DEPTH OF FIELD TUTORIAL

Adjusting the depth of field is an easy way to punch up many types of architectural renderings. I have been using this technique for a while now and have applied this concept to final presentation illustrations, model pics, and my graduate portfolio. There are probably better ways to do this, however, once you get use to the concepts, this technique can be applied in a matter of a few minutes. For those interested and using Sketchup, there is a tutorial on YouTube called “Sketchup and Photoshop: lens blur.” This tutorial uses Sketchup and its fog settings to create the layer mask. While the work flow is pretty creative, it’s a little overkill for me and one more thing to set up in sketchup and export into photoshop. The final results will be so similar, it doesn’t seem worth going through the extra effort to set everything up in sketchup.

Below are some examples that I have applied this technique to in the past. One thing to notice, when this is applied to a large scale building site, the final result looks more like a small-scale physical model instead of a full scale 1:1 building. Still, I think it’s a cool look.



Comments

[_nm]

Good job!

And quite quicker than the one you've linked to.

Thanks for that link as well- exporting a z-depth layer from sketchup, never thought of that, good..!

[Ldurkin]

How did you make the base image that you used for this turorial? I see it has a wood grain, was that added in or was this a rendering taken from a basswood model or something? Did you use a similar set of tools and tricks used in the daylight rendering tutorial?

[Babak]

I'm very interested to know about the base image. i like the texture of green areas. how did you make it, Alex ? it is very useful for large areas.

[Alex Hogrefe]

I took a screen shot of Google earth at the same viewing angle, and overlayed it on top of the rendering. It was mostly fields so the texture had a lot of soft horizontal lines in it which worked well with the image. I think I used some grunge brushes in Photoshop as well.

[Babak]

Thanks Alex. you're amazing :)

[Peter]

Brilliant tips as always. It really helped with an image I was having trouble with. Thanks for sharing.

[Genesis Studios]

Great tips! Love that you made it visual with a video.