06
ADD THE OCCLUSION PASS AND GROUND
SHADOW PATH
First, drag and drop the Occlusion pass onto your
scene. A dialog box will appear. Choose Alpha
Channel then hit OK. Put the Occlusion layer at the
top of the stacking order by either drag and dropping
from the Layers panel or go to Layer>Arrange>Bring
to Front. Then change its blending mode from
Normal to Multiply. Drag and drop the Ground
Shadow onto the scene. With the layer selected, go to
Layer>Arrange>Send to Back and also change its
blending mode to Multiply.05
BRIGHTEN THE REFLECTIONS
Go to the Layers panel and select Reflection
1, then go to Filter>Camera Raw. The goal here is to
increase the contrast and highlights. Try to play
around with the values, but feel free to use my
settings: Temperature 4400, Tint 10, Exposure -0.15,
Contrast 33, Highlights 24, Shadows -17, Whites -15,
Blacks -1, Clarity 72, Vibrance -25, Saturation 0. If
you want to remove any artefacts in any pass – for
example, I found super blown-out pixels in the
Specular pass – go to Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All,
then with a black brush, paint on the blown-out
pixels to hide them.04
IMPORT THE PASSES
INTO PHOTOSHOP
Import the main passes into Photoshop (Lighting,
Global Illumination, Reflection 1, Reflection 2,
Refraction and Specular). Drag and drop the files
onto the street scene. The layer order isn’t
important, but my personal preference is to put the
lighting at the bottom. Then change the blending
mode of the rest of the passes. To do this, select
them, go to the Layers panel and change the
blending mode from Normal to Add. While they are
still selected, go to Layer>Create Clipping Mask to
prevent any artefacts appearing around the edges.08
IMPORT THE RGB MASK
The easiest way to use the RGB mask is to
put it at the top of the layer stack. Go to the Channels
panel, Cmd/Ctrl-click on any channel you want to
make a selection from, then you can make an alpha
for each one. If you select the red channel, it will
automatically create a selection on the car body. Invert
this selection by going to Select>Inverse. Go to the
Layers panel and hide the RGB mask by clicking on
the eye icon. Go to the Hue/Saturation adjustment
layer, click on its mask and make sure that the
background colour is black. Hit Cmd/Ctrl+Backspace.07
CHANGE THE MAIN COLOUR OF THE CAR
You can make the car whatever colour you
want, but first you need to know what passes make
up the colour. In our case they are Lighting, Specular
and GI. So to change the colour of the car, drag the
Specular and GI passes just above the Lighting layer
and then go to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/
Saturation and play around with the values (I used
Hue -133, Saturation -72, and Value -5). Then go to
Layer>New Adjustment Layer> Exposure and enter
the values Exposure -0.28, Offset -0.0165, Gamma
Correction 0.50.QUICK TIP
With the render passes, you can easily make major changes to your images after rendering them. For
example, we used them in this tutorial to change the colour of the car without changing the reflection or
refraction colours.03
SET THE BACKGROUND TO 32 BIT
In order to get a great glowing effect
and colours, you have to use 32-bit images, so
convert the background to 32 bit and adjust it
with Camera Raw. To do this, open your
document in Photoshop and go to
Image>Mode>32 Bits/Channel. Then go to
Filter>Camera Raw. Adjust your image to get the
look you want to achieve. I set Temperature to
4150, Tint to 10, Exposure to -1.15, Contrast to
12, Highlights to -51, Shadows to 33, Whites to
41, Blacks to 100, Clarity to 8, Vibrance to 31 and
Saturation to 0.PHOTOMANIPULATION