So I've been looking at Photoshop Brushes...

Subtropic Pixel

Examples, Ron's Powder, Detail Smoke, Atmospheric, etc.

I don't use Photoshop and I won't buy it for as long as Adobe keeps on with their subscription madness. I'm beginning to eliminate some subscription costs from my monthly budget and I even review my DAZ PC subscription a couple times per year. So I just won't do it for any Creative Cloud software.

I do have Corel PaintShop Pro. Does anybody have any experience in this... in general will most vendors' PSD brushes work well with PSP?

And a secondary question...

What are your feelings on applying effects into your image versus doing them in post-render-processing? I kind of like working in the 3D space as much as I can and so far, not so sure I'm fond of the idea of having to do a bunch of followup stuff in post. But I may be making bad assumptions so I'd like to hear your thoughts on this...

Thanks!

XoechZ

Hello!

Yes, you can import Photoshop brushes into PSP. But there are two things you have to be aware of:
First, you cannont use the brushes instantly. You have to convert them. But this is done inside PSP, is very fast and has to be done only once.
Second, the brush size in PSP is limited to 999 pixels. So any brush that is bigger, will be scaled down to max 999 pixels.

To your second question:
I love to do things like background fx, lightning fx (e.g. god rays) and fog in postwork. It is easy, fast and very flexible. And it saves tons of render time if you keep that kind of stuff for postwork. But here everyone has his own preferences. I, for myself, like my renders to be done as fast as possible, because I prefer working on them in Photoshop, instead of waiting for hours and hours, doing nothing but waiting. Thats just boring :-)

sriesch

One disadvantage to doing postwork that could be done within the render itself, is if you ever have re-render the scene, all your postwork is lost and has to be re-done. You might have to rerender because you forgot somethig, or later after viewing it you see a flaw that wasn't immediately obvious, or others request a change of some sort, or you want to re-render it larger for a new monitor or to print out poster sized, etc.

CypherFOX

Greetings,
So...I own a significant percentage of Ron's stuff. I don't own (and never will own) Photoshop. I use Pixelmator (a Mac app), though.

To quote from Corel's own site:

Choose from a variety of built-in brushes, including paint brush, air brush, fill and color changer options, or import Adobe Photoshop brushes to bring your digital artwork and creative designs to life.

I use postwork to do a lot of different things. The basic stuff is to put in stock skies (like...90% of my final images), adjust the color balance (levels, 100% of my images), fix small render problems (spot render to new window FTW!), crop, add a signature. Then there's stuff like explosions, and...scene detail. Far away birds in the sky, spiderwebs, condensation, rain, and puddle splashes... I can take clean renders and 'dirty them up'. Add small smoke curls to cigarettes or the barrel of a gun, steam coming out of a city grate, energy bolts from boots, splatter blood on a wall, or tears on someone's cheek.

It's really hard to do all that in-render, and if I can save half an hour of setup, test-render, and fiddling by doing 30-90 seconds of postwork, it's totally worth it. (Small smoke curls, water splashes, and dirtying up textures, including bloodstains, are the biggest pains to do in 3D space, IMO.)

But I spent a long time really, really not wanting to do postwork, and it was probably helpful...but in the end, it's not a bad thing to be able to add small details after the fact.

Edit:
One disadvantage to doing postwork that could be done within the render itself, is if you ever have re-render the scene, all your postwork is lost and has to be re-done. You might have to rerender because you forgot somethig, or later after viewing it you see a flaw that wasn't immediately obvious, or others request a change of some sort, or you want to re-render it larger for a new monitor or to print out poster sized, etc.

This can be true, or it can be mitigated. If you use a layer-capable photo editor (presumably Corel is that) and always do your postwork in layers, it's very possible that you can simply swap out the original render for a new one. (Unless you change your camera angle, for instance.) I've often had to spot-render-to-new-window parts of an image in order to fix up collisions and stuff like that, and that's another great use of postwork. Just drop in the spot render as a new layer on top of the old image, and *poof* it's fixed without a full re-render of the image.

-- Morgan

p.s. For some pro-grade crazy post-work examples, check out Isikol's galleries on deviantArt. It's epic.

Serene Night

I like post work, and use brushes a lot. You can always buy an older version of Photoshop which was pre-subscription model if you don't want the pay for play software.

If you save your image in layers, it is easy enough to re-render again with and just replace the image in your layer with the new render, you aren't stuck doing it all again, unless there is something radically change din your render.

XoechZ

One disadvantage to doing postwork that could be done within the render itself, is if you ever have re-render the scene, all your postwork is lost and has to be re-done. You might have to rerender because you forgot somethig, or later after viewing it you see a flaw that wasn’t immediately obvious, or others request a change of some sort, or you want to re-render it larger for a new monitor or to print out poster sized, etc.

Hm, not necessarily. All those postwork effects are done in different layers. So, if you re-render your image because of some changes, simply exchange the render-layer of your composing in Photoshop and everything is there :-) Of course you should always save your project before flattening and saving the image.

Ruphuss

I like post work, and use blushes a lot

how do you make a picture blush ?

if you look at the Gallery the most liked pictures are very much postworked

XoechZ

ruphuss said:

I like post work, and use blushes a lot

how do you make a picture blush ?

New layer on top, fill with red, set layer mode to overlay and lower opiacity to about 20% :-) :-) :-)

Subtropic Pixel

Thank you all!

I see now how post can help.

I forgot to mention that one of my interests is animation, and I'm under the impression that post will be very difficult in a 24+ frame-per-second video file.

But skills in post would be useful so here's my strategy for now: Keep pushing the limits of what I can do in 3D space right now because that will make me better in pre-render activities, but keep open the idea of post, and start building my skills in it, especially in the layered working environment, which I'm not used to right now.

I also have Corel Painter 11 and a very very old version of Corel Draw 8, both on DVD/CD someplace. More tools, more possibilities, yes?

XoechZ

Subtropic Pixel said:

I forgot to mention that one of my interests is animation, and I'm under the impression that post will be very difficult in a 24+ frame-per-second video file.

I have never done animations, but I think a good video editing software should do the same for videos as an image editing software for images :-) "Compositing Software" is the right term here. Do a Google search and you can see how easily you can spend a lot of money (Nuke, After Effects,...)

Ruphuss

perhaps you would like to have a look at this Forum

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/categories/42/

I am working with sony movie studio platinum for the movies

photoshop elements 10 for picture postwork

that's both cheap and easy to handle

examples
https://vimeo.com/96087135