Render improvement advice, please!

Matte

Hello, I am attempting to jump into the render world, so I have LOTS! To learn….. Any positive advice would be GREATLY! Appreciated. In this second “experiment”. I threw My SU rendered image it onto an image I pulled off of the net just to see how it would look.
First I learned, When I saved my SU rendered image in a PNG format….I get JUST got the central object image, The SU background comes in blank!

So I exported in all JPEG form and I got the full Image (the one I am posting here.), But my quality level dropped ALOT! So is there a better way to save?
Another option I am going to try is to use the higher quality PNG image only version and overlay it in Photoshop on top of the background image. I am guessing, if the back ground is Low res and your SU rendered image is Hi res, it will look “fake”, same in reverse as well.
So I think In photo shop (I’m a beginner in as well), if the SL image is on one layer and the background is on another, you can individually raise and lower the contrast, brightness and quality (graininess) separately until they “match” before mixing them together onto one layer? Any advice greatly appreciated, otherwise I will keep you posted of what I learn so maybe it might help someone else down the road.
Matte

2E - Site Test HR100PS.jpg

matt.gordon320

@matte said:

First I learned, When I saved my SU rendered image in a PNG format….I get JUST got the central object image, The SU background comes in blank!

So I exported in all JPEG form and I got the full Image (the one I am posting here.), But my quality level dropped ALOT! So is there a better way to save?

Another option I am going to try is to use the higher quality PNG image only version and overlay it in Photoshop on top of the background image. I am guessing, if the back ground is Low res and your SU rendered image is Hi res, it will look “fake”, same in reverse as well.

So I think In photo shop (I’m a beginner in as well), if the SL image is on one layer and the background is on another, you can individually raise and lower the contrast, brightness and quality (graininess) separately until they “match” before mixing them together onto one layer? Any advice greatly appreciated, otherwise I will keep you posted of what I learn so maybe it might help someone else down the road.
Matte

Hi Matte,

Welcome to the rendering world! Couple questions: What rendering engine are you using? Some of the answers you seek will change based on what renderer type you're using.

I usually render out to .TIFF to keep as much information as possible from the render as long as possible. They're much larger files, but they're also uncompressed and loss-less, so they're usually the file type of choice for me.

In Photoshop, you can adjust the brightness and contrast (and many other properties) separately on each layer by using adjustments that are "clipped" to layers. Check it out here: Clipping Adjustments to Layers. The quality, though, as you said, is not something that you will want to adjust dynamically while working in a file. A general workflow is to render, post-process, then save down a separate, down-sampled version for posting or your final product. That's a very simplified version of course, but as a rule of thumb you never want to alter your quality until you're done, lest it introduce artifacts and quality loss issues. Hope that helps!

Matt