Focus on Matte Painting Techniques

FXPHD - DMP201 Focus on Matte Painting Techniques
Ludovic Iochem
Photoshop

Ludovic Iochem returns to help fxphd build a full digital matte painting curriculum.
Today, matte painters need to know a lot of various techniques. They're often involved in shots that require
some 3D or 2,5D technique, and it's definitely a plus if they can manage to do all of this by themselves.
But the base of the work is still the painting one which happens in Photoshop. Matte Painters needs to be
very familiar with photo manipulation, day to night, summer to winter, clean up or set extensions. In this
term, we'll focus on the painting, and we'll go through all the major techniques that a DMP artist needs to
know. We'll explain all the different techniques, share some tips, and do practical example.
The idea is to present all of them, in real time, with a lot of description and explanations.
It's not one big project, it's a lot of small ones to demonstrate techniques.





Class 1: Main tools from Photoshop. We present all the major tools
(Clone, Grading Tool, Selection, Brushed, Alpha, Layers, Channels, ransform) that we use in PS to do DMP.
We explain how to use them, and what we can do, or cannot do.

Class 2: Clean Up technique for DMP + Sky replacement + Lighting.
On a practical example, we explain how to replace the sky of a photo, clean up some elements which needs to
be removed, and we work on the light, overall, to adapt the environment to the new sky.

Class 3: Day to night technique.
In this class, we take a photo shot during the day, and we transform it as if it has been shot during
the night. We see how to remove shadow, grade it for night, and put some artificial lights.

Class 4: New to Abandoned technique Part 01 (clean up, dirt, trash, graffiti, broken bits...).
In this small project running on two classes, we take a photo of a nice street, and we transform it as if
it has been abandoned for a long time. We add graffitis, dirt, trash, broken bits, etc.

Class 5: New to Abandoned technique Part 02.
This is the second part of our small project started in class04

Class 6: On a production, it is crucial to be able to quickly block the composition of a shot by painting a
first version of a DMP in just few hours.
Here is how to do it on an example that involved the replacement of the all background of a plate,
from the brief, to the DMPv01.

Class 7: Summer/Winter + day to night part 1 (project using all the techniques we have seen before).
Lets start another project on 3 classes, to use all the techniques we have seen before.
In this project, we transform a daytime photo taken in summer, into a nighttime photo supposed to have
been taken in winter. We reuse everything we have done before.

Class 8: Summer/Winter + day to night part 2

Class 9: Summer/Winter + day to night part 3

Class 10: In this class, we'll explore few different techniques to convert a photo taken in
summer into a winter shot.