Adding Photographic Touches in Post-production - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 332

Adding a subtle DOF to shift focus
The next adjustment that we want to make is to direct the viewers' attention inside the
image a little. We did make a reasonable start at this by paying attention to camera
placement and lens choices in Chapter 8 , Composition and Cameras , but with an
overview type wide shot in a fixed environment such as the one we are working with
here, there really is only so much that we can do using composition.
So, a real-world photographer would probably further direct the viewers' attention here
by introducing a little bit of depth of field to the shot, pushing the viewers' eye into the
room and towards the exhibits on display there. Again, this is something that could
most certainly have been handled inside V-Ray using the physical camera controls.
However, adding genuine 3D DOF to a render becomes very expensive time-wise,
and of course, once it has been baked into the image, you are stuck with whatever
settings you applied; there can be no tweaks or adjustments further down the produc-
tion pipeline without having to re-render the whole thing again, which is why doing this
in post makes for a much better workflow approach. To do this then, let's perform the
following steps:
1. Come up to the Project panel and drag our Z depth render down into the com-
position layer stack.
2. For the edits we will make here to work correctly, we need to straightaway
put this in its own nested composition by right-clicking on it and choosing Pre
compose from the menu list.
3. To keep things recognizable and easy to work with, let's name it
ZDepth_Control and click on OK .