Light and shadow tutorial
Lighting Tutorial
(Our way of giving something back to the community that gives so much to so many)
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Recently I have been experimenting with creating moody images that have dramatic lighting. In Poser or Bryce or any other rendering program it can take a lot of trial and error to position the lights just right to create shadows and then once you position them you have to wait for the render in order to assess your efforts. I have discovered a quick way to effectively achieve the same results in the postwork phase. This tutorial is in no way designed to illustrate better ways to pose, I will leave that up to Firebirdz, nor is it intended to create the perfect moody images as OCDoug has that market cornered. It simply is a quick cheat method to create or enhance your perfect masterpiece render. The above image is just a quick render with default Poser lights except that they were all colored white. Very basic, very plain.
Nothing exciting I know but that is the point. There are very few shadows and the lighting is in no way intended to be dramatic. But that’s where this lil cheat comes in.
Load your image into Photoshop, Photopaint, Paint Pro or whatever you use. Create a new layer on top of it and fill that layer in with 100% black. (It’s that lil paint bucket icon that you use to fill in a layer) Right now you are saying Hey great idea, now I can’t see anything, boy this is a neat lil cheat :P). Just hold your horses. Now just decrease the transparency of that black layer so the image underneath begins to show through. In this image I used 63%. I really doesn’t matter what percentage you use, just so that you can see what’s underneath. This is my progress so far with my initial render and a black layer over it at 63% transparency.
