Metallic silver retouch

[designz]

Hello

I need to recreate metalic silver lid that will be placed on a white tube. It has to be done in photoshop (no CGI). At the moment my silvers look satin. Can't get this shiny silver effect.. Anyone in here had to deal with a similar challenge before? Please see attached images to help you understand desired outcome.

Thank you very much for all your help

Lukas

[skoobey]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

Why does it nee to be done in photoshop??? Noone will know the difference.

You need to paint it like chrome if you want it to be only PS.Screen-Shot-2015-02-13-at-11.43.43.jpg

[insmac]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

If you want it to resemble the anti aging creme ads you have to paint the reflections from scratch using soft brushes or create a metallic gradient.

[klev]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking at the detail level, but you should consider how metals behave and why people photograph it in certain ways. I will skip the lesson in radiometry, because it isn't that relevant. The important things are that metals tend to have a slightly tinted reflection, and if the more polished your surface, the more it will offer a direct reflection of whatever it reflects. In those samples you see a reflection of the surroundings. Visually a reflection in the metal won't be as bright as that same object would be in your scene. It may be a little distorted due to minor surface irregularities. Also note that the color of the reflection in the metal tends to be tinted slightly in comparison to the way the object itself would appear.

Anyway going back to the white tube, ask yourself what is lighting it? The metal cap should be consistent with that. If you aren't sure that may be the problem. I doubt you want it to look exactly like those, but seeking out both retouched and unretouched reference, then keeping it up for comparison would probably help far more than any responses. I suggest keeping it on a second display. That way as you work you can glance over at it and determine what aspects are under-represented at that point in the image.

As for CG, if you've never dealt with it before, now isn't the time to start. You'll find some of the behavior built into typical out of the box raytraced shaders to be a little cumbersome when it comes to metal. Some of their chosen methods of energy conservation may result in slightly flat reflection appearances, and there are many unintuitive aspects when it comes to render passes. Achieving anything beyond mediocre results isn't that easy, speaking of which I recently started working with OpenGL.

Oh also the big advantage to CG, assuming you can get past the early stages and achieve predictable results, is that you can use HDR imagery to produce more realistic reflections than what you would achieve through photoshop alone. It still requires significant retouching after the rendering process. The amount of tuning needed to cut down on that would result in unacceptable render times and more time spent than it would take you to retouch.

[designz]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

Thank you all for your great input guys. Since I come from a beauty retouching background I find some product retouching very challenging (especially shiny metal surfaces).. I decided to outsource the cap to cinema 4D experts and then mount it on the tube later. I'll make sure to paint the lighting on the tube to be consistent with a lid. Also I decided to train myself in cinema 4D. I have a previous experience with 3D studio max so hopefully I'll pick it up quickly. Building simple shapes like this lid shall be pretty easy. Once again thank you very much guys!

[skoobey]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

I have to say it like this, and I'm only putting it this way because it's where I was going wrong when I started out.

There is no such thing as beauty retouching. All retouching is painting, either you can paint or you can't. So, if it's a picture of a horse, you're painting a horse, and if it's a picture of toothpaste tube, you paint the toothpaste tube.

That's what DNB essentially is. So, you can just paint the tube lid and add some noise to make it blend well with the rest of the image.

Yes, render is super-easy, but we only really do renders when it's a complex texture that is missing or when it's a same object that we need from different angles. It's a time management more than anything else that gives us the reason to render.

[insmac]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

skoobey,

You're right, but whereas there are no different types of retouching from a principle standpoint, you can say "I come from beauty retouching background" which would indicate what skills of yours are the strongest. I have friends doing hi-end automotive and product retouching as well as vanity fair and vogue. I'm pretty sure (actually I've seen it when they started to expand the services) they approach the same problems differently and think a bit different overall.

So for example when u guy doing hi-end automotives for years started to retouch people he was going too much for the high dynamic range across the image whereas a girl specializing in beauty was too light on the sliders because she cared a lot about being natural and things not to stand out so much.

My two cents - now back to the point.
I'm thinking that you've decided to outsource the job was a wise idea. You can polish your skills on your own but with time constrains you probably saved yourself a headache trying to get the look where you don't have too much of an experience.

[klev]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

Thank you all for your great input guys. Since I come from a beauty retouching background I find some product retouching very challenging (especially shiny metal surfaces).. I decided to outsource the cap to cinema 4D experts and then mount it on the tube later. I'll make sure to paint the lighting on the tube to be consistent with a lid. Also I decided to train myself in cinema 4D. I have a previous experience with 3D studio max so hopefully I'll pick it up quickly. Building simple shapes like this lid shall be pretty easy. Once again thank you very much guys!

It's not just that. If you note what I mentioned before, lighting in CG can be a bit different. You can get a much better metal feature than what you achieved in photoshop, but it may still require retouch work to obtain perfection. There's also the issue that you posted one with fairly defined reflections. That may require the use of hdri lighting for your global illumination element, as the appearance of that shot was a dimmed and reflection of its surroundings. The entire topic of texture spaces is fascinating to me, but you guys would find it boring.

[skoobey]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

It's not just that. If you note what I mentioned before, lighting in CG can be a bit different. You can get a much better metal feature than what you achieved in photoshop, but it may still require retouch work to obtain perfection. There's also the issue that you posted one with fairly defined reflections. That may require the use of hdri lighting for your global illumination element, as the appearance of that shot was a dimmed and reflection of its surroundings. The entire topic of texture spaces is fascinating to me, but you guys would find it boring.

Yeah, it's easiest to do HDRI lighting when wanting to achieve super-reflective renders.

Just make a black image with bunch of white spots/stripes/whatever to use as a light source.

[klev]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

Yeah, it's easiest to do HDRI lighting when wanting to achieve super-reflective renders.

Just make a black image with bunch of white spots/stripes/whatever to use as a light source.

Given his reference links I'm not sure it's what he wants. There are also hdris that can be found online (licensing terms may vary) of things like kinoflos and other lighting types. They might come in handy for that. I wouldn't do what you're saying though. In that case I would just use CG lights and attach alphas or whatever as necessary. HDRi only makes sense if you have an actual image.

[skoobey]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

HDRI makes sense whatever the lighting source, you just need to know what you're doing. Light is just light. Size relative to the subject.

And the lighting doesn't need to be the same as the top bit of the tube, as long as it's believable.

P.S. I forgot to praise the OP. What you did is the best thing you could've done. I always say, when in doubt: outsource. You've got no headaches to deal with and you'll meet the deadline. And everyone is pleased with the result.

[klev]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

HDRI makes sense whatever the lighting source, you just need to know what you're doing. Light is just light. Size relative to the subject.

And the lighting doesn't need to be the same as the top bit of the tube, as long as it's believable.

Hmm? You may have misunderstood. Okay in a given rendering program, you have light shaders and various GI methods that don't depend on source photography. Those are used to implement light sources in a given 3d package that are reasonably well tested. Bringing in HDRi is something you do to get more realistic environmental reflections, but it is slower. If you're just using something that was roughly painted by hand, you can obtain faster render times just attaching that to one of the lights provided by the CG package as an alpha or gobo or however they implemented it in that given package. Captured images of lights will have the same bits of non-uniformity and similar distributions, so using them for environmental reflection can produce a nice effect. For something small like a studio light being replicated you can model it out to scale in a few minutes or less and attach that as a texture. It works quite well, but it is slower. For the use of a couple gradients created in photoshop, do it the other way and save yourself some render time.

[skoobey]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

No disagreement here, I'm was just reffering to a recenet project I did, where I needed lots of chrome, and plenty of reflections to combine with an environment, so instead of bothering with lights I just added a "spotty" HDR as a global light and gotten the most reflections. Easier than setting up 30 light sources.

[klev]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

Why would you need 30 light sources? I think you're conflating the use of HDRi imagery in global illumination and global illumination in general.

[skoobey]

Re: Metallic silver retouch

Because I wanted round light sources all around the model to reflect on the model itself, giving it lots of little reflections.