Open Photoshop, and load your rendered image. Now the layer management is very important. Here you can see my layers.

a) 

I recommend to copy your original image into a new layer. So you always have your original in the background, and if you make some mistakes, you can make simple a copy again.

My rendered image is a little bit to blur. So I use the Filter-->Sharp. A very nice effect for summer, is a little glow on the image. You can see this effect on white walls, and in towns close to the sea. I will show you very easy how you can do that.

Select the layer with your copy of your rendered image, which whe had sharpened a little bit. Now we have to make a correction in the tones, because we want to have the glow effect only on the white parts of the image. For this reason, we move the slider to a brighter value, like you can see on the image below.

If this is done, your image looks like this: Very dark, but it´s exactly what we need.

Filter-->Other-->Maximum
Radius: Pixel 3





Filter-->Blur-->Gaussian Blur
Radius: Pixel 3




Now, you can use this layer for your glow effect. Change your layer to "Screen", and with the opacity you can control this effect.

Here the result with 100% opacity. A little bit to much for my taste. But for the demonstration very good to show.

ALPHA:

Now load you alpha image you´ve rendered and put it over the glow layer. So it is on the top of all other layers. This Alpha map is always very important and without using it, it will not work so easy to seperate the 3d objects from your bg image.

Switch to the channels, and create a new one for our alpha image. If you now press over the alpha image STRG+right mous click, you select the alpha mask.

That means, you´ve loaded your alpha mask as selection. Now go back to the layers, and copy this slection to your bg image "sharp". You can do this by pressing STRG+C. Than click STRG+V to paste it. The result is very nice, and you have now sucessfully seperated your 3d objects from your bg image.






Now you can fine tune both images and make a nice color match with brightness, contrast, shadows and saturation. Well done, here is the final result, and I think it´s not bad for the beginning.

Congratulations, you now have finished my cg study, and I hope you liked it. I think you should know now the basics and you can expermiment and make your own images.

Be creative and make what ever you want, that´s it what makes 3D so fantastic for me.

VIDEO AND ANIMATION:

In my next cg study I want to show you how you can match moving 3d objects into a video. Another challenge with camera tracking and callibration. With a special software you can calculate the X,Y,Z coordinates from a 3d image and after that you can match it with your 3d objects. A fantastic way to change your reality. Here you can see a snapshot from the video I´ve created with my biggest son Florian.

If you want to download the animation, please visit my website www.bernhardrieder.com and go to my animation section.

You can see the same environment, it´s in the garden of my father in law, and my little son is walking around - but what the heck is that ? Behind him there is a Star Wars Droide......and yeah, the video was made with the same cheap camera and with 15fps only.

I wish all 3d cg fans the very best, have fun with 3d and happy rendering.

Bernhard

www.bernhardrieder.com
usa@bernhardrieder.com