Poser is a very powerful program, but it has its quirks. Some artists create "pure Poser" pictures, while many tweak the pictures in Photoshop. For animation, it makes perfect sense to spend the extra time in Poser. For single images, though, I find it easier to spend 10 minutes in Photoshop than another hour in Poser.
When I first started tweaking my pictures in Photoshop, I used Smudge extensively. Although this works nicely for smoothing shadows, it leaves tell-tale streaks when you try to erase mistakes. This technique alleviates that problem. (Note: this will work in any image editing program that supports layers.)
| Here's me, wearing my favorite hat. The hat is looking a bit ratty - my hair is poking through. |  |
| To fix this, I went back into Poser. I hid the hair (which is called ZH06) by going to Object: Properties and removed the checkmark for Visible. Note: This is a screen shot from P5. P4 and PP will have a different looking screen, but it's the same idea. (I render using the "P4 Render Engine" in P5. I don't use ray tracing. It may be necessary to remove the checkmark from "Visible in Ray Tracing" if you use the Firefly Render Engine in Poser 5.)
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I rendered and save the scene again. It's very important not to move anything in the scene. I just hid the hair and rendered again with all the same options, light settings, camera settings, etc. (Ack! I've gone bald. I've torn all my hair out from using Poser!) |
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| In Photoshop, I opened up both images, Me, and Me-bald. I held held down the Shift key on the Me picture and dragged it over to the Me-bald picture. This created a copy of the Me picture as a new layer over Me-bald and kept it perfectly aligned with the layer underneath. |
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| After that, I selected the Me layer and erased out all the hair that was sticking out from the hat. This let parts of the Me-bald layer show through, which obviously didn't have any hair problems. Total touch-up time in Photoshop: 15 seconds. |
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That's it. A simple trick to quickly tweak Poser renders. Unlike Smuding, this trick will keep the picture sharp. It's easier, too.
