25 MATTE PAINTING TIPS
- USE PHOTOSHOP,
BUT ADD EXTRAS
“The biggest change I have made to my own
workflow over the last five years or so is to paint
exclusive in 32bit float,” says Max Dennison.
“Photoshop has the singular ability to allow
users to do this without any appreciable loss of
functionality, and the processes are perfectly
suited and designed to work with ‘film’ in mind.
It seems logical on many levels that Photoshop
can do this especially as it is designed for wide
gamut, multiformat image processing.
Additionally, I employ many third party plug-ins,
which are exceptionally powerful, for instance
ProEXR, a multi layered OpenEXR file format
from fnord software allowing direct and easy
transfer of layers in 32bit float files to Nuke and
other cross platform software. This is especially
useful where importing multilayered PSD file
formats may prove too difficult. Neat Image is a
brilliant noise removal tool and Filter Forge,
although with certain limitations, is very useful
for bespoke texture production.” © Max Dennison- FOLDERS AND FLATTENING
“I don’t know what I’d do without folders,” says
Heather Abels. “Keeping my painting organised in
a folder structure helps me quickly and easily
save out my painting for projection and rendering
in 3D. I also really love using proofing LUTs to
turn on and off ICC profiles to quickly evaluate my
colour when working in other colour spaces.”
© Heather AbelsShe notes that when she’s working on a matte
painting, “I need to be able to quickly flatten a
folder, save out my file and set off a render to see
how it’s working. This means that you can’t
always use modes like Overlay, Screen, or
Multiply inside a Normal mode folder, because
they won’t flatten properly. A student of mine justshowed me that you can attach those layers
with a clipping mask to an adjustment layer,
like a curve with no changes, and then it will
flatten properly. This has been an incredible
time saver and opened up new opportunities
for me to paint light in ways I wouldn’t have
attempted before!”