How to make renders look more colorful
ppaawweell336
Posts: 21
in The Commons
Hello, I have a question about lighting and maybe tone mapping settings.
I wanna make renders look more colorful, almost like a fairy tale and not real life. But it always come out that my renders look more realistic and colors are not that intesive.
This picture is what I'm aiming for.
Maybe more expirience members could tell what lighting and tone mapping settings was used in the this picture to getting this bright, colorful effect.
1.jpg
1920 x 1080 - 364K
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that images looks to me almost like it was made from three singel renders : the guy, the girl and the background and then composed in postwork (gimp/photoshop)
To achieve something like that in one render I would advise to learn about three point light settings or multy point light settings
there is a lot of information collected in this thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/382196/february-2020-daz-3d-new-user-challenge-lighting-and-light-effects/p1
or you try purchasing one of the light sets (not only HDRI but an arraged group of lights, eG https://www.daz3d.com/boss-pro-light-set-for-portraits-promos or any other of that sort) and study how and which lights are positioned where to get which effects.
Sometimes it's easier to take a finished render into something like GIMP or Photoshop and make brightness & contrast adjustments in there rather than trying to do it all in the initial render.
I could be totally wrong, but the example image above also looks like it has had its sharpness adjusted post-render too - look to where the black t-shirt meets the skin... there is a slight aberration where a thin section of skin looks brighter than the rest of the skin, which is a sign of manual sharpening (there is a simple trick to avoid that, but that's a bit of a tangent at the moment). Similarly with some of the facial features - I'm not saying it's bad, but I am saying that you don't see those sorts of things in an unmodified render.
Better lighting would definitely make that scene shine.
This set contains absolutely fantastic looking natural scene light settings: https://www.daz3d.com/ultimate-grass--meadow-worldbuilder
I have used the lights from that set for both exteriors and interiors. I love those lights.
Edit: this is an overview of the lights from the promos. They are extremely easy to use, simply double click to add to the scene, select the light and rotate/transfer as needed.
It's because they chose bright pink for the home & curtains and made those surfaces more glossy.
Wow, a lot of ideas thanks for your answers. I will definetly try the things you suggest here.
One more thing - the male figure out of the focus zone looks transparent, you can clearly see the wall line through his head. That makes the scene look a lot less realistic and more like an artifical amalgamation of images.
I used to have this happen when I applied too much Gaussian Blur to an entire layer... a better strategy would be to duplicate the layer you want to blur, blur that, and then apply a mask do you can white it out and paint it back in so you maintain some more control over things like edges and such. Not that I'm preaching, mind you... learned that the hard way myself haha
Fortunately, this cannot happen to me, because I have no idea what a Guassian Blur or a layer in this context are, nor how to use them. I simpy use the Depth of Field on my cameras.
It's a filter you can apply when editing an image.
You can adjust the saturation in the render settings or download topaz labs legacy version for some free filters.
In Iray you can try to play with Gamma and Saturation under Tone Mapping. The first render here is with the default settings, with the second Gamma is changed to 1.8 and Saturation to 1.4.
I don't find that render particularly colourful... but in any case, if you want more colourful images I would recommend adjusting saturation in GIMP (or Photoshop, if you have access) after rendering.
What makes you think it's not simply DOF?
the female character definitely has a light coming from behind left side which is not present on the male character and has no indication of origin on the background part, the blurr seems off in the scale relation to the different parts of the image, the parts of the house seen through the blurry part of the male character was already mentioned.
there is no trace of environmental light (pink from the house) which would be thrown back onto the characters, on the contrary the light set used for the female has its temperatures set way up high (eG 8000 that is what the boss light set uses for most of the lights in the standart setting) so its a very cold light, skin tends to grey out in that, the guy then was rendered with a different light temperature, his skin tone didn't grey out.
That enough for my theory on a Friday night ? :D
You make some good points, thanks for your Friday night theories!
Iray is a physically based render engine, so it prefers making realistic looking things. And here is the problem...real life is pretty blandly lit up!
When you watch any movie or TV show, they fake their light all the time. What you might want to look at are videos about how Hollywood does lighting. Hollywood almost NEVER uses the natural light. They will add light right in front of people to light their faces (of course, just out of camera view). They will place lights under tables, in the ceiling, in any sort of weird places to get it looking just right, so that it pops. The issue here is that such lighting is not possible in real life. Yet many people have been trained by Hollywood to look at movies and TV and pictures with this sort of alternate reality, even though it is not reality. In door lighting especially is totally faked across the board. Lighting is a full time job.
So if you want more color, use more colorful light. That is, try a warmer light. Try using several different lights of different color temps, that could add a more dynamic look to this scene. You can also opt for more contrast, controlling the direction of the light so that the render has more contrast, which could also make the colors pop better. You do not need to worry about where you light is coming from, if you try to make light only come from realistic places, like actual lamps, you will get a more realistic look...but that is not what you want here. So go ahead and experiment, try placing some lights in places just for this shot, even if they don't make sense. Post effects like tone mapping and gamma can help, too. But if you are scared of messing with these, it is ok, focus on learning some lighting first and maybe come back to these concepts later.
There is no one way to do this.
Yeh and it is pretty obvious watching some of the TV dramas. The indoor lighting is so dark you can barely see the other side of the room with the lights on. Who lives in a house like that... moles?