Category Archives: Tutorials

This is a tutorial in how to quickly combine the best of two inks-only renders, from Poser’s Comic Book Preview render, by using Photoshop. For future speed-of-working this tutorial can, of course, be encapsulated and semi-automated as a recorded Photoshop Action.

We’re going to manually select just a few nice lines from one render, and combine them with lines from the other render.

Why do this? To subtly boost the quality of your ink lines output from Poser’s Comic Book Preview mode, at only a small cost in time spent per comics frame. Depending on your intended style, possibly also to selectively combine sketch edge-shading, from a Poser Sketch render, with your Comic Book line-art inks.

Tools: Poser 11 (Pro or Standard) with a suitable Poser 3D character to render. Adobe Photoshop (CS6 is being used here).

What’s it called in Photoshop?: “Q” mode or “Quick Mask”.

1. First render your two nearly-identical ink lines renders from Poser 11’s Comic Book Preview mode. The differences between them will perhaps arise from your selecting different Display Styles for Preview renders, or choosing Poser lights that cause new ink lines/shadows to appear in the line-art. Here I have kept the lighting fairly flat, and run a Sketch render into the Preview ink lines to make them a bit less slick and more grainy.

Animated GIF comparison between the layers:

2. Bring the two renders into Photoshop, with each render placed on its own layer. The renders should be exactly aligned one above the other, and Photoshop’s “Paste in place” command may help you with that.

3. ‘Knock out all white’ from both renders (there are many free line-art Photoshop actions that do that). Then place a new white background layer behind them.

Toggle the ink layers on and off, to let you decide which needs to be renamed as the ‘bottom render’.

The ‘bottom render’ should be the one that has some nice lines you wish to add to the top main render, while junking the rest of its lines.

You choose the other render to be the ‘top’ because it’s mostly OK and barely needs changing.

Ok, you’ve now decided which layer is to be which. It’s time to rename the layers sensibly, so that an Action can be run on them. Your saved .PSD production file will have three layers — named as: top render | bottom render | White. It should look like this…

I’ve capitalised “White” to remind you that layers are case-sensitive for Photoshop Actions. If an Action expects to find a layer called “White”, it will not run if the layer has been re-named to “white”.

4. To make it easier to identify the ink lines of the bottom layer, we now turn the lines a uniform dark mid-green. To do this you first press ‘Crtl’ on the keyboard while clicking with the mouse cursor to select the layer thumbnail in the Layers palette. This gives you a clean automatic selection of your inks, indicated by the dotted lines…

Then you make a wholly new blank layer, and fill this blank layer with green by using the Paintbucket. Then you select the ‘bottom render’ layer and hide it.

You are now going to be working on the green lines in the copy of the ‘bottom render’. It doesn’t matter that it’s a copy, as we’ll switch back to the original soon (once we’ve selected the lines we want to keep) and then junk it entirely.

5. Ok, so how do we select those nice ink lines? With the new temporary green layer selected, you now press “Q” on your keyboard. Then you select a hard round Brush from the Toolbar and size it for picking out fine details in line-art. The brush size will depend on your render size. I tend to render in Preview to 3600px.

6. While you are in this “Q” (Quick Mask) mode, any Brush will automatically paint in semi-transparent red. That will be the only visual indication that you have entered this special mode. With this red brush you then simply paint on the active layer, and where you lay paint indicates the details you want to keep.

You can see here why we needed to add the temporary green inks layer. Without it, there would be no way to tell the difference between the black inks of the two layers.

7. Once all these details are selected, you switch back to your copy layer and make it visible. Your selection is now acting on the original inks, not the green inks. Press “Q” again. Your red painted areas now become selections with dotted lines around them. Once this happens, you hit the Delete key. Everything except the selected areas is then deleted. Now you can also delete the green inks surrogate layer, as it’s no longer needed.

Ok, you’re basically done. The above process may sound fiendishly complex, but once it’s in a recorded Action with stops and user prompts then it becomes something that can be completed with ease in 30 seconds, and you don’t need to remember anything other than where the Action is located in the Palette.

Finally, you might then select a good small inking brush, to manually add just a few completely new hand-painted lines. You can also erase any bits of the inking you still don’t like. Here that’s been done, especially fixing the mouth. The sketchy dotting on the ink lines is not that pleasing here, in combination with the smooth colour layer, and I could have produced cleaner inks from a straight Comic Book Preview render. But this is just a quick demo. Here I’ve added a filtered colour Preview render layer and a subtle Ambient Occlusion shadows layer from Firefly (which was almost as fast as Preview, since it was only doing light shadows)…

If your graphic novel has 600 frames and the above process takes a minute per frame (even with the recorded Action), plus a few more manual inking stokes just to finish off, then that’s 10 hours of additional work. But that seems a small price to pay for creating nicer ink lines.

How to change Poser’s Comic Book ink lines from hard black to… any colour you like. You can’t yet do it natively in Poser 11, although perhaps the forthcoming Poser 12 will add a feature to make that happen.

I’m assuming here that you make several quick real-time render passes from Poser. These being, for this tutorial:

i) The Comic Book ink lines from a flat IBL light-lit scene.

ii) The colour flats, with the same light, made by just turning off the same Comic Book mode’s ink lines.

iii) A 3D grey/shadows layer. In this instance, from a simple switch to the old default Poser light preset + set Display as Cartoon w/Lines. (If you’ve swung the camera before starting, make sure there’s a fairly even illumination by having your main light ‘dead-centre’, as you can see happening on my light preset icon). This layer is just used later to subtly add detail to the colour flats. Any good lots-of-shadows layer, suitable to become a greyscale, should work. It doesn’t need to be pretty, so don’t waste time tweaking it.

iv) Then you make an alternative linework render. This is made very simply by switching scene iii) from Colour to B&W in the Comic Book controls, and tweak the B&W dial slightly to get a layer with different lines and more of a 2D manga-like subtle shading to it. The horrible posterision of the shading edges doesn’t matter, as that’s easily fixed in Photoshop. (Though if you want better shadows in Poser, try taking Preview-light “Shadows” up from 512 to 2048). (If you save ‘2048 shadow’ lights, label them ‘do not use with Firefly’ – as lights with that setting will reliably crash Poser when making a Firefly render with them).

Once the two ink line layers are loaded into Photoshop with “Paste in Place”, you can knock out white, blend the two line layers and clean any stray lines and ink in missing lines. Here I’ve knocked out the white from both layers (there’s an automated Photoshop action for that), then used the eraser to clean the mouth ink lines and a couple of unwanted weird lines that were lurking below the helmet edge. I could have done much more to tidy up the linework, but this is just a demo. I then softened the posterised edges on the subtle shadowing ink-lines layer, by applying Surface Blur to the whole layer at 7 | 42.

Under the ink lines is the 3D grey/shadows layer, but converted to greyscale (with a simple Desaturate), and then set to Screen blend at 30%. That makes it blend into the Colour Flats layer below it, softening down the colour layer while also adding a bit of subtle shaping to the colours, but not so much as to provoke an “Ugh, that’s so 3D!” reaction. No watercolour shaders required.

The problem then is that when you turn the two ink line layers back on, over the colour, then the inking looks way too heavy and crudely black. To beautify we need to make the black ink lines change colour. Here’s how…

Firstly, in the Layers Pallette, turn off all but the topmost of your ink lines layers. Then click on that layer’s tweeny-weeny little checkerboard icon…

Then select a big soft brush at 100% opacity in Normal blend mode, pick a colour and simply paint over your chosen layer’s black line work. Only the ink lines should be colorised, because we turned on the little checkerboard icon.

Repeat for the next ink line layer.

Here’s the result, with the ink lines coloured up a bit so as to better match the colour flats layers below, and all layers turned on.

In the comic book colouring trade, this is known as a “colour hold” on the line.

The ink line edges are a bit jaggy here because I’m only doing a demo here so have been working with 800px 72dpi renders. Ideally you’d be working with 5000px and above. Even at that size they render quickly, because all the renders come from the real-time Preview render setting.

The flattened final frame can also be art-ified by being run through a Photoshop filter. Note how what was a clunkily-inked nose and mouth now look very nice indeed.

Here’s another and less garish version, with the same filter just run on the base layers and then with the colour layer blended. Still not ideal, as again we’ve lost some of the ‘sci-fi look’ on what was a white jumpsuit, and our carefully coloured ink lines are now shades of dark grey and white. But at least they’re not a jarringly hard black, and you get the general idea.

If you have an additional Poser Sketch Designer sketch-lines render layer, you could blend that back onto filtered versions, for a charcoal line look. That charcoal linework could also be coloured using the technique above. You can also colourise in Photoshop using the Replace Colour option (though not from a hard black) and can use the Sponge to desaturate small areas when a filter causes them to “pop” too much.