Yo! Here’s the second edit: the indoor pic. Sorry it has taken me so much time to get these two edit “tuts” done, nonny. Life’s just too busy (⇀‸↼‶)

Right click the image and open it in an another tab to see the enlarged version for details. Open them in tumblr mode, or else they’ll show up tiny.

1. So, this is the ‘before the edits’ pic which was taken with Whiisker SoftDreamsreshade preset! This time I think the “ambient light” setting was on.

2. In Photoshop I fix few things that bother me too much such as clipping and odd shading caused by reshade etc. I use smudge tool, clone tool, liquify tool, and my paint brush for fixing. The GIF  below shows the ‘before fixes and after fixes’. Yes, the quality of the gif is bad but that’s not the point d(-_^)

2.5. I also added smart sharpen and used a mask to erase the sharpening from the blurred area. I reduced the noise with Topaz noise (I use default settings but pulled the strength slider to 0.05) Oh and I used the blur tool to blur the chair a bit.

3. After those steps I placed rain images over the windows to make it a bit more obvious that it is raining outside. Window 1 and window 3 have a black-and-white rain image over them, which layer mode is set to ‘screen’. 

Window 2 has a rain splash drawn with a brush and faded out with the the layer fill option to 22%

I also grouped the window rain layers and set the group mode to Pass Through.

p.s you can get all kind of free rain brushes and images by simply searching them via google

3.5. Every rain layer has a layer mask, which ensures that only the window areas are visible while rest gets hidden! (the red x I have on the example images is just there because I turned the mask off to show what the layers look like without the masks)

4. Finally I add image adjustments. 

One: Curves adjustment from cowplant-pizza Yogi bear action. 

Second: I brush a spot of warm yellow color on top of the fireplace area and set the layer to overlay mode and lower the opacity to 37%

Third: I place a light-dust (black-and-white) image and set it on screen mode and use mask to erase any parts I don’t need. I set the layer also to 27% opacity because I didn’t want the light-dust to be too strong.

Okay, nonny, here’s the outdoor pic edit of mine. (I’ll do the indoor one later)

1. This is the before the edits pic which was taken with Whiisker SoftDreams reshade preset. I think I had the “ambient light” setting off, or what ever causes the pretty pinkish tone in this preset.

2. I duplicated the layer and added a field blur. Then I painted a mask to define what areas I needed blurred exactly. I did this to get a better control for the depth of field since the reshade didn’t do it exactly the way I wanted. 

3. Then I used Bohemian Sundance action. I don’t usually use this action for sim pics, but I randomly tried it and it gave this image much more interesting feel so I kept it.

4. I added a couple of adjustment layers to fix the tones because the action made it too purple. Color balance + Selective color to lessen the magenta. (You can right click the image and open it as a new tab to see the settings closely) Lastly I added a color-fill adjustment layer with a ‘Lighten’ mode.

5. Next I added more rain with free rain and splash brushes because there wasn’t enough rain in that pic. I adjusted opacity of the rain layers and masked away anything I didn’t want!

Before-After Series #3

(つ >ω ･ )つ Here’s one of my very recent pics and it will show how I edit my pics on this present day. 

Note: Both pics are done the same way. I don’t have Reshade. I use Aren&LLS CAS light overhaul (the neutral spot light) My CAS background is replaced with Solid gray color. I use in game camera. My editing is done with Photoshop  and Topaz studio. And most importantly, I’m not a pro at all but a simple hobbyist (∩｡･ｏ･｡)っ.ﾟ☆｡’`

1. I began by using my favorite color palettes as my inspiration. You see, I have some sort of strange obsession for colors. I get all giddy when I see perfect color combos/palettes (perfect for my taste that is). One of my top favorite color palettes are from Seeds design. I usually find them in Pinterest. I had a fascination to the “blueberry” palette so I went with it.

2. The outfit and necklace I found were perfect. But in order to get all the pieces match the palette closely, I had to recolor the hair and eyes and eyelashes. The colors weren’t exact, but good enough.

3. Once I took the CAS pictures of the model, I started removing the background. Usually I duplicate the picture so I have 2 of them. From the duplicate A I remove the background with magic Eraser tool or/and with polygonal lasso tool. Then I select the image A with the removed background to create a mask layer to the duplicated image B (which still has the background intact). This way I’ll still have the background which is only hidden with the mask. If I need to fix something later, the layer mask will always let me return to the original image.

4. Next I’ll fix most of the little details that bother me such as sharp body parts, clipping, and other weird stuff. With regular paint brush, smudge tool, clone stamp brush, spot healing brush, and liquify tool. Below are the parts I fixed for these images. The waist had clipping issues, the hair had very odd shadows and clipping, there was hard edge on the cheek under the eye, odd mouth corner shadow, and straps of the top were deformed.

5. I also edited the eyes by making them stronger sky blue. I painted a dot of the selected color over the eyes and changed the layer mode to color. Also, later, I adjusted the strength of the new eye color to 50% opacity since it was way too strong. I realized I also needed to fix the eyelashes so I used a paint brush to paint thicker eyelashes and added some around the eyes, too.

6. Then I applied unsharp Mask with an amount of 90% + used the sharpen tool to slightly sharpen the eyes and brows by hand. Next I added topaz noise filter with strength of 0.04 (everything else default setting) BUT I used mask layer to remove the effect from the eyes, lashes, lips and other small areas which needed to stay sharp. Then I duplicated the layer to add more topaz noise onto the hair with strength 0.22. (keeping it only on the hair with mask layer) This was an exception to my editing process because this hair’s specific texture happened to have some irritating noise (like static hair strands all over, or something).

7. Then my favorite part of editing: shading! (if that’s what it’s called).  As before, I duplicated a new layer of the previous finished step. On the new layer I used dodge and burn tools to get some stronger shadows and highlights.  My burn tool is usually set to 50% or less, and I switch between the ranges depending how the tool affects the image. Also, I keep protect tones on most of the time. Same with Dodge tool. When I use these tools, I mostly avoid the skin, only touching it a bit, and mainly shade rest of the model.

7.5. Afterwards I use the method I learnt from Citrontart, but somewhat with my own way since I need more brush and layer control. So I create 3 layers and set them as clipping masks. 

The first layer is set to 50% opacity and multiply mode. On that layer I paint the shadows with soft and large brush strokes. 

The second layer is set to 60% and multiply mode. I paint with the same brush but make smaller, sharper and stronger shadows.

The third layer is set to 100% opacity and soft light mode. I paint with white brush gently on the areas I want to highlight. It’s almost unnoticeable to be honest.

8. Lastly I add couple of adjustment layers. I did not feel like adding much for these pics since I was mostly content with what I had. So Curves and levels:

9. Oh, and of course, I quickly made a gradient background and added drop shadow effect behind the model.

(σ≧∀≦)σ Done and done. So, the finished results can be seen on the very top of this post

One thing for sure, I don’t do anything simply ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I over complicate everything I do, lol. Well I hope this was helpful, or at least fun to see. 

Before-After Series #4

This is post will be a very short post of this series (〃∀〃)ゞ Here are couple of sim pics before editing and after editing which were done using the same method told in the Before-After Series #3 post/tutorial.

The only biggest difference with these pics and the previous one is that I began to use one more adjustment layer: Photo Filter with a slight rose tint. It surprisingly gave a nice effect to the final image so I kept using it.

And also Topaz clean with the settings catplnt recommends in this post! But I mostly used it for the eyebrows and hair only.

Before-After Series #2

This one I made last spring and is my very first outdoor scenario ever, thus, I didn’t succeed with is as well as I wished. One thing for sure: I procrastinated making this pic for weeks. I was damn afraid to do something I’d never done with sims 4 before and the fact that I’ve got extreme expectations for myself did not help.

First things first, I don’t/didn’t have Reshade. (never used it to be honest).

1. I began by exploring what I can do with the sims 4 world. I attempted to find a lot that might have a large meadow with a horizon far away. Well, I could not find any such lot. I’m so used to open world from sims 3 (where you can openly mod outdoors to your liking) so the sims 4 world restrictions are not easy to get used to. (At least the outdoor lighting is much better in ts4) So, I settled on a lot that could give me the illusion of a meadow from a right angle. This is what I had in the very beginning:

2. I build a meadow which was just spamming flowers on the field with moveobjects on. I went with these cute cc daisies, and to match the realism of the flowers I also modded the sky. Then I tested poses and various camera angles.

3. I soon realized I did not like the realistic flowers and sky, it just didn’t feel right to me. I adore the cartoon style of sims 4 so I needed to get it back asap. So I switched the cc flower to maxis match flowers and tried different colors with the whole scene.

4. Once I chose my favorite screen shot, I then began to edit it. My editing methods aren’t fluent, I just try different things to see what I like and I use a lot of adjustment and mask layers.

First I used unsharp mask at 60% just to bring out some detail

Then I used Topaz noise reduction on 0.04 to get a bit of softness because I don’t like sharpness with sims 4, I want to stay close to the clay style

Then I tried out topaz clean basic blemish removal preset just for the surroundings because it made the grass, flowers and sky look nicer. I used mask layer to softy brush the effect off of the sim (that’s what that weird black-gray blur indicates in the picture below, haha)

after all that I needed to brighten up the big white flowers and the model to balance them with everything else. So I used Curve adjustment layer. Most importantly I used it with mask layer to paint the flower and the model visible only. Nothing else was affected by the curve adjustment.

Then I used dodge and burn tool to shade the sim model. I darkened the shadows on her and added a bit of highlight for depth.

Next I applied slight amount of Gaussian blur on whole image but used the mask layer so the blur was applied onto the front flowers only

Then Brightness and Contrast: brightness 8 / contrast 17

Then Selective color: RED +9 +17, GREEN +16 -25and BLUES +12 +11

Gradient map of #f4dbf6 and #d05ed7 with Soft Light mode 40% opacity

Color Balance: Midtones Yellow/Blue -18

Lastly I created a simple radial gradient layer with overlay mode and used free shine brushes to stamp sun rays on the pic with soft light mode and finally added dust speckles with a free brush as well. For what reason? I dunno.

Before-After Series #1

This is one of my oldest sim pics. I really liked it months ago, but now I stare at it and can only spot everything that’s wrong with it, haha, pretty basic mind set of most artist, huh 😂 But now I’ll show how I got to the ending result.

1. In the beginning I needed to test whether my idea of xmas and burning books would work, or rather, how exactly am I going to visualize the idea. This is how the prototype looked:

2. Next, with the actual sim model and school materials, I shot the scene from different angles to find the right feel/composition.

3. Once I chose the image I wanted to go with I began in Photoshop by fixing the model’s face as she was not looking at the blazing books but to the ball of her hat. I also covered her face a little with the hair because after I fixed the eyes the did not look good together lol

4. Then I painted some fire over the books (with free fire brushes) because otherwise it seemed like the model herself was on fire and not the books 😅 !! Then I cut out part of the blue background so I could create white frames for a pop up effect.

5. Lastly I used adjustment layers: Channel mixer Red at +105% & Selective color Reds Black at +10% with color mode & also Color fill #4c2a0f with 30% layer opacity and overlay mode. All this to give the warm red atmosphere.

So that’s how the “Burning school books during Xmas holiday” came to this world 😇 My methods on how I make images currently are different than before, but I find it interesting to see how I leveled up. I’m no longer at beginner level, now I’m a basic noob 😁