You all have probably seen a post-digital collage image, but what most of you don’t know is that it used to be a render before. Sometimes we get stuck in the same representation and we forget that there are plenty of ways of architecture representation.
Look at how we took a render and turned it into a post-digital collage with these easy steps.
1. Get render ready
1.1 What we are going to do first, is take the render file and import it to your Photoshop. When you have it, you will see that you have all of the layers in the layer panel. The idea of this is to look at what you need and what you don’t to make the post-digital collage. Hide or erase the render base file (this makes it look more renderish).
1.2 When we are making a render, shadows are important, especially soft shadows, but in a collage, it is the contrary. Hard shadows are the important ones. So we will turn the hard shadows on.
1.3 We don’t want a post-digital collage with real-looking people. We will take all of the people layers and merge them into one layer, after you’ve done this, add a filter from the filter gallery. In this case, we added the cutout filter to make it look more like an illustration.
1.4 Read our article on free textures, so you can download them to include in the image. Paper textures work perfectly.
2. Adding texture
2.1 We will be adding a lot of texture, starting with the sky, we took a canvas texture, make sure to read our article on free textures. Verify that the textures you are using are of high quality. Again, the texture is to make it more illustration, so after putting your texture, you can use the blending modes to blend the texture with the background.
2.2 We know that we already put a filter to the mountains, but since we want this render to have an illustration feel, adding a texture is never enough lol, so just throw in another texture, if it is “dirtier” the better.
3. Final adjustments
3.1 We don’t want this image to have a lot of distracting elements, so in this case, we took the windows and just put a solid color to them, white.
3.2 At the end you will see if your image needs more adjustments or more texture.
Take a look at the final image, we added what is the equivalent of birds in a render, a sun in a collage, a white sun.
Have you done something like this?
Take a look at our YouTube video on this short tutorial below.
