Need Advice...Thinking of Trying one of Ron's Items
Subtropic Pixel
Posts: 2,388
Hello:
I am thinking of trying one of Ron's items. Really any one of them. Or a Bundle. This is just for learning new technique.
I don't use Photoshop but I have Corel Paintshop Pro as well as the lightroom alternative, Aftershot Pro.
Can anybody give me any advice on how to try this out or which of Ron's products might be a good starter? I'm not trying to complete any particular type of work right now, so fire, water, dirt, snow, it doesn't really matter just yet. Also, I have no real budget limit but I don't want to spend hundreds until I know if I like what I can do, haha!
Thanks in advance!
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Comments
Ron's sets are really all quite nice. I have several of them. Some are brushes only, some are psd layers, others are both. I would recommend having an image in mind so you know what you might like to try. Making something you want to render and enhance is always going to be better than having effects and then coming up with an image to try to use them. A bit like buying a can of green paint without knowing where in your house it might work. :)
Depending on the effects, I would say try rendering with multipasses (a render per light) to control and influence each light and what it adds to your image and also where you render the figure apart from the scene (hide everything in the scene) so you can layer effects in front and in back of the figure.
I actually did this with a can of grey paint. Hey, it was only a dollar! But you're right, I already had an idea of what to do with it...a faux concrete element in my house. I stucco'd it and painted it and it came out well! I'm nuts like that; willing to try out crazy stuff!
I'll look again at Ron's store and see what looks interesting. Halloween is coming up. Fire, water, and/or blood would be interesting!
Hi!
The one I started with was the fairy dust because with the items shrunk, you can make streams behind a character and it doesn't come across as pixie or fairy. But I would say any of the water brushes would be a delight.
Take a peek at this one- the water is just a blue plane, and I used about ten of the brushes (in various water sets, can't remember now) to create mystical water from scratch. So I'd have to vote for any of the water brushes. :) (EDIT: be sure to click to enlarge, click again, and look at the detail.)
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/35975/#529543
Just a bit of advice/warning. All of Ron's items are very nice and one can easily get addicted to them.
I have bought almost all of his items, and I am chasing the rest of them on the Fast Grab.
Just my 2 cents :)
+1 on that!
If you'd like to try before you buy, may I also recommend his (freebie) sampler? Find it at:
http://www.brusheezy.com/brushes/12896-rons-sampler-brushes
I tried that before I bought anything because I needed to be sure they would work in Photoshop Elements (they did)
Rons brushes are fantastic I would not be without them. But they do not work in all versions of Corel paintshop pro I have x4 , but need to update to x6 for the photoshop brushes to work.They work fine in Photoshop elements . I would think some of the grunge edges would be a good start. Hope this helps!!
I own a couple of Rons brushes sets and they are very good and extensive. have used them on many occasions.
The only thing that stopped me buying more was that I figured out how to make my own.. :P
What a coincidence... I logged in hoping to see if any of Ron's stuff was on sale. Bought one package on sale the other day, I probably missed out on other sales.
Here is an image I found being sold commercially that was created from using Ron's stuff:
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-illustration-mechanical-eye-direct-contact-image43995449
I have a project that I'm working on today which will use the package I just purchased from Ron. I'm a newbie who is still learning this part of the market and wished I had caught other stuff from Ron when it was on sale.
Hey, Daz, put Ron's stuff up for sale again and I will purchase. Just can't justify the full price at this point in time.
Ron's Fog 2 is easily one of the most used products I have. A bit of warning, as you mentioned you're using Paintshop, tho -- for whatever reason Paintshop has a pretty small cap on how large you can make a brush, so if you render wide pictures (I do all mine at 2000x1125 for 16:9 wallpapers) brushes that are meant to span the whole scene can't be made big enough. GIMP works fine for that, tho, and since those brushes are best for foreground fog anyway it works out fine. :)
But yes, I'll backup what Artini said...you'll get addicted and start buying more sets. Birds, webs, slime...
Greetings,
I second the free brush sampler; it's what I picked up to try out the brushes, and see how they worked. I had a wide enough back-catalog of rendered images that I was able to take a few of them and practice putting brush stamps in a few places, toy with translucency, colors, layers, etc., and see how I'd use them, and almost always they added to the atmosphere and the 'depth' (for lack of a better word) of my images.
Now...well, now I own about the same percentage of Ron's catalog as I do of Stonemason's, which is to say damn near everything. :)
I use them in Pixelmator, an amazing and inexpensive image editor for the Mac. It's amazing how much texture a steam curl out of a sewer, or smoke from a lit cigarette, or just a little grime on a fantasy castle's wall can add. That's also when I stopped prizing 'No Postwork!' in my renders. They just looked better with a smidge of postwork, and I had to 'Let it go!'
-- Morgan
Thank you all for your input!
I had Corel Photoshop X6 and decided today to upgrade to X7. Not for this, or for these brushes; I just decided to do the upgrade for both Photoshop and Video Studio.
So now I've been fussing about getting everything downloaded, installed, and registered. The workstation is almost done and next will be the laptop.
Melanie and others mentioned the free sampler brush pack, which I've also downloaded. I will try that and then will decide how to proceed. Really looking forward to it, so thank you all for sharing your experience and opinions!
I thought Adobe has Photoshop and Corel has paint shop pro. I remember downloading Photoshop from the Adobe website.
Yeah, typo. I have PaintShopPro, sometimes called PSP. Similar names, similar acronyms. Oops!