Technology in Architecture

By: Stephen Lauer

Post 7: Final Touches

The final post this semester will be about finishing touches. There are final adjustments that can be made to alter how the image looks and “feels”. The first is to use the layer adjustments (vibrance, hue/saturation, color balance, etc.). This places a new layer on top of all of the existing layers and adds the adjustment to the affected areas. By doing this it can make the image brighter or darker, create a different feeling all together, or completely invert the color of the image. These adjustments are very simple to make and take nearly no time at all to do. The top image is the unadjusted image from an earlier tutorial of the fog and rain/snow. The bottom image is the same image as above but was adjusted using only the Vibrance layer adjustment and dropping the saturation to -100 and the vibrance to +100. This created a very foggy and ominous look and much more convincing and realistic than the top image in which I was beginning to achieve the same affect only needing one layer adjustment to achieve that. In my opinion the adjustments on sunny or bright images begins to make them look more artistic rather than realistic. But each adjustment is used in its own specific way and has its advantages and disadvantages.

Another way to make these final adjustments are to use plug-ins such as Topaz Labs software, https://www.topazlabs.com/, which has numerous plug-ins that allows for various types of adjustments. A few of their software plug-ins are as follows, Adjust, Clarity, and Detail. Each of these take advantage of different aspects of the image and highlights them. As Topaz Labs has their own software for these adjustments, there are other companies that do the same thing and Topaz Labs is just one that I have personally tried myself and have seen used in other tutorials.

A final word on Photoshop tutorials that I would llike to say is that to use other tutorials out there to learn better ways and more efficient manners of doing things in Photoshop. One specific website where I have learned many things is https://visualizingarchitecture.com/. The person who does these tutorials is very skilled in his work and teaches very well. Some tutorials have just text and process images while others give full video tutorials. Finally do not forget that achieving a great rendering takes many hours of work to learn how to do it and it takes hours to actually finish a rendering to a high quality. I hope these tutorials have helped you and will push you to continue on to learn more and make great things.