Postworking

[Engel47]

Recently in the pub forum we started a collaboration "team effort" sort of thing and I have rendered a couple of poser characters over some of DragonWizards excellent Artmatic backgrounds.

What I wanted to ask here is - Do you import your background picture into poser and render over it - or like me, do you add the background image in postwork??

What do you find works best for you? And why??

For me I feel that adding the background in postwork gives me more control and a better finish - I can scale the image and shuffle it about so that I get the best view. Often I use really large backgrounds and may only want part of it in the finished image, so I find postworking it in gives me more flexibility. But I do add the background into Poser at the start of the work just to get the lighting etc right.

[Liewald]

Well I actually do a bit of both. I find that pulling the BG into poser allows me to get the lighting and pose exactly the way I want them. After rendering however I may overlay sections of the origional image for a number of reasons. I also tend to apply overall filters to the image to level off the lighting and colour balance between the render and the BG and integrate them together.


Dave

[hoskins78]

Ah a good question lol!
Like Dave I've started rendering over an imported background image but then rendering several PNGs as well as the full image (if that makes any sense)
I can then reassemble the whole thing during postwork and bring in a higher res version of the background image too!
One benefit of rendering PNGs over the imported background is that any pixelation to the edges will match the eventual scene whereas if you leave the background black you'll have lots of black pixels to remove from the outline of the image :)

[Liewald]

One of the things that you can do in corel photopaint is feather objects that yuo drop onto a pic. This effectively removes masking pixelation. A real neat feature.

[wile1]

I've done both but I prefer to make the model then add bg in post work. That way I can play with different backgrounds and see which one works the best. Sometimes when you have a background picked out it doesn't always work with the figure you do. And sometimes I get two great pictures out of one figure on different backgrounds. It amazes me sometimes.

[Larry Wolf]

I insert the backgrpund in postwork like engel.

Theres more control with color, contrast and so on.
I can better work with this.