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Thought I'd start a new thread.
.png saves grayscale pixels and leaves white pixels as transparent. With .jpeg and.tiff, the image is saved with the white pixels and they would have to be removed in postwork.
@littlesparrows That's what I mean by transparent 🙂
You know, I never thought about if you have white within your image. Like, true Hex Code FFFFFF. I suppose that color doesn't occur often in an image, but if it did, I think it would show up as holes in your .png file. I never thought about that.
PNGs (can) save transparency, they dont do white = transparent. Not all PNGs will have transparency though it depends on their settings... most 3d software seems to default to transparent PNG though.
TIF/TIFF is another option if you want to save transparency (better than PNG but much larger).
How do you get a TIF/TIFF to save transparency? I did a test before that post and the dead space was white, so I must be missing something. I was a little concerned that I didn't totally know what I was talking about and apparently I was right about that, lol!
Rendering my first layered project now. I'll let you know how it goes. Could take awhile though. New at this stuff. Very, very, noobie. Gonna try TIFF and PNG.
@rob - I believe if you render a .tif from DAZ it'll save transparency in the alpha channel. I'm not 100%, it's been a while since I tested it.
In most image manipulation programs you can leave transparent sections, that's how you are able to produce layers that aren't opaque. There are then a number of formats that will remember the state of your picture rather than just save/export as a flat image and will allow you to save with individual layers. Saving an image with transparent sections is also done with a few formats as has been stated, png, tiff, etc and those formats that don't support transparency will flatten out your picture leaving the transparent areas as the colour of your background, most often white unless selected otherwise.
I said I'd let you know how things in my first layered project went. Amazing! I was able to render a scene that before it was even finished crashed my computer. Finished the scene, rendered the background then the foreground characters without anything else in the scene. All in TIFF in DAZ and all empty spaces were transparent. Put them together in Photoshop and loved the results.
One thing I had a problem with was when I was rendering just my foreground characters one at a time, they only rendered for a few minutes and the results were on the grainy side. I eventually put my render settings to 'convergence - 100%' and my 'render quality - 25'. This gave me images that fit the quality of the background of my scene.
Thanks again to the people whose comments on this site helped steer me in the right direction.
if you render in layers, do you drop them all in PS or do you lioad each as a backround so the front cast shadows on the back?
You have to decide how much the shadows are relevant, some renderers let you do all sorts of depth things that we can't do in DAZ iRAy though.
Often just rendering ground shadows and blending them in your compositing app of choice will be 'good enough' ... for example you might just use a mask to blend out part of the shadow in photoshop if it crosses an area it shouldn't 'realistically'.
Adding some fog, dirt, clouds, etc. from stock imagery can also add interest and cover some sins.
It can be a lot more complicated than just dropping a bunch of transparent images in photoshop.
Then after I was busy 'amazing' myself and getting over how happy I was that I was able to render a scene that crashed my computer I began to see what I did not like about my image. Namely and mostly the shadows on the ground and lighting. So, much research later I now am rendering with 'Environment mode - scene only'. A few tweaks and the lighting and shadows are better. Here is the problem that I hope someone could help me with. My ground is part of the background. When I render with 'Environment Mode - Dome and Scene' I got shadows on the ground that was not there. Now when I just render my characters I don't. How do I get my ground shadows back but keep everything but them and my character transparent for layering?
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