you liked it,

Rich

#8

Here’s my contribution.

Use Photoshop Actions to proof your work.

Photoshop Actions are often overlooked as most of the work involved in creating a painting can’t be automated, but they are an excellent way to quickly check out how your work looks in final delivery.

I have a PS action set up that:

[ol]
[li]CopyMerges the entire painting into a new file.[/li][li]Applies a very slight chromatic aberration (helps to integrate various elements - especially CG).[/li][li]Resizes the whole thing to 50% of the original.[/li][li]Applies slight UnsharpMask to pop out some of the detail.[/li][li]Adds a tiny hint of Noise.[/li][/ol]

#9

Hi I noticed that there was a comment on a thread regarding over sharpening,

the only time you really need to sharpen is for print purposes, the image on screen will look oversharpened however will print perfectly. On a forty foot screen the halo, and aberration will be obvious.

If you go to the cinema you will notice that the CGI films are oversharp, however film stock if you look carefully is soft (including IMAX). Which is why some artists slip grain into the image. Which unnerves me as matching film stock is an art best left to a compositor.

There are a variety of ways to sharpen an image, but its the responsibility of the compositor or offline/online editor to do so.

I have noticed an alarming trend to emulate CGI crispness, this may have come from the HD world where crispness is meant to mean quality. Something that we are being brainwashed into by the blue ray lobby.

So I am now going to leave sharpening alone unless it is for print. I am going to suggest that if someone posts an image that they declare sharpened for print.

I will post here my two techniques for sharpening for print.

Sharpening technique 1

It is bad form to sharpen a colour image, reason why is that halos are formed, over highlights, it overpowers specular and adds ghosting.

Convert image into LAB colour it will complain that you need to flatten your image, just conitnue with out flattening the image.

Channels select lightness and the image will pop up greyscale, now go into filters and select Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen.

Select preview

Now you have a percentage slider, in six years of working professionally I have never gone beyond 80%

Now you can select pixel radius if you move the slider up and sown you can see the image gets pretty sharp.

The best place to start is look for the following areas,

Specular Highlights
Fur
Grass
Leaves
White over Black/ black over white
Text
Texture
Brickwork
Cloud fringes

Move the slider up and down and look at these areas, you need adjust it to taste. Dont panic as the black and white halos will not show up in your image.

(If you are unsure where your deep blacks and highlights are you can do a test in threshhold filter)

If you are in smart sharpen I tend to do this in gaussian mode as this will effect the whole image.

select ok and then select lab channel and you will see an obvious difference. At this point zoom in and identify the problem areas.

Remember to select mode and go back to RGB. You do not have to flatten it.

I know several people that try and work in LAB mode as much as possible (Google Dan Margulis he is the adobe expert who can explain better than I).

Second method

I used a compressed layer all the time in my work, though not advised if you are like Dusso and like to do a lot of fine adjustments on the fly.

Compressed Layer

Make sure you have a new layer at the top of the layer stack

Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E

This will flatten your layers into a new compressed layer

Ctrl+J

This duplicates your top layer

Go into Filters and select High Pass filter, adjust the pixel radius as far to the left before losing the image you will see that the image gets sharper.

Go to layer blend mode and select either hard light or soft light (personal taste here) you will see the image is sharpened. There are two further adjustments you can do here either using the opacity slider or as I do create a layer mask and paint in areas you want sharp.

Big, Big suggestion here remember depth of field, items in the focal range should be sharp whilst items in the distance are softer.

Unless you are emulating hyper focal distance, which is a advanced landscape photography technique.

If you remember foreground, mid ground and background and change the sharpness to get softer the further the distance away. The image will now look more realistic without looking too CGI.

I am sure there strong views on putting in film grain and sharpening for some artists, however if you did this and presented it to a compositor you might get a stern look.

Look forward to your comments, be nice, and if you have a better technique please share

Rich

#10

For Sharpening, I like to use a software called “Irfanview”. Its a free image viewing program that also has some limited editing tools. Anyways I only use this software to mainly sharpen my (and I quote here) “resized” images weather they be a matte for viewing online or photos. If you’re interested go to http://www.irfanview.com/ and check it out. The algorithm they use to sharpen I find is just the best. Can’t get your stuff sharpened like that in PS, I have tried every trick. Don’t take my work for it, try it on resized images and you’ll see. BTW, you’ll have to go into effects browser/ sharpen, then type in a value, I suggest 20.

m.

#11

Cheers Marcin,

I will check that out, thanks for sharing, like things that are free,

Rich

#12

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