Technology in Architecture

By: Stephen Lauer

Post 4: Adding People in Photoshop

Sorry for missing a week on the tutorials but I will continue working from where we left off 3 weeks ago with the rendering. This post will be all about adding people into renderings in Photoshop. The image to the right is where we left off last time and where we will begin now. First step is to decide what people will be used throughout the image. Just to reiterate from last time there are many of websites out there that have textures, trees, people, etc. that are free to download from. A few examples of these would be mrcutout.com or cgtextures.com. The best thing to do from these sites is to build up a library of images that can be used for future projects. 

In this render I want to have people walking down the sidewalk to add some life. When adding people, do not place the same person over and over because no 2 people are alike and doing this will cause the image to be less realistic. To begin add a person to the image and scale the image down to a correct scale. Depending on the perspective of the person added, a little transforming may need to happen to make it so that the image fits into the rendering. The image to the right shows how I have begun to add people in and used the technique learned last time with adding shadows on trees to add shadows for the people (I have turned the tree layers off to show the people). I have also added a guide across the entire image to be a height guide for scaling each person. By keeping each person around this guideline will allow for the image to stay in perspective. After this the process is just repetitive in adding more people and shadows. To do a person that is running or riding a bike and make it so that they look as if they are moving a blur can be added to accomplish this. For this I would use the motion blur filter and set it to an angle that matches the perspective of the image. The amount of blur that is needed depends on how fast they could be moving. In my opinion I would not use too much blur because this can distract from the overall image. 

 To finish the movement place a copy of the still image in front of the blur to make it look like the still person is moving. Here is my render up until this point. I added a few more trees and adjusted the vibrance and saturation to brighten the image a little bit.