The Eveningstar

Lord of the Rings is trending for obvious reasons, and I saw this image of Lady Arwen, the Eveningstar.

I really wanted to see if I could replicate the extremely heavy back-lighting, though DAZ really didn't want to play along. As a result I ended up cheating a little.

By default DAZ renders things out at PNG, with 8 bits per channel. That means that each pixel in the image has 4 components (Red, Green, Blue and Alpha) with each component being 8 bits (or one byte), meaning it can represent a number between 0 and 255.

For most use that's all you really need, but when you have extreme contrast you're going to stuggle getting both deep darks while not making all the bright areas washed out. The solution is an extended color range image, in this case an EXR file (see attachment if you're curious).

In this case each component of a pixel is stored as a 32 bit value (0..4,294,967,295) instead of 8, so you're getting a lot more fine detail and control. You can also ask it to render out various other elements (rendering just the distance, or just the specular component, as I did here), then combine it in Photoshop.

For the final image I ended up taking it into Photoshop and using the Exposure layer adjustment to control things.

Step one was to bring it in, attach an Exposure layer and tune it from bright white to something where I can at least see the girl.

Next I tuned it down until it looks somewhat like the image I wanted, you can see it's lacking that super-white hot background. I also added the 'blue' background I use for a lot of stuff, figuring it'd make a fun replacement for what's behind Arwen's head.

For step 3 I wanted to recreate that super-bright glow. My solution to that was to duplicate the layer, so the 'glow' shows up behind the girl. Essentially this is Step 1 + Step 2 put together.

Finally I made the background layer brighter; I could have done this kind of simple luminance shift using levels or curves, but I decided to just reuse the Exposure filter, since it was serving so well.

That's be basic process. Hopefully it was interesting to some of you guys!