Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 12 – Post-production
Image credit supplied by Paul Hatton
Introduction
We are finally at the end of this epic series of Blender tutorials. In reality we’re pretty much done with Blender although even during a post-production phase of a project you might need to head back into Blender and make some changes. For post-production of our image we’re going to use Lightroom for the colour editing and the Photoshop for inserting a background into the image. You could alternatively use a program like GIMP to achieve much of the same output.
Blender: Enabling Transparency
We are finally at the end of this epic series of Blender tutorials. In reality we’re pretty much done with Blender although even during a post-production phase of a project you might need to head back into Blender and make some changes. For post-production of our image we’re going to use Lightroom for the colour editing and the Photoshop for inserting a background into the image. You could alternatively use a program like GIMP to achieve much of the same output.
Enable transparency.
Blender: Saving your image properly
When saving your image, it’s important that we get the settings right so that the image we’ve got to work with is the best quality and has the most amount of information contained inside. With your render window open hit Shift+S. The most important thing to do is to save your image in a format that is lossless rather than lossy. The Jpeg format for example is lossy which means that information is lost as it is saved. Not great! If you’re just working with Photoshop then you should use OpenEXR but as we’re using Lightroom as well we’ll choose Tiff.
Save your image in a lossless format.
Blender: Saving as a tiff
Select Tiff from the list of format options. It’s not enough however to just save it as a Tiff. You need to set the Color Depth to 16 so that there’s a higher dynamic range and then make sure that the Compression is set to None. You don’t want Blender doing anything to reduce the quality of that image when it’s saved out.
The Tiff file format will let you save in a lossless way.
Lightroom: Import
With our Tiff created we now need to import it into Lightroom. As mentioned earlier you could do a number of the following colour corrections in another piece of software so please feel free to just take the theory from this. With the latest Lightroom (V3.3) use the + icon to bring up the import dialogue box. Navigate to your file and select it. With it imported we’re ready to make some changes.
Import your image into Lightroom.
Lightroom: Basic color adjustments
Now if I’m being honest with you I feel that my render our of Blender is too flat. It lacks punch and contrast. I want it to pop and it’s absolutely okay that it doesn’t work for me straight out of Blender. We can fix it. In Lightroom I’m going to increase the exposure, raise the contrast, reduce the highlights as I’ve got some parts that are too over exposed, reduce the shadows, increase the whites and decrease the blacks. All along I’m just eye-balling it to see what I think looks nice. That’s the key during the post-production stage.
Make some basic colour adjustments.
Lightroom: Noise cancellation
One of the challenges with any renders is noise. It is particularly an issue if we’re dealing with a lot of complex glossy reflections or if we need to keep our render times down to hit a pressing deadline. Thankfully there are ways to remove that noise in post. It can be done in Blender but for images I prefer just to do it with the noise reduction tool in Lightroom. It’s worth noting that you can also sharpen your images in Lightroom.
Use Lightroom to remove noise from your images.
Lightroom: Save your image
You can save it as another Tiff image using the ‘File’ -> ‘Export’ menu or you can go to ‘File’ -> ‘Edit in Photoshop’. If you save to a Tiff then you’ll need to open it up in Photoshop. If you go straight to edit it in photoshop then it’ll open directly in Photoshop. In essence it’s opening up the same file that you imported to Lightroom so once you finish up in Photoshop it’ll be automatically synced back into Lightroom.
Move from Lightroom to Photoshop
Photoshop: Import
Now open your exported Lightroom image in Photoshop. Remove the lock from the background layer by duplicating the layer and deleting the original. You’ll notice that we’ve lost the background as transparent. No worries. Bring in the original file you saved out of Blender by going to ‘File’ -> ‘Place Embedded’. With that layer selected and using the magic wand tool, select the background. Hit Ctrl+I to invert selection. Select your other layer and apply a layer mask. Now you’ve got your transparent background back!
Use a layer mask to remove the background.
Photoshop: Insert background
We’re now going to insert a background image to put Iron Man in context. Find the image that you want using a website like Unsplash or feel free to take your own. Place it into your Photoshop file and make sure it’s below your render in the stack. Scale it and change its position if you need to. I thought it might be cool to put Iron Man in New York City scene!
Insert your background by adding it as a separate layer
Final color correction
The initial colour corrections that we did to Iron Man were in isolation but now we’ll want to apply a few colour corrections in Photoshop to make Iron Man fit better in his surroundings. I achieved this by adding a simple Levels correction and changing the levels. You can use whatever corrections you want to fit the background you’ve chosen.
Make your Iron Man sit in its surroundings
Conclusion
Woah! We’re done and you made it! What a series it has been. If you came into this series feeling like you had no idea where to start with Blender then I hope you now feel like you’ve got enough of a handle on the software to be able to explore further; to be able to check out more of the modelling tools and to be able to push those materials and lighting settings that we only scratched the surface of. Blender is an incredible piece of software and I hope you enjoy using it too.
Related website links
Read the other parts to this 12 part tutorial
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 1: interface and navigation
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 2: modeling basics - object creation
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 3: scene organization
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 4: modeling basics - object editing
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 5: Advanced modeling – modifiers
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 6: Advanced modeling – curves
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 7: finishing touches
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 8: creating your materials
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 9: Lighting
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 10: Setting up your cameras
- Building Iron Man out of Lego in Blender Part 11: Rendering
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